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This chapter begins at the beginning of urban life. It outlines the dramatic growth from the first tentative agricultural villages to the massive industrial cities of the last century. In brief, what is being discussed is the rise of civilization. Our goal is not to memorize a series of dates and places, but rather to develop some understanding of the process of urban development- that is, how and why cities developed. Archeological, anthropological, and historical material is included, not because there is anything sacred about beginnings as such, but because having some understanding of the origin and function of cities helps us to better understand contemporary cities and how and why they got to be what they are today.

One model that helps us to understand change is the ecological complex. An ecosystem is defined as a natural unit in which there is an interaction of an environmental and a biotic system – that is, a community together with its habitat. At the upper extreme, the whole earth is a world ecosystem. In recent decades the ecological framework has been criticized by political economy scholars for not giving sufficient attention to deliberate changes planned by economic elites.¹ This is a valid criticism when discussing industrial and postindustrial cities. However, for viewing early preindustrial cities, an ecological framework is a useful tool.

In basic terms, the ecological complex identifies the relationship between four concepts or classes of variables: population, organization, environment, and technology. (Some add a fifth category of “social.”) These variables are frequently referred to by the acronym “POET.”

Population refers not only to the number of people but also to the growth or contraction through either migration or natural increase. An example of the first is the growth of Houston from 1975 to the present through in-migration from frost belt cities. Population also refers to the composition of the population by variables such as age, sex, and race.

Organization, or social structure, is the way urban populations are organized according to social stratification, the political system, and the economic system. For example, one might want to examine the effect of Houston’s political system and related tax system in encouraging population growth through in-migration.

Environment refers to the natural environment (e.g., Houston’s absence of snow, or Vancouver's mild maritime climate) and the built environment of streets, parks and buildings.

Technology refers to tools, inventions, ideas, and techniques that directly impact urban growth and form. Examples in Houston’s case are the private automobile and air-conditioning. Air-conditioning has made the sun belt not only prosperous but possible. Without air conditioning the fast-growing states of Florida and Texas would still be the relative economic backwaters they were 50 years ago. Humid Houston, the control center for the world’s gas and oil industry, would be unthinkable without air-conditioning. Similarly, Dallas would never have emerged as a business center, and Austin’s rise as a computer technology center would have been impossible. (Microchip manufacturing requires a constant 72 degrees and 35 percent humidity.) It should be kept in mind that how technology is used, and who has access to it, has social and political ramifications.

The ecological complex is not a theory, but it does provide a way of reminding us of the interrelated properties of life in urban settings and how each class of variables is related to and has implications for the others.² Each of the four variables is casually interdependent; depending on the way a problem is stated, each may serve as either an independent (or thing-explaining) or a dependent (thing-to-be-explained) variable. In sociological research, organization is commonly viewed as the dependent variable to be influenced by the other three independent variables, but a more sophisticated view of organization sees it as reciprocally related to the other elements of the ecological complex.

IFor example, if we are looking at the destruction of the Brazilian rain forests, we can view rapid population growth and availability of modern technology as “causing” massive environmental degradation and destruction of the earth’s ozone layer. On the other hand, one could view the environmental variable as “causing” the social organizational response of the international environmental movement.

A major advantage of the ecological complex as a conceptual scheme is its simplicity, since the economy of explanation is a basic scientific goal. For example, using the example of smog in Los Angeles, one can see that as transportation technology changed, the environment, organization, and population of the city also changed. In Los Angeles a favorable natural environment led to large-scale increases in population, which resulted in organizational problems (civic and governmental) and technological changes (freeways and factories). These in turn led to environmental changes (smog), which resulted in organizational changes (new pollution laws), which in turn resulted in technological changes (antipollution devices on automobiles and a limited, but very expensive, subway system).

This example illustrates how sociologists can use the conceptual scheme of the ecological complex to clarify significant sets of variables when studying urban growth patterns. This can be of considerable help in enlightening policy options. Note, for example, the dominant importance of environmental factors in the first cities and how this, in time, is modified by technological and social inventions. The role of technology becomes increasingly important in the 19th century (railroads, telephones, elevators, high-rise buildings).

A problem with the ecological complex is that the categories themselves are somewhat arbitrary, and the boundaries between them are not always precise. The ecological complex, however, is simply a tool to help us better understand the interaction patterns within urban systems. It is not intended to be a fully developed theory of urbanization. Perhaps the greatest limitation of the original ecological complex is that it subsumes cultural values under the variable of organization. A very strong case can be made that "culture" should be a separate reference variable in its own right. Thus as previously noted, some would add an “S” for social to make the acronym POETS. Another limitation is that the ecological complex as such does not explain how, when, to what degree, and under what circumstances the categories of variables interact. Nonetheless, the ecological complex remains a useful explanatory tool for organizing large bodies of material and showing relationships. It is less useful when addressing specific questions requiring conceptual precision.

The ecological approach has been challenged by the emergence of a variety of political economy models. These conflict-based paradigms or models are commonly referred to as political economy models. Originally these were neo-Marxist in nature, but some contemporary models have moved beyond Marxism.³ Today, both ecological and political economy models are undergoing considerable change. (Political-economic conflict theories are discussed in detail in Chapter 4: Ecology and Political Economy Perspectives.)

Political economy models differ in specifics, but they all stress that urban growth is largely a consequence of capitalist economic systems of capital accumulation, conflict between classes, and economic exploitation of the powerless by the rich and powerful. The capitalist mode of production and capital accumulation are seen as being manipulated by real estate speculators and business elites for their private profit. The assumption is that “societal intervention is dominated by antagonistic social relationships,” “social development is unstable in societies with antagonistic owner relationships,” and “power inequality is a basic element in societal relationships.”⁴

Critical theorists criticize ecological models as being ahistorical and mechanistic, and stress that social conflict is an inevitable consequence of capitalistic political economies. Thus, they discount the ecological model’s reliance on transportation and communication technologies in explaining urban-suburban development. Rather, they place greater emphasis on the deliberate and conscious manipulation by real estate and government interests in order to promote growth and profits. Suburbanization, for example, is not viewed as resulting from individual choices made possible by access to outer land through streetcar and automobile, but rather as the deliberate decision of economic elites to disinvest in the city and to manipulate suburban real estate markets.⁵ The strength of political economic models is their attention to the influence of economic elites on political decision making and the role played by real estate speculators. The weakness is the assumption that local government acts largely at the bidding of economic elites, and thus citizen’s wishes have little impact on growth patterns or on local government.

Our knowledge of the origin and development of the first human settlements and our understanding of the goals, hopes, and fears of those who lived within them must remain forever tentative. Because the first towns emerged before the invention of writing about 3,500 B.C.E., we must depend for our knowledge on the research of archeologists. Understandably, historians, sociologists, and other scholars sometimes differ in their interpretations of the limited archeological and historical data. Lewis Mumford has stated the problem aptly:

Five thousand years of urban history and perhaps as many of proto-urban history are spread over a

few score of only partly exposed sites. The great urban landmarks Ur, Nippur, Uruk, Thebes, Helopolis,

Assur, Nineveh, Babylon, cover a span of three thousand years whose vast emptiness we cannot

hope to fill with a handful of monuments and a few hundred pages of written records.⁶

This chapter, which outlines the growth of urban settlements, must necessarily be based in part on scholarly speculation about what happened before the historical era. Fortunately, though, our interest is not so much in an exact chronology of historical events as in the patterns and processes of development.

Agricultural Revolution

Hunting and Gathering Societies. It is generally believed that before the urban revolution could take place, an agricultural revolution was necessary.⁷ Before the invention of the city, nomadic hunting-and-gathering bands could not accumulate, store, and transport more goods than they could carry with them. Hunting-and-gathering groups were small, ranging from 25 to at most 50 persons. Hunting-and-gathering societies were equalitarian, lacked private property, and had no fixed leadership. Since the group was mobile, parents could pass on little in goods to their children. Each generation started with equal resources. Settled agriculture changed everything by allowing population growth, limited economic specialization, and a more complex social organization. However, there was not a total absence of culture. The hunter-gatherers of Japan's Jomon culture produced pottery with a cord pattern in the 10th millennium B.C.E.⁸

Settled Agriculture. Eventually, some groups gained enough knowledge of the relationship between the seasons and the cycle of growth to forsake constant nomadism in favor of permanent settlement in one location. The Neolithic period is characterized by this change from gathering food to producing it. There is fairly clear evidence that a transformation from a specialized food-collecting culture to a culture where grains were cultivated occurred around 8,000 B.C. in the Middle East.

