City

"Cities" redirects here. For the Cities (Eidecia), see Eidecia.

A city is a settlement of comparatively large size with permanent residents. Cities are often contrasted with smaller settlements such as towns and villages, but the exact cutoff is somewhat subjective, and there is no hard and fast population limit distinguishing a city from a town or village; while a settlement of only a few hundred people would almost certainly not be considered a city, and one of a few million certainly would, there are population numbers in between that are more dubious. Indeed, there are other criteria often used (consciously or otherwise) rather than absolute population. Relative population may be relevant—a settlement much larger than any others in the area it might be more readily considered a city than one of equal population but surrounded by larger settlements. Frequently the distinction between a city and a town is made on the grounds of government (in many states a "city" must be recognized as such by the national government, and is granted certain rights), or on certain other features (in medieval Europe some held that a city was required to contain a cathedral). Some authorities have proposed other diagnostic criteria for cities, such as that cities must provide enough surplus goods and resources to permit trade, or that they are socially heterogeneous, or have significant social, religious, or economic impact beyond their boundaries. These criteria do not necessarily distinguish cities from towns, however, while they do distinguish them from other settlements, and ultimately the distinction between a city and a town is a nebulous one that may vary from place to place.

If there is no unambiguous lower limit to a city's size, there's no fixed upper limit either. For practical reasons few cities measure more than a few kilometers across. At the time of this writing, Tokyo, by many measures the largest city on Earth, has an area of over two thousand square kilometers, and is about ninety kilometers across along its largest dimension. While the largest city by population (of the urban or metropolitan area; if one regards only the city proper then Shanghai is in the lead), Tokyo does not, however, necessarily have the largest area of any city. Determining which city does have the largest area is difficult, because of the dubiety of the definition of a city; China, for instance, has a number of enormous "prefecture-level cities" which are referred to as cities but in practice act as large administrative divisions that each contain a number of separate settlements. On some lists, Baie-James, a municipality in Quebec that was dissolved in 2012 in favor of the formation of a regional government, has been called the largest city by area; Baie-James had a total area of over 330 thousand square kilometers. For all its area, however, Baie-James had a population of not much over a thousand, rendering its classification as a city problematic at best. If Baie-James's status as a city is highly questionable, and it's doubtful that any real city on Earth was ever nearly that large, at least it's safe to say that no city on Earth was ever larger.

Larger cities are, however, possible, even if none have existed on Earth. In extreme cases, a city may take up an entire continent, or even an entire planet or other mound. The former type of city is sometimes called an eperopolis, the latter an ecumenopolis. Choropoles, cities that span entire planes, may be even larger—though such vast choropoles are rare, and most choropoles are located in pocket planes and are comparable in size to conventional cities.

The study of cities is sometimes called urbanology, though the term remains relatively rare.

History

By its very nature, a city needs considerable infrastructure to support it, and its concentrated population consumes a large amount of resources, especially food. For this reason, on typical terrestrial worlds, cities do not arise before the advent of agriculture, which provides a way to efficiently and locally produce food in the quantities a city requires. Once agriculture exists, cities arise to take advantage of the availability of local food and other resources. This is, not to say, of course, that agriculture leads immediately to the development of cities; in every site on True Earth that has been investigated, agriculture has been found to have preceded cities by several millennia. Indeed, the advent of cities is a significant milestone in societal development, a phase transition for which archæologist V. Gordon Childe coined the term the Urban Revolution. On magical worlds, where food may be produced by spells and enchantments, agriculture may not be necessary for the formation of cities, and indeed there are some known worlds where cities exist in the absence of agriculture, their populace being supported by magical means (or their populace being undead or otherwise not in need of the usual amenities). Likewise, there are certain other special cases where means other than agriculture supply a city's requirements.

Sometimes cited as the first city on True Earth is a site in Turkey called Çatalhöyük. Çatalhöyük's identification as the first city, however, is problematic on at least two grounds. First, it may have been purely a residential settlement with no clear communal buildings or other accouterments that would characterize a true city. Second, even if Çatalhöyük is considered a city, there are earlier settlements that have at least as good a claim to the classification, and thus a better claim to the title of first city. Mureybet in Syria predates Çatalhöyük by well over a millennium, and if it wasn't as large it shows more evidence of public buildings and other features of cityhood. The same can be said of Jericho in the West Bank, which is sometimes said to be the oldest continuously occupied city in the world (though this, too, is not without controversy). Some later settlements of Mesopotamia such as Uruk and Tell Brak even more unambiguously met the urban criteria, and have also been referred to as among the first cities. In any case, whether one gives the nod to Jericho, to Çatalhöyük, to Uruk, or to some other locale, or whether one pursues the perhaps more rational course of acknowledging that there is no definitive threshold that makes a settlement a city and therefore no settlement can be unambiguously identified as the first city, what can be said with fair definitivity is that the first cities arose in Western Asia, a large part of the reason that Mesopotamia is often called the cradle of civilization.

