History of cities


Towns and cities have a long history, although opinions vary on which ancient settlements are truly cities. Historically, the benefits of dense, permanent settlement were numerous, but required prohibitive amounts of food and labor to maintain. Ancient cities allowed for the pooling of resources, exchange of ideas, large marketplaces, and even some shared amenities such as drinking water, sewerage, law enforcement, and roads. The first cities formed and grew once these benefits of proximity between people exceeded the cost of work required to maintain a settlement. Various technologies such as bricks, pottery, and animal taming played a large role in the costs and benefits of maintaining the earliest forms of cities. Cities were first made possible by advances in technology.

Origins

There is not enough evidence to assert with certainty what conditions gave rise to the first cities. Smaller human settlements pre-date cities by many thousands of years. Before permanent settlement in cities, there were also large temporary settlements used for religious purposes or as a stopping place for nomadic people.
Anthropologists speculate on what they consider suitable pre-conditions and basic mechanisms that might have been important driving forces in the shift to permanent settlement. The conventional view holds that cities first formed after the Neolithic Revolution, and the introduction of agriculture. The ability to produce food from a fixed location made permanent settlements much more attractive to ancient people. However, whether farming immigrants replaced foragers or foragers began farming is not clear. The increased food production per unit of land supported higher population density and more city-like activities in areas suitable for agriculture. In the book, Cities and Economic Development, Paul Bairoch takes up this position in his argument that agriculture and a surplus of food is necessary before cities can form.
File:Mohenjo-daro.jpg|thumbnail|right|Mohenjo-daro, a World Heritage Site that was part of the Indus Valley Civilization
File:Ur from the Air.jpg|thumb|Aerial photograph shows the remains of the Sumerian city Ur, near Nasiriyah, Iraq.
According to V. Gordon Childe, for a settlement to qualify as a city, it must have enough surplus of raw materials to support trade and a relatively large population. Bairoch points out that, due to sparse population densities that would have persisted in pre-Neolithic, hunter-gatherer societies, the amount of land that would be required to produce enough food for subsistence and trade for a large population would make it impossible to control the flow of trade. To illustrate this point, Bairoch offers an example: "Western Europe during the pre-Neolithic, the density must have been less than 0.1 person per square kilometre". Using this population density as a base for calculation, and allotting 10% of food towards surplus for trade and assuming that city dwellers do no farming, he calculates that "...to maintain a city with a population of 1,000, and without taking the cost of transport into account, an area of 100,000 square kilometres would have been required. When the cost of transport is taken into account, the figure rises to 200,000 square kilometres ...". Bairoch noted that this is roughly the size of Great Britain. The urban theorist Jane Jacobs suggests that city formation preceded the birth of agriculture, but this view is not widely accepted.
In his book City Economics, Brendan O'Flaherty asserts "Cities could persist—as they have for thousands of years—only if their advantages offset the disadvantages". O'Flaherty illustrates two similar attracting advantages known as increasing returns to scale and economies of scale, which are concepts usually associated with businesses. Their applications are seen in more basic economic systems as well. Increasing returns to scale occurs when "doubling all inputs more than doubles the output an activity has economies of scale if doubling output less than doubles cost".
Similarly, "Are Cities Dying?", a paper by Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser, delves into similar reasons for city formation: reduced transport costs for goods, people and ideas. Discussing the benefits of proximity, Glaeser claims that if a city is doubled in size, workers get a ten percent increase in earnings. Glaeser furthers his argument by stating that bigger cities do not pay more for equal productivity than in a smaller city, so it is reasonable to assume that workers become more productive if they move to a city twice the size as they initially worked in. The workers do not benefit much from the ten percent wage increase, because it is recycled back into the higher cost of living in a larger city.

Childe's ten criteria

The first true towns are sometimes considered large settlements where the inhabitants were no longer simply farmers of the surrounding area, but began to take on specialized occupations, and where trade, food storage and power were centralized. In 1950 Gordon Childe attempted to define a historic city with ten general metrics. These are:
  1. Size and density of the population should be above normal.
  2. Differentiation of the population. Not all residents grow their own food, leading to specialists.
  3. Payment of taxes to a deity or king.
  4. Monumental public buildings.
  5. Those not producing their own food are supported by the king.
  6. Systems of recording and practical science.
  7. A system of writing.
  8. Development of symbolic art.
  9. Trade and import of raw materials.
  10. Specialist craftsmen from outside the kin-group.
This categorisation is descriptive, and it is used as a general touchstone when considering ancient cities, although not all have each of its characteristics.