Herd animals such as oxen, sheep, donkeys, and finally horses were first used during this period, allowing the available supply of food to be substantially increased and the first solid steps toward permanent settlement of a single site to be made. Animals such as the horse and the donkey could also serve, in addition to humans, as beasts of burden and a source of pulling power. In all likelihood, decreases in the very high mortality rates and increases in population occurred at this same time.

Only when the agricultural system became capable of producing a surplus was it possible to withdraw labor from food production and apply it to the production of other goods.⁹ The size of the urban population was thus directly related to the efficiency of agricultural workers, and agriculture remained primitive millennia.

However, while a food surplus was essential to the emergence of towns, it was not essential that the surplus come from agriculture. Perhaps as early as 15,000 years ago, during the Mesolithic period, hamlets from India to the Baltic area based their culture on the use of shellfish and fish.¹⁰ Within these Mesolithic hamlets possibly were seen the earliest domestic animals, such as pigs, ducks, geese, and our oldest companion, the dog. Mumford suggests that the practice of reproducing food plants through plant cuttings – as with the date palm, the olive, the fig, and the grape – probably derives from Mesolithic culture.¹¹ Small villages could manage by food gathering if their ecological sites were especially bountiful.

Early settlements had a rudimentary division of labor and hierarchical social order. Jericho – which some argue was the first “city,” with some 600 people around 8,000 B.C. – had a fairly complex architectural construction.¹² The inhabitants, for example, had sufficient civic organization and division of labor to build defensive walls and towers in a period when they had barely begun to domesticate grains. They also built mud houses of sun-dried bricks. Further north in what is now Turkey, permanent villages emerged about the same time.

The first population explosion - an increase in tribe size to the point where hunting and gathering could no longer provide adequate food, further encouraged fixed settlements. This was most likely to occur in fertile locations where land, water, and climate favored intensive cultivation of food. Archeologists suggest that population growth, in fact, forced the invention of agriculture.¹³ Hunting, gathering, and primitive plant cultivation simply could not support the growing population.

Since the plow did not yet exist – it was not invented until sometime in the fourth century B.C.E. – farmers of this period used a form of slash-and-burn agriculture.¹⁴ This method required cutting down what you could and burning off the rest before planting – an inefficient form of farming, but one with a long history. It was even used by the American pioneers who first crossed the Appalachian Mountains into the new lands of Kentucky and Ohio. It was still being used in isolated areas of the Appalachians in the first decades of the twentieth century. The first farmers in ancient times soon discovered that slash-and-burn farming quickly depleted the soil, forced them to migrate – and probably spreading their knowledge by means of cultural diffusion.

The consequences of these developments were momentous: with grain cultivation, a surplus could be accumulated and people could plan for the future. One of the early permanent Neolithic farming communities - Jarmo, in the Kurdista area of Iraq - was inhabited between 7,000 and 6,500 B.C.E. It has been calculated that approximately 150 people lived in Jarmo, and archeological evidence indicates a population density of 27 people per square mile (about the same as the population density today in that area).¹⁵ Soil erosion, deforestation, and 10,000 years of human warfare have offset the technological advantages of the intervening centuries.

The early inhabitants of Jarmo had learned to domesticate dogs, goats, and possibly sheep. The farmers living there raised an early form of domesticated barley and wheat but still had to hunt and collect much of their food. Since the earliest farmers lacked plows to break the tight grassland sod, they worked the hillsides where grass was scarce and trees broke the earth. Similarly, America’s tightly packed western prairie soil remained untamed until the steel plow was invented in the 19th century.

Village farming communities like Jarmo had stabilized by about 5500 B.C.E., and over alluvial plains of river valleys like that of the Tigris-Euphrates. A similar process took place in the great river valleys of the Nile, the Indus, and the Yellow. The invention of agriculture was quite possibly an independent development in China and was certainly independent in the new world. The civilizations of Mesoamerica were physically isolated from those of the Middle East and Asia and thus had to invent independently, since they were unable to borrow. In pre-Mayan Mesoamerica, elaborate systems for irrigating and raising corn were developed.

Although China's cities evolved somewhat after those of the Middle East, the latest archaeological evidence suggests the concept of the city probably was not borrowed from Mesopotamia but developed independently.¹⁶ Certainly by the time of the Shang dynasty (1600-1100 B.C.E.) China had cities that apparently were laid out according to a plan, complete with ceremonial buildings and palaces, as well as dwellings.

In Mesoamerica, cities were not a product of cultural diffusion but rather a separate invention. Mayan cities in Central America developed somewhat later than those in Mesopotamia or China. New research confirms that the city of Caral in Peru existed in 2600 B.C.E., a thousand years earlier than cities in the Americas were thought to exist.¹⁷

The Mayans had a major civilization and large cities dating from roughly 500 B.C.E. Since these cities had no walls, it was thought until the 1990s that the Mayans were peaceful. They weren't. Decoding of Mayan writing indicates that Mayan religious rituals and wars were all remarkably bloody. Dispute arises as to whether the Central America Mayan sites were true cities with resident populations or rather huge ceremonial sites. Most contemporary scholars incline toward seeing them as true cities. In 2000, one of the richest Mayan cities and royal palaces yet discovered was found buried deep and virtually intact in a neglected part of the Guatemalan rain forest.¹⁸ The city, named Cancuen or "place of the serpents" after the name of its dynasty, rose to power about 300 A.D. and continued beyond 600 A.D. Because of constant warfare, none of the other Mayan dynasties lasted so long. The Mayan era of greatest city building was between A.D. 600 and 800. Then between A.D. 800 and 900, most of the great cities of Central America were abandoned, for reasons that are still debated and unclear.¹⁹ It appears that populations increased while resources declined due to overfarming and drought. Cities were abandoned and taken over by the jungle. Population growth may have brought environmental collapse.

At its peak, Teotihuacan in central Mexico numbered perhaps 150,000 persons or more. By the time the Spanish invaders arrived in 1521, both Mayan society and cities had collapsed due to a combination of continuous warfare, self-destructive political divisions, and environmental collapse. However, their successors, the Aztecs, had built a city at Tenochititlan (Mexico City), which dazzled Cortez and his Spanish troops. No such cities existed north of the Rio Grande.

The relationships between population, organization, environment, and technology are clearer in their consequences than in their timing. The immediate result of the agricultural revolution was a spurt in population size, since a larger population could be maintained on a permanent basis. Stable yields meant that larger numbers of people could be sustained in a relatively compact space. The creation of an agricultural surplus made permanent settlements possible. Agricultural villages could support up to twenty-five persons per square mile, a dramatic improvement over the maximum of three to five persons per square mile in the hunting-and-gathering societies. Technology had spurred population growth.

The establishment of sedentary agricultural villages with growing populations increased the pressure for more intensive agriculture and complex patterns of organization. Agriculture in the river valleys required at least small-scale irrigation systems, something not necessary in the highlands. Rudimentary social organization and specialization began to develop; periodic flooding made it necessary for the village farmers to band together to create a system of irrigation canals and repair the damage done by the floods. The existence of irrigation systems also led to the development of systems of control and the emergence of more detailed social stratification within the permanent settlements.

Relatively permanent settlements in one place also allowed the structure of the family itself to change. In a hunting-and-gathering society, the only legacy parents could pass on to their progeny was their physical strength and knowledge of rudimentary skills. Agriculturalists, though, can also pass land on to their children, and all land is not equal. Social stratification emerged over generations, with some children born into prosperity and others into poverty.