This is not to say, however, that all cities were patterned after those Western Asian precursors. The processes of settlement and specialization that produced cities were not confined to that part of the world, and there are other sites on Earth where cities may have arisen independently, if slightly later. These include central China (specifically the Yellow River valley), Egypt, India, Mesoamerica, and coastal Peru. Wherever they occurred, cities, by putting together large numbers of people, and by freeing them from all having to focus on growing or gathering food, enabled specialization of labor, permitting people to narrowly focus on specific pursuits, trading the fruits of their labor to others with different specialities; and thereby allowed people to develop expertise in their specialties that would not have been possible if they had to devote their attention to subsistence, facilitating much more rapid advancement in many different fields of development. Wherever cities rose, the other trappings of civilization followed: trade, writing, law, philosophy, and eventually the formation of larger nations.

Layout

A city is not, of course, just a haphazard collection of buildings. The better to make it easy to get between parts of the city, roads run between the city's structures, some large enough to be major thoroughfares. Furthermore, even the buildings themselves are not generally just randomly distributed; some parts of the city may be primarily residential, others commercial, and even districts devoted to the same general purpose may have very different economic, cultural, and architectural characters.

Two major factors determining a city's layout are its history and its geography. Some cities are carefully planned, in which case they usually are designed in an orderly way to make it easy for residents to find their ways around. Grid designs are common; circular and radial designs less so; other geometrical arrangements may also occur. Of course, cultural factors may play a role there too, as cities may be designed around certain buildings with cultural prominence such as temples or communal halls, or certain numbers or geometrical shapes may have some cultural significance. Still, planned cities tend to have some regularity to their design. Cities that form more or less spontaneously, however, may be much more irregular and desultory, with neighborhoods developing semiïndependently with little regard for the layout of surrounding areas. Even originally planned cities seldom keep their regularity for long, as they outgrow their original design and expand in ways that are less centrally planned, or that are laid out according to different guidelines. Different districts of a city may have notably different ages and architectures harking back to the time they were built. Other vestiges of a city's history may also be discerned, of course; significant sites may lead to monuments, waves of immigration may leave cultural marks on areas of the city; disasters may leave scars on the city that linger for many years.

As for geography, cities must of necessity be built around natural features of the landscape. It's possible that a sufficiently powerful civilization may be able to reform the land to their liking and fit the terrain to the city rather than vice versa, but even if this power is available tailoring the city to the terrain may be easier. Steep hills and mountains require switchbacks and make it hard to build on their slopes; streets and structures conform to seacoasts and river margins. Together, the geographical features of the land the city is built on, the culture of the designers, and the vagaries of the city's history combine to give every city a unique layout.

A special case possible only in the presence of significant magical or technological advancement is that of the distributed city, a city which is physically scattered over a large number of disparate regions, or indeed possibly over multiple mounds or planes, but the parts of which are connected by portals or similar means. A distributed city may have a compit at its core, or may have only a handful of portals in each of its discrete sections. Distributed cities pose additional challenges of government and maintenance, but there are some such cities that have succeeded and thrived.

While less of a concern at the heart of peaceful nations where assault is unexpected, in border towns of fractious states and in independent city-states defense is also a consideration in a city's design. Fortified areas for defenders to fall back to are important, chokepoints where invaders can be held off, miradors where guards can keep watch over their surroundings, and from which arrows or other weapons can be rained down on enemies. One very common defensive feature is city walls that surround the settlement and that may be very elaborate, with their own towers and bastillions. The buildings inside the city might butt up directly against the city walls, and perhaps actually connect to their interiors, or there might be a broad space left around the wall; such a space was in ancient Rome called a pomœrium. In any case, the city walls often provide another record of the history of a city, as concentric traces of walls that once surrounded successive stages of the city mark its expansion in a way perhaps not entirely unanalogous to the growth rings of a tree.

Different parts of town may have their own character not just due to historical vicissitudes, but also just due to happenstance and positive feedback—as a particular area happens to have an above-average proportion of people of some particular culture or proclivity, for instance, it may become more attractive to others of like mind, and the number of such people may increase. In any case, a city may comprise many distinct neighborhoods, which may be given their own names; some of these areas might be insular enough to effectively function almost as self-contained communities. Large cities may also be divided into districts with their own submunicipal governments, the boundaries of which may or may not coincide with those of the socially distinct areas.

