Cities: Historical development

• From first settlements to present day:

– Agricultural revolution
– Pre-industrial
– Industrial revolution
– Postmodern city
– Urban planet

First Industrial Postmodern Urban

settlements city city planet

Pacione (2009)
 Theories
• Hydraulic
– Based on irrigation – key/ important factor in
ancient cities
– Middle East
– Key person: Karl Wittfogel (1957)
– “need for large-scale water management required
centralised co-ordination and direction, which in
turn required concentrated settlement” (Pacione,
2009: 38).
(Pacione, 2009)
• Main characteristics:
– Agricultural concentration/ intensification
– Population concentration
– Labour division
– Cooperation (large scale, integration)
– Control/ power
Town

“institutions of centralised urban government and

large-scale irrigation grew side by side” (Pacione,
2009: 39).
(Pacione, 2009)
 Theories
• Economic
– Trade
– Administrative control
• Military
– Protection/ defence
– Specialisation
• Religious
– Power – religious control
– Contribution to transformation of society and thus
formation of cities (not only cause)
(Pacione, 2009)
• Not one cause for origins
• Rather complex change from nomads to urban
settlements
• WHERE?
– Mesopotamia +- 3500 BC
• Ur: 2300 BC – 2180 BC = capital Sumerian Empire
– Egypt +- 3300 BC
– Indus Valley +- 2500 BC
– Yellow River +- 1800 BC
– Mesoamerica (southern Mexico, Gutemala, Belize and
Honduras) +- 200 BC
(Pacione, 2009)

– Jericho
– Çatal Hüyük
– “So which came first, farming or cities?” (Fox and
Goodfellow, 2016: 36)
(Fox and Goodfellow, 2016)
• Greek cities +- 800 BC and diaspora from +- 750 BC
(colonisation)
• Roman Empire introduced cities/ town planning practices to
Western Europe
• Dark Age – Western Europe, late 9th C – lowest point for city
life
• Medieval towns – trade/ commerce
• Emergence of CAPITALISM
(Pacione, 2009)

• African cities
– Kingdom of Ghana, Cush prior to AD 1
– Jenne-Jeno 3rd C BC
– Aksum +- AD 100-600
– Great Zimbabwe +- AD 1000-1500
(Fox and Goodfellow, 2016)
 Capitalism
“An historically specific form of economic and
social organisation in which the direct producer,
for example a factory worker, is separated from
ownership of the means of production and the
product of his or her labour through the
transformation of labour power into a
commodity that is bought and sold in a market”
(Pacione, 2009: 675).
 3 phases of capitalism
1. competitive capitalism (end 16th C – end 19th C)
– “free-market competition between locally orientated businesses”
– “laissez-faire economic (and urban) development”
(Pacione, 2009: 4)
2. organised capitalism (20th C – WW2)
– Fordism
– mass production and consumption
– labour specialised
– increased government role/ intervention
3. advanced/ disorganised capitalism (post WW2 – present)
– shift to service provision
– flexible production
– globalisation
– transnational corporations
(Pacione, 2009)
 Industrial City
• 1500-1800 in Europe – early urban
development
• Industrial Revolution – +- 1750 onwards
(Britain)
• Technology, machinery, energy
• Population, culture, society
• 1750-1800: proto-industrialisation,
urbanisation
(Pacione, 2009)
 Industrial City
• 19th C – industrial capitalism
• Factories increased production, economies of
scale, output increased
• Labour
• Markets, services
• Cultural impacts: built environment and
institutions
• Power division: capitalist/ labour – impact on city
form social segregation
(Pacione, 2009)
 Industrial City
• Pressure on services and infrastructure
strained
• Social stratification and segregation
(Pacione, 2009)
London, a Pilgrimage. With illustrations by Gustave Dore.
William Blanchard, Gustave Doré (1872)

Source: Picard (2009)

Source: Picard (2009)
Source: Picard (2009)
“Photograph of
a Glasgow slum
by Thomas
Annan, 1868”
Source: Picard
(2009)
 City Models
• Burgess’ (1925) Concentric zone model
• Hoyt’s (1939) Sector model
• Harris and Ullman’s (1945) Mulitple nuclei
model
Burgess (1925)