Extended family forms can also more easily emerge under sedentary conditions – for example, a patriarchal society where polygyny is practiced. Patriarchal family systems, such as those found in the Bible, can have major economic as well as sexual advantages for those in charge, since extra wives mean extra hands to tend the animals and cultivate the fields. More important, many wives mean many sons – sons to work the fields, help protect what one has from the raiding of others, provide for one in old age, make offerings to the gods at one’s grave, and carry one’s lineage forward. The last was particularly important in many societies. For example, in the Old Testament the greatest gift that God could bestow on Abraham was not wealth or fame or everlasting life, but that his descendants would number more than the stars in the sky and grains of sand.

Environmentally, those located on rivers had advantages not only of soil fertility, but also of transportation and trade. Particularly blessed were those settlements of Mesopotamia and the Nile River valley that could exploit the rich soil of alluvial riverbeds. The very name "Mesopotamia," which refers to the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq, means "land between rivers."

Egypt was among the first to adopt sedimentary agriculture. By the middle of the fourth millennium B.C.E., the economy of the Nile valley in Egypt had shifted once and for all from a combination of farming and food-gathering to a reliance on agriculture. In this great river valley, two and sometimes three a year were possible because the annual floods brought rich silt to replace the exhausted soil. (The Aswan Dam now blocks the annual floods.) To the dependable crops of wheat and barley was added the cultivation of the date palm. This was a great improvement. In the Mesopotamia the palm provided more than simple food; from it were obtained wood, roofing, matting, wine, and fiber for rope. Grapes were also crushed and fermented in the Middle East about 3000 B.C.E.²⁰

The use of rivers for transportation further encouraged the aggregation of population, for now it was relatively easy to gather food at a few centers. Thus, in the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus, and the Yellow population surplus developed, which in turn permitted the rise of the first cities. By the third century B.C.E., Egyptian peasants from the fertile river flood plain could produce approximately three times the food they needed. The city served as a “central place” where goods and services could be exchanged.

By contemporary standards, the largest cities were little more than small towns. However, in their own day they must have been looked upon with the same awe with which nineteenth century immigrants viewed New York, for these cities were ten times the size of the Neolithic villages that had previously been the largest settlements. Babylon, with its hanging gardens, one of the wonders of the ancient world, embraced a physical area of only roughly 3.2 square miles. The city of Ur, located at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, was the largest city in Mesopotamia. With all its canals, temples, and harbors, it occupied only 220 acres.²¹ Ur was estimated to have contained 24,000 persons; other towns ranged in population from 2,000 to 20,000 inhabitants.²² Such cities, however, remained urban islands in the midst of rural seas.

Hawley estimates that although these cities were large for their time, they probably represented no more than 3 or 4 percent of all the people within the various localities.²³ Even Athens at its peak had only 612 acres within its walls – an area smaller than 1 square mile; ancient Antioch was roughly half this size. Carthage at its peak was 712 acres. Of all the ancient cities, only imperial Rome exceeded an area of 5 square miles. Even the biggest places before the Roman period could scarcely have exceeded 200,000 inhabitants, since fifty to ninety farmers were required to supports one person in a city.²⁴ In an agricultural world, the size of cities was limited by how much surplus could be produced and what technology was available to transport it.

Early cities were important not because of their size, but because they frequently not only tolerated but actively encouraged innovations in social organization. Even though few in number, the urban elite were the principal carriers of the all-important cultural and intellectual values of civilization. Needless to say, the city also held economic and political sway over the more numerous country dwellers. The Arab philosopher-sociologist Ibn Khaldun, writing in the 14th century, pointed out that the concentration of economic power and the proceeds of taxation in the cities led to a profound difference between the economic pattern of the city and that of the country. The concentration of governmental and educational functions in the city also stimulated new demands that affected the patterns of production and supply.

A surplus in the food supply not only allowed populations to grow; it also allowed the emergence of some nonagricultural specialists. The city’s greater population density, along with its sedentary way of life, made possible the development of an urban culture emphasizing trade, manufacturing, and services. However, early cities were at least as important as administrative and religious centers. Cities were as much symbolic places for the worship of the sacred as practical places for secular concerns. The earliest cities began to evolve a social organization immensely more complex than that found in the Neolithic village. The slight surplus of food permitted the emergence of a rudimentary division of labor. No longer did each person have to do everything for himself or herself. The city thus differed from a large village not only because it had a larger number of people, but because it had a larger and more extensive division of labor. The consequence was hierarchy and stratification. Surplus permitted inequality.²⁵

Archeological records indicate that the earliest public buildings were temples, suggesting that specialized priests were the first to be released from direct subsistence functions. Early Sumerian cities were basically theocracies, that is, they were ruled by priests. That the priests also assumed the role of economic administrators is indicated by the ration or wage lists found in the places where the temples were located.²⁶ In Egypt the temples were also used as granaries for the community surplus. This surplus could be used to carry a community through a period of famine. The technology of food storage was a major achievement of the city. The biblical story of Joseph- who was sold by his jealous brothers into slavery in Egypt, only to become advisor to the Pharaoh and predict seven good years of harvest followed by seven lean years of famine- points out the vulnerability of the nomadic Israelites to their physical environment, and the relative control of the more advanced Egyptians over their environment. Even if the nomadic Jews had received Joseph’s warning, they would have been unable to profit from it. They lacked the transportations and storage technology of the more urban Egyptians. The Egyptians had learned how to move a surplus through time as well as through space. Long-term planning – whether to avoid famines, build pyramids, or construct temples – was possible only where a surplus was assured and storage was available.

For a long time the temples were the most largest and most complex institutions; kingship and dynastic political regimes developed later. Apparently, warrior-leaders were originally selected by all other males and served only during times of external threat. Eventually, those chosen as short-term leaders during periods of war came to be retained even during times of peace. As the process evolved in China in the fifth century B.C.:

Perhaps whole settlements sometimes found it was easier to set up as warriors, and let the people

around them work for them, than to labor in the fields. The chiefs and their groups of warriors, no

doubt, provided the farmers with “protection” whether they wanted it or not, and in return for that service

It is hardly necessary to add that the size of the warrior’s share of the peasant’s crop was fixed by the warrior, not the peasant. The growth of military establishments did contribute, though, to technological innovations – metallurgy for weapons, chariots for battle, and more efficient ships.

It was but a small step from a warrior class to kingship and the founding of dynasties with permanent hereditary royalty. The gradual shifting of the central focus from temple to palace was accompanied by the growth of social and economic stratification. Artists working in precious metals became regular attachments to palace life. Records of sales of land indicate that even among the agriculturalists there were considerable inequalities in the ownership of productive land. As a result, social differences grew. Some few members of each new generation were born with marked hereditary social and economic advantages over the others. If they couldn’t afford the luxuries of palace life, they nonetheless lived in considerable comfort.

Archeologically, the emergence of social classes can be seen clearly in the increasing disparity in the richness of grave offerings.²⁸ The tombs of royalty are richly furnished with ornaments and weapons of gold and precious metals; those of others, with copper vessels; while the majority have only pottery vessels or nothing at all. The building of burial pyramids was the ultimate case of monumental graves. In China a social evolution led to the replacement of hereditary feudal lords with centrally appointed mandarins selected by examination. This bureaucratic system survived over 3,000 years until its abolishment in 1905.

We are just discovering the elaborate water collection and distribution systems of the ancient Mayan culture of Central America. The system allowed the Mayan elite to develop large cities in areas that had long dry spells. The failure to maintain the water system may have led to the civilization’s collapse about A.D. 900²⁹In early cities, technology was spurred on by the existence of the palace elite. The military required armor, weapons, and chariots, and the court demanded ever-more ornaments and other luxuries. This demand created a constant market for nonagricultural commodities, and the result was the establishment of a class of full-time artisans and craft workers. The near-isolation of earlier periods was now replaced with trade over long distances, which brought not only new goods but also new ideas.