Ancient times

The more complex human societies, called the first civilizations, emerged around 3000 BCE in the river valleys of Mesopotamia, Minoan Crete, the Indus Valley Civilization, China, and Egypt. An increase in food production led to the significant growth in human population and the rise of cities. The peoples of Southwest Asia and Egypt laid the foundations of Western civilization: they developed cities and struggled with the problems of organised states as they moved from individual communities to larger territorial units and eventually to empires. Among these early civilizations, Egypt is exceptional for its apparent lack of big cities.
The growth of the population of ancient civilizations, the formation of ancient empires concentrating political power, and the growth in commerce and manufacturing led to ever greater capital cities and centres of commerce and industry, with Alexandria, Antioch and Seleucia of the Hellenistic civilization, Pataliputra in India, Chang'an in China, Carthage, ancient Rome and its eastern successor Constantinople.
The roster of early urban traditions is notable for its diversity. Excavations at early urban sites show that some cities were sparsely populated political capitals, others were trade centers, and still other cities had a primarily religious focus. Some cities had large dense populations, whereas others carried out urban activities in the realms of politics or religion without having large associated populations. Theories that attempt to explain ancient urbanism by a single factor, such as economic benefit, fail to capture the range of variation documented by archaeologists.

Mediterranean and Mesopotamia

The earliest known proto-cities include Jericho and Çatalhöyük, a settlement in southern Anatolia that existed from approximately 7400 BCE to 5600 BCE whose earlier East Mound may have accommodated a population of 600-800 by 6700 BCE, and possibly several thousands at a later date. Hunting, agriculture and animal domestication all played a role in the society of Çatalhöyük.
Eridu was one of the earliest cities, and located in southern modern day Iraq.
Mesopotamia, the area of the Tigris and Euphrates within modern day Iraq and Syria, was home to numerous cities by the third millennium BCE. These cities formed the basis of the Sumerian and subsequent cultures. Cities such as Jericho, Uruk, Ur, Nineveh, and Babylon, made legendary by the Bible, have been located and excavated, while others such as Damascus and Jerusalem have been continuously populated.
The Phoenician trading empire, flourishing around the turn of the first millennium BC, encompassed numerous cities extending from Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos, across the Mediterranean to Carthage and Cádiz. The name of Melqart, an important Phoenician deity, comes from M-L-K and Q-R-T, meaning "king" and "city".
Beginning in the early first millennium, independent city-states in Greece began to flourish, evolving the notion of citizenship, becoming in the process the archetype of the free city, the polis. The agora, meaning "gathering place" or "assembly", was the center of athletic, artistic, spiritual and political life of the polis. These Greek city-states reached great levels of prosperity that resulted in an unprecedented cultural boom, that of classical Greece, expressed in architecture, drama, science, mathematics and philosophy, and nurtured in Athens under a democratic government. The Greek Hippodamus of Miletus has been dubbed the "Father of City Planning" for his design of Miletus; the Hippodamian, or grid plan, was the basis for subsequent Greek and Roman cities. In the 4th century BCE, Alexander the Great commissioned Dinocrates of Rhodes to lay out his new city of Alexandria, the grandest example of idealized urban planning of the ancient Mediterranean world, where the city's regularity was facilitated by its level site near a mouth of the Nile.
The rise of Rome again shifted the locus of political power, resulting in economic and demographic gain for the city of Rome itself, and a new political regime in the form of the Roman Empire. Rome founded many cities, characteristically imposing a grid pattern made of north–south cardines and east–west decumani. The intersection of the cardo maximus and the decumanus maximus marked the origin of the city grid. Following these standard plans, Rome founded hundreds of cities and exerted substantial influence toward urbanizing the Mediterranean. In the process, Rome developed sanitation, public housing, public buildings and the forum. In the late Roman Empire political power was increasingly held by bishops of the Christian Church.