While the ways in which neighborhoods of a city can vary are legion, there are some common developments. Many cities have a core dedicated to its major industries, sometimes known as the downtown; this may or may not coincide with the oldest part of the city, which often has a special character of its own, either carefully maintained in good condition in honor of its history, elevated to the prestigious domain of the wealthy and influential, or, less often, left to become the tumbledown haunt of broken wretches living in the shadow of preterite glory. Many cities have particular neighborhoods noted for their concentrations of residents of particular cultural, ethnic, or racial backgrounds, the Chinatowns of San Francisco and New York City being famous examples. A city's interior also may have districts noted for specific trades, and if it contains a university then that may exert a significant influence on its immediate surroundings. Areas often vary by economic standing of their residents and frequenters as well; one district might be the home of the rich, all full of grand mansions that the vulgus could never afford, while others may be impoverished slums where the well-to-do would shiver to set foot—though there may certainly be places where lofty manors and shady rookeries sit anomalously side by side. On magical worlds, rhegi may also differentiate neighborhoods of a city. The uses of different parts of the city, either between districts or within a district, may be governmentally imposed, with some blocks being restricted to residential use and others to commercial or industrial, a phenomenon known as zoning.

The fringes of a city, far from the downtown, are often residential in nature, but frequently follow one of two contradictory paths. They may support large areas of middle-class homes called suburbs, where the secure but not affluent can live in peace away from the bustle of the city center. Without guidance and supervision by the city government, however, the edges of a city often instead sprout shantytowns, stretches of homemade hovels slapped together out of whatever building materials the inopious occupants can get their callused hands on. While shantytowns are often associated with cities in less developed nations, they can and do occur in the more developed nations as well; Brazil's shantytowns, called favelas, are infamous.

In populous areas, cities may not be discrete and separate, but may merge directly into their neighbors, forming in effect a large urbanized area, or conurbation, comprising a number of individual cities. Each city might retain its own government and be independent in many ways, but people may freely cross the cities' borders without perhaps even realizing when they pass from one city into another. Very large cities, or metropoles, are confluent with many smaller cities around them, and when such a city is mentioned it may not be entirely clear whether it is only the city itself that is meant, or the city along with all its urban satellites. When it's necessary to specify, the dominant city along with its surrounding settlements can be referred to as the greater city, while the single city alone is the city proper. Multiple metropolitan areas may themselves meet in a vast urban continuum sometimes called a megalopolis.

Government

The first cities were by far the most powerful political entities in their vicinities, and often ruled not only the area within their own walls but a wide region of the surrounding rural countryside, possibly including a number of smaller settlements not sufficiently developed to qualify as full cities. Such a reigning city, together with any subordinate settlements, is called a city-state. As single-city sovereign states, city-states may vary nearly as much in their forms of governments as may larger nations; they may be monarchies, democracies, or anything else, though, commonly occuring near the dawn of civilization, they tend toward autocratic systems. Even after the rise of larger states, some cities may contrive to remain independent of surrounding sovereignties. These free cities rarely can claim as much surrounding territory as more isolated city-states, and may have to get by largely on trade and perhaps tourism, but they can still have their own sovereign governments not subject to any larger states.

More typically, however, after the rise of larger nations, cities find themselves within those nations, and must answer to the national leaders. They do, however, still have their own local governments, succumbent to that of the state, and perhaps to those of intermediate administrative divisions. While some cities may be led by councils, there is generally a single person who holds the highest administrative position. This individual may be elected or may be appointed by higher officials, and may be called any of various titles in different languages and areas: mayor, governor, chief magistrate, reeve, portreeve, borough-reeve, burgomaster or burghermaster, wick-master, wic-reeve, alcalde, podesta, corregidor, etc. Even where the mayor is the highest position in the city, their rule may not be absolute; there may still be a council that advises them and that perhaps under certain conditions can overrule their decisions and perhaps even depose them.

As with national governments, the city government may exhibit some division of powers. The mayor may embody, or at least head, the executive branch of the city government, but the legislative branch may be up to the town council. The judicial branch may also fall under the mayor's purview, or there may be separate city courts to fill this function. Even within the executive branch, there may be other officials aiding the mayor in certain capacities.

City governments also provide various public services to their citizens. Law enforcement is one of the most obvious, with city-employed guards or police doing their best to keep order, under the direction of a captain of the guard or a chief of police or a similar official. Other public services may include disaster relief or prevention, such as through fire departments to put out dangerous conflagrations, or weal departments to handle magical perils. The city government also maintains public buildings and other works. In former centuries, there were officers called murengers specifically entrusted with maintaining the city walls.

Development

It occasionally happens that a planned city is built all at once by a national government or some other central body. This is particularly common with national capitals, which may be designed for that purpose, but is not confined to them; the largest planned city in early twenty-first-century Earth, Navi Mumbai, India, is not the capital of India nor of any of its twenty-eight states, but was designed in an attempt to reduce the overcrowding of the nearby (non-planned) city of Mumbai (which is the state capital). Much more often, a city develops over time, expanding from an initial smaller settlement, or a collection of settlements that grow together and unite. Even a planned city will, of course, change over time, not necessarily in predictable ways, and may outgrow or contravene its original plans.