The first city was far more than an enlarged village – it was a clear break with the past, a whole new social system. It was a social revolution involving the evolution of a whole new set of social institutions. Unlike the agricultural revolution that preceded it, this urban revolution was far more than a basic change in subsistence. It was “pre-eminently a social process, an expression more of change in man’s interaction with his fellows than in his interaction with his environment.”³⁰

Once begun, the urban revolution created its own environment. Inventions that have made large settlements possible have been due to the city itself – for example, writing, accounting, bronze, the solar calendar, bureaucracy, and the beginning of science. Ever since Mesopotamia, the city as a social institution has been shaping human life.³¹

A number of years ago V. Gordon Childe listed ten features that, he said, define the “urban revolution,” that is, features that set cities apart from earlier forms of human settlement. The features are:

7. The acquisition of predictive sciences – arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy

10. The replacement of kinship by residence as the basis of membership in the community³²

We now know that all 10 are not necessary. For example, monumental urban places developed in Mesoamerica without the wheel, the raising of animals, the plow, or the use of metals. (Actually, Mayan civilization did have the wheel, but for some reason used it only on children’s toys.) They did, however, have other advantages; probably the most significant was the knowledge of how to cultivate large surpluses of domesticated maize (corn). The Mayans also had made major advances in mathematics, including the invention of the concept of zero. They were accurate astronomers and had an exact calendar; both skills were used for religious purposes but had secular consequences (e.g., indicating when to plant). Social organizations, culture, and technology were interrelated.

Lists, such as Childe's, are most useful in indicating what we have come to accept as the general characteristics of cities. What is important for our purposes is that cities possessing these characteristics did emerge in Mesopotamia and the Nile valley.

The stable location of the city was not an unmixed blessing. It was not simply for the convenience that gardens and pasturelands were found within city walls. Cities had to be equipped to withstand a siege, since the earliest cities were vulnerable not only to conquest by other peoples but also to periodic attacks by nomadic raiders. For the numerous cities built on the banks of rivers, floods were also a recurrent problem. Middle Eastern cities also were perpetually under attack by nomadic tribes.³³ The Bible, for instance, devotes considerable attention to the successes of the nomadic Israelites in taking and pillaging the cities of their more advanced enemies. The description of the fall of the Canaanite city of Jericho tells us that:

The People went out into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city. And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and ass, with the edge of the sword – and they burnt the city with fire and all that was therein (Joshua 2:20-24).

That “Joshua 'fit' the battle of Jericho … and the walls came tumbling down” is known to all those who have heard the stirring spiritual, even if they have not read the Old Testament. While the walls Joshua is believed to have miraculously brought down with trumpet blasts about 1500 B.C.E. have not been located with certainty, the remains of other walls dating back to 8000 B.C.E. have been excavated. As with some other long-inhabited ancient sites, the walls had been breached many times – sometimes by invaders, sometimes by earthquakes. Actually destroying everything and everyone in the city was remarkably shortsighted. By Solomon’s time a more complex social organization had evolved where subjugated peoples were taxed yearly rather than destroyed.

There also were threats to the inhabitants within the city walls, the most dangerous being fires and epidemic diseases. Plagues spread easily in cities. City life was more exciting, but it was not necessarily more secure or healthful than life in the countryside.

As we have noted, environmental factors played a decisive role in early cities. The history of the city can be considered the story of human attempts, through the use of technology and social organization, to lessen the impact of environmental factors. An example is Athens, widely regarded as the apex of ancient Western urbanism. Not only was the Greek soil thin and rocky and of marginal fertility, but the mountainous hinterland made inland transportation and communication almost impossible. Aside from the sacred ways to Delphi and Eleusis, the roads were mere paths, suitable only for pack animals or porters. It is estimated that the cost of transporting goods 10 miles from Athens was more than 40 percent of the value of the goods.³⁴

But Greece was blessed with fine harbors. Consequently, Athens turned to the sea. A Greek ship could carry 7,000 pounds of grain 65 nautical miles a day, and do it at one-tenth the cost of land transportation. (Storms and sea pirates, however, often made this an ideal rather than a reality.) There were also technological contributions to Greek prosperity: the use of the lodestone as a basic nautical compass and the development of more seaworthy ships.

The greatest achievement of the Greeks was not in the area of technology but in that of social organization. The social invention of the polis, or “city-state,” enabled families, phratries (groups of clans), and tribes to organize for mutual aid and protection as citizens of a common state. Because they acknowledged a common mythical ancestry among the gods, different families were able to come together in larger bodies. Gradually the principle of common worship was extended to the entire community. Citizenship within the state and the right to worship at civic shrines were two sides of the same coin.

Citizens were those who could trace their ancestry back to the god or gods responsible for the city and thus could participate in public religious worship. An Athenian citizen was one who had the right to worship at the temple of Athena, the protector of the city-state of Athens. Thus religion had strong social consequences since it conferred citizenship. The ancient city was a religious community, and citizenship was at its basis a religious status.³⁵ Socrates’ questioning the existence of the gods was considered a grave offense because, by threatening the established religion, he was undermining the very basis of citizenship in the city-state. His crime was not heresy but treason. As punishment for such a subversive act, he was forced to drink poison hemlock. Unfortunately, the Greeks never devised a system for extending citizenship to political units larger than the city-state. This was to be the great accomplishment of the Romans.

Being a citizen of the city was of supreme importance to the Greeks. When Aristotle wished to characterize humans as social animals, he said that man is by nature a citizen of the city. To the Greeks, being ostracized, or forbidden to enter into the city, was an extremely severe punishment. To be placed beyond the city walls was to be cast out of civilized life. The terms pagan and heathen originally referred to those beyond the city walls; our adjective urban and our nouns citizen and politics are derived from the Latin terms for the city. As previously noted, the English terms city and civilization are both derived from the Latin civis.

Physically, the Greek cities were of fairly similar design, a phenomenon that is not surprising given the amount of social borrowing that took place among the various city-states and the fact that cities were built with military defense in mind. The major city walls were built around a fortified hill called an acropolis. Major temples were also placed upon the acropolis. The nearby agora, or open place, served as both a meeting place and, in time, a marketplace. All major buildings were located within the city walls. Housing, except for the most privileged, was outside the walls but huddled as close to the protective walls as possible.

In describing the Greek polis, there is a strong tendency to focus on the image of the Athenian Acropolis harmoniously crowned by the perfectly proportioned Parthenon. Separated by seas and centuries, it is perhaps natural for us to accept Pericles’ own praise of his fellow Athenians as “lovers of beauty without extravagance and lovers of wisdom without unmanliness.” Yet it is easy to forget that the "classic" white stone of the Parthenon was originally painted garish colors. Traces of red paint can still be seen millennia later. Below the inner order and harmony of the Parthenon was a sprawling, jumbled town in which the streets were no more than dirty, winding, narrow lanes and unburied refuse rotted in the sun. Housing for the masses was squalid and cramped. Although the town planner Hippodamus designed a grid street pattern for Piraeus, the port city of Athens, Athens itself had no such ordered arrangement. Athens was the center of an empire, but little of its genius was given to urban design of municipal management.

During its peak the city achieved a population of possibly 250,000 including slaves and noncitizens (slaves constituted perhaps one-third of the population). The major limit on population growth was the limited technological base. The city was still dependent on the surplus of agricultural activities. Much of the land within Athens itself was given over to gardening. The great sociologist Max Weber put the Greek city-states in perspective when he wrote, “The full urbanite of antiquity was a semi-peasant.”³⁶

Expansion of Greek cities was also limited by preference and policy. The ancient Greeks preferred fairly small cities. Both Plato and Aristotle firmly believed that good government was directly related to the size of the city. Plato specified that the ideal republic should have exactly 5,040 citizens, since that number had 59 divisors and would “furnish numbers for war and peace, and for all contracts and dealings, including taxes and divisions of the land.”³⁷ Why Plato chose the number 5,040 isn’t known, since his totalitarian state would be governed not by citizen vote but by a small group of guardians presided over by a philosopher-king. Lewis Mumford suggests two possible reasons for the limited size: A larger population would be more difficult to control strictly, and there may have been the desire to keep the population low enough to live off the local food supply.³⁸ He also notes that when noncitizens such as children, slaves, and foreigners are added to the calculation, the total population of the city-state is approximately 30,000, or about the size chosen later by Leonardo da Vinci and Ebenezer Howard for their ideal cities. Aristotle informs us that Hippodamus envisioned a city of 10,000 citizens divided into three parts: one of artisans, one of farmers, and one of warriors. The land was likewise to be divided into three parts: one to support the gods, one public to support the warriors defending the state, and one private to support the farm owners.³⁹ This illustrates the classic Greek interest in balance.

Aristotle’s views on the ideal size of the city are less specific, although he recognized that increasing the number of inhabitants beyond a certain point changes the character of the city. In his view, the city-state had to be large enough to defend itself and to be economically self-sufficient, but not so large as to prevent the citizens from knowing each other’s character. In other words justice should not be blind. As he stated it:

A state then only begins when it has attained a population sufficient for a good life in the political

community; it may somewhat exceed this number, but as I was saying there must be a limit. What

should be the limit will be easily ascertained by experience. – If the citizens of a state are to judge and distribute offices according to merit, then they must know each other’s characters: where they do not possess this knowledge, both the election to offices and the decisions of lawsuits will go wrong – Clearly then the best limit of the population of the state is the largest number which suffices for the purposes of life and can be taken at a single view.⁴⁰

City-states were restrained from growing overly large by the policy of creating colonies. When a city began growing too large a colony city was established. Between 479 and 431 B.C.E., over 10,000 families migrated from established cities to newer Greek colonial settlements. Colonization both met the needs of empire and provided a safety valve for a chronic population problem. This diffusion of population led in turn to a spread of Greek culture and ideas of government far beyond Peloponnesus. The military campaigns of Alexander the Great (356- 323 B.C.) also spread Greek culture and led to the establishment of new cities to control conquered territory (e.g., Alexandria in Egypt).

If Greece represented philosophy and the arts, Rome represented power and technology. The city as a physical entity reached a high point under the Roman Caesars. Not until the 19th century was Europe again to see cities as large as those found within the Roman Empire. Rome itself may have contained 1 million inhabitants at its peak, although an analysis of density figures would make an estimate two-thirds that number seem more reasonable; scholarly estimates vary from a low of 250,000 to a high of 1.6 million. These wide variations are a result of different interpretations of inadequate data. The number given in the total Roman census, for example, jumped from 900,000 in 69 B.C.E. to over 4 million in 28 B.C.E. No one is quite sure what this increase indicates – perhaps an extension of citizenship, perhaps the counting of women and children, perhaps something else.⁴¹Readers should remind themselves that all figures on the size of cities before the 19th century should be taken as estimates rather than empirical census counts. At their most accurate, such figures are formed by multiplying the supposed number of dwelling units in a city at a given period, and then by estimating average family size.

Expertise in the areas of technology and social organization enabled the Romans to organize, administer, and govern an empire containing several cities of more than 200,000 inhabitants. The population of the Roman Empire exceeded that of all but the largest twentieth-century superpowers. According to the historian Edward Gibbon, “We are informed that when Emperor Claudius [ A.D. 41-54] exercised the office of censor, he took account of six million nine hundred and forty-five thousand Roman citizens, who with women and children, must have amounted to about twenty million souls.” He concludes that there were “about twice as many provincials as there were citizens, of either sex and of every age; and that the slaves were at least equal in number to the free inhabitant of the Roman world. The total amount of this imperfect calculation would rise to about one hundred and twenty million.”⁴² The total world population at this time was roughly 250 million so Rome controlled half the world’s population.

Gibbon further states that ancient Italy was said to contain 1,197 cities - however defined - and Spain, according to Pliny, had 360 cities.⁴³ North Africa had hundreds of cities, and north of the Alps major cities rose from Vienna to Bordeaux. Even in far-off Britain there were major cities at York, Bath, and London. What made all this possible for hundreds of years was a technology of considerable sophistication and – most important – Roman social organization. Wherever the legions conquered, they also brought Roman law and Roman concepts of government. Rome’s domination resulted in an urban imperialism.

“Rome, Goddess of the earth and of its people, without a peer or a second” remains the wonder of the ancient world. Yet despite the emperor Augustus’s proud claim that he found a city of brick and left one of marble, much of the city centuries later was still composed of buildings with wood frames and wood roofs on narrow, crowded alleys. Fire was a constant worry, and the disastrous fires of A.D. 64 that some say Nero started left only four of the city’s fourteen districts intact.

Wealthy Romans lived on the Palatine Hill, where the imperial palaces overlooked the Forum with its temples and public buildings and the Colosseum. However, as was the case in Athens, Roman municipal planning was definitely limited in scope. Magnificent though it was, it did not extend beyond the center of the municipality. Once one branched off the main thoroughfare leading to the city’s gates, there was only a maze of narrow, crooked lanes winding through the squalid tenements that housed the great bulk of the population. The masses crowded in the poor quarters were offered periodic “bread and circuses” to keep their minds off revolt. Magnificent public squares and public baths were built with public taxes for the more affluent Romans, not for the masses. As the city grew, the old city walls were torn down and rebuilt to include buildings that had been constructed on the outer fringe. In time even the Forum became crowded and congested, as the ruins still standing amply testify.

The city was supplied with fresh water through an extensive system of aqueducts. The most important of these, which brought water from the Sabine Hills, was completed in 144 B.C.E. Parts of aqueducts still stand – testament to the excellence of their engineering and the skill of their builders. (However, use of lead pipes in homes gradually poisoned the wealthy, who could afford piped running water.) Rome even had an elaborate sewer system – at least in the better residential areas. It is an unfortunate comment on progress to note that present-day Rome still dumps untreated sewage in the Tiber River. (The beautiful North American city of Victoria similarly dumps its raw sewage into the Pacific.)

In many ways provincial Roman cities such as Paris, Vienna, Cologne, Mainz, and London exhibited greater civic planning than Rome itself. These cities grew out of semipermanent military encampments and thus took the gridiron shape of the standard Roman camp (The pattern can be seen today on football fields and also is the origin of the square city block.) The encampments and later the cities were laid out on a rectangular grid pattern with a gate on each side. The center was reserved for the forum, the coliseum, and municipal buildings such as public baths. Markets were also generally found in the forum.

Elsewhere in the empire, the major distinction was between preexisting cities and new provincial towns and cities. In the east were Egyptian, Hellenic, and other cities which the Romans simply took over and expanded under Roman jurisdiction. In the west (western Europe and Britain), on the other hand, there was no preexisting system of cities; here the Romans created a wholly new system of Roman rather than Hellenic cities. Eastern cities differed from each other physically as well as politically. On the other hand, because of their commonality of origin, the western European provincial Roman cities were all remarkably similar in design (for more detail on Hellenic and Roman planning, see Chapter 13, Planning, New Towns, and New Urbanism). The differences between the older eastern and newer western segments of the empire were never fully resolved, and the empire eventually split into eastern and western sections.

Rome was an exporter not of goods, but of ideas – such as Roman law, government, and engineering – which enabled it to control the hinterland. It was an importer of necessary goods and, therefore, depended on the hinterland not only for tribute and slaves but for its very life. The city of Rome could feed its population and also import vast quantities of goods other than food because of an unrivaled road network and peaceful routes of sea trade. (The roads were built and the galleys powered largely by slaves.) Some 52,000 miles of well-maintained roads facilitated rapid movement of goods and people. Parts of some of the original roads are still in use today, and the quality of their construction surpasses that of even the most rigorous contemporary federal standards.

With the elimination of Carthage as a rival, the Mediterranean truly became “Interium” or local sea. Foodstuffs for both the civilian population and the legions could be transported easily and inexpensively from the commercial farming areas of Iberia and north Africa. When the African grain-producing areas were lost to the Vandals, and the barbarians in Germany, Gaul, and England pressed the empire, disrupting vital transportation routes, the decline of Rome was inevitable. Rome lived off its hinterland.