One Australian anthropologist, Thomas Griffith Taylor, proposed a quinquepartite classification of cities and towns according to their stage of development, inspired by the similar classification of landscapes by the geographer William Morris Davis. He derived his classification primarily from observation of the city of Toronto, though he supposed it represented "the usual development of an occidental city". In Taylor's scheme, an "infantile town" is homogeneous, with little distinction between districts or areas; shops and residential areas are arbitrarily intermingled, and there is no real industry. "Juvenile towns" still lack industry, but shops begin to concentrate in particular zones. "Adolescent towns" begin to develop industry, while "Early mature towns" have zones of upscale housing for the higher classes. Finally, he defines "mature towns" as having residential zones of four different socioeconomic levels, as well as separate commercial and industrial zones. Taylor designed this classification, however, for towns of a population of 50,000 or less. He did also lay out a seven-stage scheme for larger cities, but he declared it tentative and acknowledged that the order of the stages could vary, and in any case some of the diagnostic criteria of the stages of his city development scheme were specific to particular industrial levels or cultural aspects such as railways and newspapers.

Though Taylor's scheme may not be as universal as he hoped, even among "occidental cities", certainly there are some general lines that a city's development frequently follows. As a city grows, it does tend to diversify and to evolve more commercial and industrial components to complement the largely residential areas it generally starts with, though not necessarily in exactly the same order as Taylor laid out. The evolution of a city is not always left to chance; central planning of its growth and development may lead to greater efficiency and coherence than if the different parts were simply allowed to advance on their own without regard for each other. The process of guiding the development of a city is a discipline called urban planning.

Not only in the development of an individual city can patterns be traced, but in the overall development of cities in a region as well. The first and largest cities often form in places that are conducive to trade, easily defensible, or both, which is why so many large cities are on seacoasts, or at least on large rivers; major inland cities tend to arise where several trade routes intersect. Gradually, as a nation industrializes, more and more of its population move into cities, a process known as urbanization. On True Earth, the United Kingdom became in 1951 the first nation to have more than half its population living in cities as opposed to rural areas; as of the year 2007 this was true of the population of the planet as a whole. Especially in its early stages, urbanization is not entirely an unmixed blessing; if sanitation and other means to deal with concentrated populations have not advanced to the point of being able to keep up with the city's density, both life expectancy and quality of life in the cities may be much less than that in rural areas—but people may keep moving into the cities anyway in the hopes of bettering their economic status. This particular disadvantage of urban life is ameliorated by the advent of sewage systems, waste treatment, and other methods of effectively dealing with the issues concomitant to a lot of people in relatively little space, though even so there may be other reasons many people prefer rural life.

If one may speak metaphorically of the birth and life of a city, then certainly one may equally speak of its death. (And there are those, hathroists and perhaps tyctothymists, who might argue that these are more than mere metaphors.) This could be due to externally imposed urbicide on the part of invaders or enemies, or to the physical destruction of the city in some natural disaster, or it could be due to the city's depopulation caused by war or disease or some other calamity. It could also simply result from wholesale emigration from the city, due to depletion of some important local resource or to change in the surrounding conditions, though this is much more common for smaller settlements (which may depend heavily on a single resource) than for large cities. It's also possible for a city to legally cease to exist even without its population going anywhere, if the city is absorbed into a larger city or dissolved into an unincorporated area of a larger administrative division.

Economy

Like people anywhere, the inhabitants of a city must have some source of livelihood. The industrial areas of cities may include factories that employ large numbers of people; universities and libraries may provide jobs for scholars, and so forth. More so than smaller communities, however, cities may subsist largely on trade, being home to middlemen who broker trades of goods grown or manufactured elsewhere. It's not unusual for a city to make much more on exchanges of imported goods than they do on the sale of goods created within the city. This is especially common for millevias connected to many different worlds, but by no means unique to them. Still, even if a city produces no tangible goods worth noting, there is still need for services catering to the traders and to visitors. Restaurants, cleaners, and many other service providers necessarily arise in just about any city.

In order to pay for the services they provide and the officials who govern them, the cities themselves, as governmental bodies, must have some source of income. While they may receive some funding from the federal government, this rarely covers all the city's expenses; more frequently, the cities levy taxes on their citizens, in addition to those that might be imposed by larger governmental divisions. Some of these taxes are earmarked for specific ends; the murenger's upkeep of the city walls, for instance, was paid for by a tariff called murage. Others go into a general fund that pays for the city officials' salaries as well as various contingencies. In addition to the general income, sales, and property taxes, other local taxes may also be collected. For instance, taxes may be applied on goods brought into a city, similar to the customs duties on the national level. This practice is not now widespread on True Earth, but was in the past, going by such names as "vectigalia", "tonlieux", "octroi", and "alcabala".

See also

City on Wikipedia