The prosperity of the Roman Empire during its peak and the leisure it afforded the residents of the capital were imperial indeed. By the second century after Christ, between one-third and one-half of the population was on the dole, and even those who worked (including the third of the population who were slaves) rarely spent more than six hours at their jobs. Moreover, by that period, religious and other holidays had been multiplied by the emperors until the ratio of holidays to workdays was one to one.⁴⁴

To amuse the population and keep their mind off uprisings against the emperor, chariot races and gladiatorial combats were staged. The scene of the races was the colossal Circus Maximus, which seated 260,000 persons, and gladiatorial fights were staged at the smaller Colosseum. When the emperor Titus inaugurated the Colosseum in A.D. 80, he imported 5,000 lions, elephants, deer, and other animals to be slaughtered in a single day to excite the spectators. The role Christians came to play in these amusements is well known. Our contemporary beliefs about proper civic amusements were not necessarily shared by earlier eras of urbanites.

The dissolution of the Roman Empire in A.D.476 marked the effective decay of cities in western Europe for a period of 600 years. This is not the place to detail why Rome fell; it is sufficient to note that under the combined impact of the barbarian invasion and internal decay, the empire disintegrated and commerce shrank to a bare minimum. Once-proud Roman provincial centers disappeared or declined to a point of insignificance. By the end of the sixth century, war, devastation, plague, and starvation had destroyed the glory that was Rome. From the status of the megalopolis, the city was reduced to its early medieval character of a collection of separate villages whose population had taken shelter in the ruins of ancient grandeur and had dug wells to replace the aqueducts. The small population was supported by the pope, rather than by the emperor, from the produce of papal territory.⁴⁵

Nonetheless, while the social and physical city withered and decayed into poverty and ruins, the idea and myth of Rome and a Roman Empire remained alive even in the darkest medieval periods, and led eventually in the Renaissance to a new burst of urban activity. The throttling of Mediterranean trade by the advance of Islam in the seventh century, and the pillaging raids of Norsemen in the ninth century, did further damage to what remained of European commercial life. In the east, however, cities continued to prosper. Constantinople, built by the emperor Constantine between A.D. 324 and 330, survived as the capital of the Byzantine Empire until its conquest by the Turks in 1453.

The preceding pages discussed the development of the city through the Roman period. Here emphasis is placed on the reemergence of European urban places after the decline of Rome and on how such cities laid the basis for the industrial city with which we are all so familiar.

The fall of Rome meant that each locality was isolated from every other and thus had to become self-sufficient in order to survive. Local lords offered peasants in the region protection from outside raiders in return for the virtual slavery – called serfdom – of the peasants. Removed from outside influences, local social structures congealed into hereditary hierarchies, with the local lord at the top of the pyramid of social stratification and the serfs at the bottom.⁴⁶ It is important to note that the economic and political base of the feudal system, unlike that of the Roman period, was rural, not urban. Its center was not a city but the rural manor or castle from which the local peasantry could be controlled. Long-range trade all but vanished. The economy was a subsistence agriculture based solely on what was produced in the local area; transportation of goods from one area to another was extremely difficult. Lack of communication, the virtual absence of a commonly accepted currency, and the land-tenure system that bound serfs to the soil all contributed to a narrow, inward-looking localism.

However, not all former provincial cities were totally abandoned; a few managed to survive with greatly reduced populations. These often came under the secular control of the residing bishop. The Catholic church had based its diocesan boundaries on those of the old Roman cities, and as the empire faded and then collapsed, the bishops sometimes came to exercise secular as well as religious power. By the ninth century, civitas had come to be synonymous with these “episcopal cities.”⁴⁷

According to Henri Pirenne, the “episcopal cities” were cities in name only, for they more clearly resembled medieval fortresses than true cities. They had a maximum of 2,000 or 3,000 persons and were frequently even smaller.⁴⁸ By the time of Charlemagne (ninth century) the cities – or towns – had lost most of their urban functions:

The Carolingians used the ancient cities as places of habitation, as fortified settlements from which

to dominate the surrounding countryside. The surviving physical apparatus of the old town the

walls, and buildings, served because it already existed, a convenient legacy of an earlier age.⁴⁹

Cities began to revive, very slowly, in the eleventh century. According to Pirenne, most of these new towns were not continuations of ancient cities but new social entities. Originally they were formed as a byproduct of the merchant caravans that stopped to trade outside the walls of the medieval "episcopal cities" such as Amiens, Tours, and Cologne. Under the influence of trade, the old Roman cities took on new life and became repopulated, while new towns were also being established. Mercantile groups formed around the military burgs, along seacoasts, on riverbanks, and at the junctions of the natural routes of trade and communication.⁵⁰

Over time the seasonal fairs that were held outside the town gates came to take on a more or less permanent year-round character. Since at this time the merchants were not allowed inside the town walls, they settled in the outside shadow of the walls and in some cases built their own walls, which attached to those of the town. These faubourgs, or medieval suburbs, came to be incorporated into the town proper, and by the 13th century merchants had an accepted and important role in the growing medieval towns. Revitalized city life was most prominent in Italy when city-states such as Venice established extensive commercial ties with the Byzantine and even the Arab empires. Trade with Constantinople enabled the Venetians to prosper and in time create a mini-empire of their own based upon the skills of their sea captains and the size of their fleets.

Two external factors during the Middle Ages also greatly contributed to the growth of towns elsewhere in Europe: (1) the Crusaders and (2) the overall population growth. A great impetus for the revival of trade came from the medieval religious crusades. The Crusaders returned from the urban Byzantine Empire with newly developed tastes for the consumer goods and luxuries of the east. The crusading movement provided an excellent opportunity for the town entrepreneurs to put their commercial instincts into practice.⁵¹ Sociologically, the marketplace made merchants negotiators responding to market conditions.

Trading activities greatly accelerated despite the pillaging that traders suffered from highwaymen and the endless feudal taxes and dues the traders were forced to pay to local lords as they transported goods through their territories. Still, the increasing stability led to a more constant food supply, which in turn resulted in lower death rates and improvement in the rate of natural increase of the population.

Technological innovations also contributed to population growth. The moldboard plow, which had been used in Roman times, was rediscovered. This heavier plow could turn the tight soils of northern Europe, and it came to be commonly used during the 10th century. The substitution of three-field rotation for the two field system permitted three plantings a year rather than two. The effect of these improvements was to double production and permit stable growth.

England at the time of William the Conqueror (1066) had a population of approximately 1.8 million. Three hundred years later the population had increased to roughly 2.7 million. Some of this increased population migrated to the small but growing towns. Without such increases, the growth of towns would hardly have been possible.

While the feudal order was basically rural, certain elements of the medieval legal and social system indirectly encouraged the growth of towns. Feudal lords were forbidden by custom to sell their lands, but lords badly in need of new funds could sell charters for new towns within their lands. Also, by encouraging the growth of older towns, such lords could increase their annual rents. Towns were frequently able to purchase or bargain for various rights, such as the right to hold a regular market, the right to coin money and establish weights and measures, the right of citizens to be tried in their own courts, and – most important – the right to bear arms.⁵² Over time cities became more or less autonomous and self-governing. City charters, in fact, bestowed the right of citizenship upon those living within the urban walls. As a result, medieval cities attracted the more skilled and the more ambitious of the rural population. In a sense the towns did not grow out of the feudal social order, but in opposition to it. English common law developed in this way.

Medieval cities were quite small by contemporary standards, having hardly more inhabitants than present-day towns or villages. Even during the Renaissance, cities of considerable prominence often had only 10,000 to 30,000 inhabitants.⁵³ Only Paris, Florence, Venice, and Milan are thought to have possibly reached populations of 100,000.⁵⁴ These figures are of course scholarly estimates of past size, rather than counts taken at the time.

Thick walls enclosed the medieval city; watchtowers and sometimes even external moats added to its military defense. The main thoroughfares led directly from the outer gates to the source of protection and power – the cathedral or the feudal castle. The religious cathedral dominated the medieval skyline as the skyscraper dominates the contemporary urban skyline. Outside the medieval burgs, land was reserved for expansion, so that when the population increased, the older fortifications could be torn down and new city walls built farther out. The magnificent ring-like boulevards of Vienna and Paris are reminders of the medieval origins of these cities. When the walls were finally demolished in the later part of the nineteenth century, the resulting open space was used to construct the now-famous boulevards.

Within the medieval towns or burgs could be found a new social class of artisans, weavers, innkeepers, money changers, and metal smiths known as the bourgeoisie. This new class of merchants was in many ways the antithesis of the feudal nobility. They were organized into guilds, and their way of life was characterized by trade and functionally specialized production, not by the ownership of land. The rise of the medieval bourgeoisie undermined the traditional system and prepared the way for further changes, for, as a German phrase put it, “Stadtluft macht frei” (“City air makes one free”).⁵⁵

What eventually formed was a distinct form, a full urban community. Such communities, as defined by the German sociologist Max Weber, were economically based on trading and commercial relations. Each exhibited the following features: (1) a fortification, (2) a market, court of its own, and at least partial autonomous law, (3) a related form of association, and (4) at least partial political autonomy and self-governance.⁵⁶ Weber argues convincingly that such a totally self-governing urban community could emerge only in the West, where cities had political autonomy and urban residents shared common patterns of association and social status.

By the 14th century it was clear that the growth of town-based commerce was turning Europe toward an urban-centered, profit-oriented economy. The more ambitious cities were starting to flex their economic muscles. The Italian port cities grew wealthy on trade and began to expand their influence over the surrounding hinterland. Economic competition among the Italian city-states was augmented by warfare. Florence eliminated the competition of Pisa and Siena by conquering them militarily. The cities to the north were equally active in carving out a hinterland under the economic domination. Rouen was the economic center for 35 villages, Metz controlled 168, and Lijbeck claimed 240 dependent villages within its territory.⁵⁷

Urban development, however, received a major blow in the 14th century by the outbreak of the plague. The plague was spread from the east by fleas that lived on rats found on ships. However, even the devastation of the plague could not reverse the long-term growth of cities, although in the short run it wrought havoc to a degree that is difficult to exaggerate. In its first three years, from 1348 through 1350, the plague, or “black death,” wiped out at least a fourth of the population of Europe. One scholar of the plague simply says that “it undoubtedly was the worst disaster that has ever befallen mankind.”⁵⁸ Before the year 1400, mortality due to the plague rose to more than a third of the population of Europe. Cities, with their congestion, were especially vulnerable. Over half the population of most cities was wiped out; few cities escaped with losses of less than a third. Florence went from 90,000 to 45,000 inhabitants and Siena from 42,000 to 15,000, and Hamburg lost almost two-thirds of its inhabitants.⁵⁹ As put by the traditional nursery rhyme:

(Rosies were the pox marks the plague made on a victim, and posies were supposed to ward off the plague.) Overall some 35 million Europeans died of the plague.

The path of the black death, which began in India and spread to the middle east and then Europe, followed the major trade routes. Thus, the effects were most pronounced in seaports and caravan centers.⁶⁰ The greatest losses occurred at the emerging centers of development and change. While the blow to the cities was severe, the effect of the plague on the rural manorial system was fatal. The feudal social structure never really recovered. Those peasants who were not killed by the plague fled to the towns, thus depriving the manors of their essential labor force. Serfs fleeing the plague often found that labor shortages had turned them into contract laborers or even town artisans. Population declines changed the economic structure.

The structure of basic social institutions such as the Catholic church was also dramatically altered by the black death. Many of the senior and most learned clergy perished; those who survived were more concerned with taking care of themselves than their flocks. While some clergy did far more than their duties, others deserted their perishes when plague threatened. Their participation in the general loose living and immorality of the time contributed to the religious upheavals that swept Europe for the next two centuries and culminated in the Protestant Reformation.

Since the plagues were considered to be a consequence of the wrath and vengeance of God, some people became fanatically religious, while the majority embraced the philosophy of “Live, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die.” In the words of one scholar, “Charity grew cold, workers grew arrogant, revenues of Church and State dropped, people everywhere were more self-indulgent and frivolous than ever.”⁶¹ Chroniclers stress the lawlessness, depravity, and dissolute behavior of the time. In London, “In one house you might hear them roaring under the pangs of death, in the next tippling, whoring, and belching out blasphemies against God.”⁶² The plague had given the rural-based feudal system a blow from which it never recovered. From this point onward the history of western civilization was again to be the history of cities and city inhabitants.

By the 16th century, Europe had fully recovered from the plague, and numerous cities, particularly the Italian city-states, had developed a wealthy patrician class that had the interest, resources, and time to devote to the development and beautification of their cities. Renaissance cities such as Florence embarked on major building programs. The revival of interest in the classical style and in classical symmetry, perspective, and proportion had a profound effect on the design of both public and private structures. The artistic talents even of artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were used to beautify the cities; Leonardo also developed proposals for urban planning. Rather than simply building at random, the more prosperous city-states hired architects to make planned changes. The classical effect can be seen in the use of straight streets and regular squares, and particularly in the use of perspective. The early medieval city with its semirural nature had aptly symbolized that age. A 16th and 17th century Renaissance city, such as Florence, symbolized the humanistic ideology of its age and proudly proclaimed its secular urban culture.⁶³

While the Renaissance city gained ever-greater economic and cultural dominance over rural areas, it also marked the beginning of the end of the city as a self-governing unit independent of the larger nation-state. During the medieval period, kings and city dwellers had been natural allies, since both wished to subdue the power of the local nobility. In order to cast off the last fetters of feudal restraint, the city burghers supplied the monarch with men and – most important – money to fight wars; the monarch in turn granted ever-larger charter powers to the towns.

Once the monarchs had subdued the rural lords, however, they turned their attention to the prosperous towns. Gradually the independent powers of the cities were reduced as they became part of nations in fact as well as in name. The structure of social organization in Europe was changing to the larger geographical unit: the nation-state. The loss of political independence, however, was compensated for by the economic advantages of being part of a nation-state rather than a collection of semi-independent feudal states and chartered cities. National government usually meant better and safer roads and therefore easier and cheaper transport of goods and a larger potential market area. Merchants also had the advantages of reasonably unified laws, a common coinage, and standardized measures of weight and volume – all things that today we take for granted. Emergent business classes prospered from the certainty and stability provided by the king’s national government. The capitalist city was coming into existence.

Influences of Technology. The technological developments of gunpowder and the cannon changed the nature of the walled city. The traditional defenses of rampart, bastion, and moat were of limited utility in stopping cannon fire. Cities that hoped to resist the armies of a king had to shift their attention from interior architecture and urban planning to the engineering of fortifications. Only elaborate defensive outworks could stop cannon fire, and so the city unwittingly became the captive of its own horizontal defenses. While one can certainly question the urbanologist Lewis Mumford’s view that the decline of the city as a place of comfortable habitation began with the end of the Middle Ages, it is certainly true that the city of the 17th century was changing.

Unable to grow outward, the cities began to expand vertically and fill in open spaces within the city walls. The increased crowding that resulted had a bad effect on both the quality and length of life. For example, extending the second floor of houses over the street decreased sunlight below; this led to vitamin D deficiency, which caused rickets in children. Filthy living conditions, combined with minimal sanitation and an absence of any knowledge of public health practices, resulted in the rapid spread of contagious diseases and consequently high death rates. As John Graunt’s pioneer research in the 17th century on the London Bills of Mortality demonstrated, London actually recorded more deaths than births. Only heavy migration from the countryside allowed the city to grow in population rather than decline as would otherwise have been the case with such a high mortality rate. As late as 1790 the city of London had three deaths for every two births.⁶⁴ European cities only grew because the possibilities of jobs attracted rural in-migrants.⁶⁵

Demographic Transition. Urban growth was closely tied to the growth of the population as a whole, and until the middle of the 17th century, the population of the world had been growing at a very slow rate: 0.4 percent a year. As a result, by the beginning of the 18th century the world population was roughly 500 million, or double that at the time of Christ. Then momentous changes occurred that resulted in what we call the demographic transition or demographic revolution. Population growth suddenly spurted in the latter part of the 18th century, not through increases in the birthrate – it was already high – but through declines in the death rate. Population increases continued to the 19th and 20th centuries. The term demographic transition refers to this transition from a time of high birthrates matched by almost equally high death rates, through a period of declining death rates, to a period where birthrates also began to decline, and eventually to a period where population stability is reestablished – this time through low birthrates matched by equally low death rates.

Changes in Agriculture. Much of the decline in death rates can be attributed to technological changes in agriculture that assured both a better and a more reliable food supply. Without such increases in food supply cities could not grow and expand. As late as the beginning of the 19th century, the produce of nine farms was still required to support one urban family. (Today each American farmer supports approximately 75 other persons.)

At the beginning of the 18th century English agriculture was still primitive. One-quarter of the farmland was left fallow and thus unproductive each year. Pasturelands and water rights were held in common, as were the woods that provided hunting and firewood. Then, within the span of half a century, English agriculture was revolutionized. Jethro Tull published the results of 30 years of research on his estates, and the new ideas were quickly adopted by much of the landed aristocracy. Tull advocated planting certain crops on fallow land to restore nutrients to the earth, thus radically increasing the usable acreage. (Today we still use the expression “being in clover” to indicate prosperity.) He also recommended deep plowing and a system of foddering animals through the winter. Seeds were now planted in rows rather than through broadcasting into the air.

At the same time it was being discovered that selective breeding of animals was far superior to letting nature take its course. Previously it had been believed that animals could only grow larger by eating more. Striking changes can be seen by comparing the weight of animals at the Smithfield Fair in 1710 and 1795; the average weight of oxen went from 370 pounds to 800 pounds, that of calves from 50 to 150 pounds, and that of sheep from 38 to 80 pounds. More animals also meant more fertilizer for the fields.

Accompanying these agricultural improvements in England were the notorious Enclosure Acts, which took the village commons from joint ownership and gave them to the lord enjoying ancient title to the land. While disastrous for the local yeoman, the larger enclosure could be worked more efficiently by the lords who were using the new agricultural knowledge. The result was an increase in both the quantity and quality of the food supply. While it is extremely hazardous to generalize about living conditions, there apparently was an improvement over earlier centuries. Death rates began to go down, and populations expanded rapidly.

The abandonment of traditional subsistence agriculture and the orientation to a market economy meant that rationality was replacing tradition, and contract was taking the place of custom. The calculation implicit in the land enclosure acts destroyed small peasant landowners but made it possible for London and other cities to be assured foodstuffs and thus to grow as manufacturing and commercial centers. The movement of agricultural surpluses was facilitated greatly by the construction of new toll roads, which were built in great numbers after 1745.

Roughly at the same time that agricultural improvements were both increasing yields and releasing workers, inventions were being made that would allow for the growth of new industries. Eighteenth-century inventions in the manufacture of cloth, such as the flying shuttle and the spinning jenny, were capped in 1767 by Watt’s invention of a usable steam engine. The steam engine provided a new and bountiful inanimate source of energy. The cotton industry boomed, and it was soon followed by other industries. The machines, rather than eliminating the need for workers, rapidly increased the demand for an urban work force.⁶⁶ A factory system began to emerge based on specialization and mechanization. As a consequence, new forms of occupational structure and a more complex stratification system began to develop. In the mechanized, capital-intensive industries, urban bondage replaced rural bondage for poor laborers.

The first urban revolution was the emergence of cities, and the second was the 18th century changes that for the first time made it possible for more than 10 percent of the population to live in urban places. This new urban revolution started in Europe. Without population growth and the release of workers from the land, it is hard to see how the early industrial cities could have grown at all, for as noted earlier, unhealthful living conditions in the cities meant that they were not able to maintain, much less increase, their population without in-migration from rural areas.

Rapid expansion of population and national economic expansion did not, however, translate into healthful living conditions in the bulging European towns that were turning into cities. Eighteenth-century London was a model of filth, crowding, and disease. The early stages of industrialism hardly did much to improve the situation. While the rural mortality decreased, urban mortality was kept high by unbelievably poor sanitary conditions. The novels of Charles Dickens, such as Oliver Twist (1838), give and accurate portrayal of life in such cities. Cholera and other epidemics were common until the middle of the 19th century, and until the 1840’s many of London’s sewers emptied into the Thames just a few feet above the ducts that drew drinking water from the river. It was fortunate that the fascination and opportunities of the city continued to attract rural migrants, since without migration the cities would not have grown but died. Until the latter part of the 19th century, the Old English observation that “The city is the graveyard of countrymen” was all too accurate.

1 Manuel Castells, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach, Alan Sheridan (trans.), M.I.T. Press, Cambridge Mass., 1977.

2 Otis Dudley Duncan, “From Social System to Ecosystem,” Sociological Inquiry, 31:145, 1961.

3 See the discussion by John Logan, Robert Beauregard, and Herbert Gans in Community and Urban Sociology, Section Newsletter, American Sociological Association, Summer 1995, pp. 6-7.

4 Mark Gottdiener and Joe Feagan, “The Paradigm Shift in Urban Sociology,” Urban Affairs Quarterly, 24, 174, 1988.

5 Joe Feagan and Robert Parker, Building American Cities: The Real Estate Game, Prentice-Hall Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1990.

6 Lewis Mumford, The City in History, It’s Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects, Harcourt, Brace, and World, New York, 1961, p. 55.

7 Not everyone agrees with an implicit evolutionary typology such as the one used in this chapter. Bruce Trigger, for instance, strongly argues against an evolutionary approach in explaining the emergence and growth of cities, and states that “what seems to be required is a more piecemeal and institutional approach to complex societies,” Bruce Trigger, “Determinants of Urban Growth in Pre-industrial Societies,” in Peter Ucko, Ruth Tringham, and G. W. Dimbleby (eds.), Man, Settlement, and Urbanism, Schenkman, Cambridge, Mass., 1972, p. 576.

8 "Voices of the World," National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C., August 1999.

9 Jane Jacobs reverses the order presented here, suggesting that intensive agriculture was the result rather than the cause of cities. This theory suggests that population growth forced agricultural improvements. See Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities, Random House, New York, 1969.

10 Mumford, op. cit., p.10.

11 Ibid.

12 Kathleen Mary Kenyon, Archeology in the Holy Land, 3^ded., Praeger, New York, 1970; 4^th ed., Methuen, London, 1985.

13 Kent J. Flannery, “The Origins of Agriculture,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 2: 271-310, 1973.

14 E. Cecil Curwen and Gudmund Hatt, Plough and Pasture: The Early History of Farming, Collier Books, New York, 1961, p. 64.

15 Robert Braidwood, “The Agricultural Revolution,” Scientific American, September, 1960, p. 7.

16 Ray Huang, China: A Macro History, M.E. Sharpe, London, 1988.

17 John F. Ross, "First City in the New World," Smithsonian, August, 2002, pp. 56-64.

18 Robert Cooke, "Palace Found in Rain Forest," Los Angeles Times/ Washington Post News Service, September 8, 2000.

19 Colin Woodard, "Wrestling Prizes of the Maya from the Yucatan Jungle," Chronicle of Higher Education, October 20, 2000, p. A22.

20 National Geographic, op. cit., 1999.

21 V. Gordon Childe, What Happened in History, rev. ed., Penguin Books, New York, 1964, p.87.

22 Ibid., p.86

23 Amos H. Hawley, Urban Society, Ronald Press, New York, 1981, pp. 32-33.

24 Kingsley Davis, “The Origin and Growth of Urbanization in the World,” American Journal of Sociology, 60:430, March 1955.

25 Gerhard E. Lenski and Jean Lenski, Human Society: An Introduction to Marcosociology, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1987.

26 Robert M. Adams, “The Origin of Cities,” Scientific American, September, 1960, p. 7.

27 Herrlee Glessner Creel, The Birth of China: A Study of the Formative Period of Chinese Civilization, Reynal and Hitchcock, New York, 1937, p. 279.

28 Adams, op. cit., p. 9.

29 “Did Maya Tap Water Power?” Washington Post, Feb. 18, 1991, p. A3

30 Creel, The Birth of China, p. 279.

31 Adams, “The Origin of Cities,” p. 9.

32 V. Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,” Town Planning Review, 21: 4-7, 1950.

33 Stuart Piggot, “The Role of the City in Ancient Civilization,” in Robert Moor Fisher (ed.), The Metropolis in Modern Life, Russel and Russel, New York, 1955.

Chapter 2: Emergence of Cities

INTRODUCTION

Agricultural Revolution