Source: Burgess (1925: 51)

Source: Burgess (1925: 55)
Hoyt (1939)

Source: BBC (2023)

Harris and Ullman (1945)

Source: Wikipedia (2023)

 Postmodern City
• Post-industrialism
– Shift to services (from manufacturing)
– Focus on professionals
– Importance of research and development
– Impacts of technology
– Advanced technology and information systems
(Pacione, 2009)

• Soja (2001: 40) – six themes:

– “major explanatory forces”
– “social and spatial outcomes”
– “forms of reaction, regulation, and resistance”
 Soja’s (2001) six themes
• “Globalization of captial, labor, culture, and
information flows” (Soja, 2001: 40)
• “Post-Fordist economic restructuring” (Soja,
2001: 42)
• “Restructuring of urban form” (Soja, 2001: 42)
• “Restructuring the social order” (Soja, 2001: 43)
• “Carceral cities” (Soja, 2001: 44)
• “Simcities” (Soja, 2001: 45)
 Urban planet
• “regional urbanization”/ “regional-urban synthesis”
(Soja, 2015: 372, 380)
• “As networks of urban agglomerations, cohesive
regional economies have come to be seen as the
primary (but not sole) generative force behind all
economic development, technological innovation and
cultural creativity. In another twist derived mainly from
the work of Jane Jacobs (1969), this generative force
may go back more than 10,000 years to the origin of
cities and the development of full-scale agriculture.
The NR is built on these far-reaching premises and
promises” (Soja, 2015: 372).
• Blurring of boundaries
• “regional cities” (Soja, 2015: 375)
• American: Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay area,
Washington, DC, Chicago
• Europe: London, Berlin, Barcelona, Milan,
Randstad (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and
Utrecht), “‘Grand Region’” (Luxembourg, Belgium,
France, Germany) (Soja, 2015: 376)
• Africa: Gauteng “the first officially proclaimed
‘global city-region’” (Soja, 2015: 376)
• megaregion (>20 million): Shenzhen, Hong Kong,
Guangzhou (Pearl River Delta) = 120 million
• “planetary urbanization” (Soja, 2015: 377)
(Soja, 2015)
 Planetary urbanisation
• “Charted out is a variegated, center-less urbanization
(“the concentration - deconcentration- place
engagement simultaneity”) that encompasses multiple
connecting processes, notably uneven development,
transnational human movement, current modes of
production and communications, and on-the-ground
human negotiation of place emergent cultural forms. In
places, urbanization synchronously concentrates,
expands outward in all directions, and comes to
infiltrate the fabric of lived-in worlds in expected and
unexpected ways” (Wilson and Jonas, 2018: 1576).
• “important criticisms have been leveled at the concept,
notably, that it emanates a western-centric bias (Oswin,
2016), peripheralizes the realities of racialities, sexualities,
and gendered relations (Oswin, 2016), and embraces a
disconcertingly strong impulse to totalize (Derickson, 2015,
Ruddick, Peake, Tanyildiz, & Patrick, 2017). Nevertheless,
most agree that the concept offers some core building
blocks around which to construct and refine urban theory.
As Rossi (2017) notes, we may criticize planetary
urbanization, even be deeply suspicious of its specifics, but
its goal of problematizing understandings of urbanization
and formulating a flexible set of propositions to
comprehend this process are admirable” (Wilson and
Jonas, 2018: 1576).
• “the concept underscores the importance of
examining a notion of the urban rather than a
conception of the city, and in a generally
meaningful way” (Wilson and Jonas, 2018: 1577).
• Urbanisation – liminal/ transitional process
• Centreless, diversified conception of urbanisation
(Wilson and Jonas, 2018)
• “A shift away from the city as the default unit of analysis
in urban studies is one of the widely agreed-upon
advances brought about by the planetary urbanization
thesis. Yet academic critique of methodological cityism
has gained traction during a period when the city is not
only globally prominent through the “urban age”
discourse but has also been consolidated as a key scale
of policy action in multilateral agendas. Rather than
focusing on a new theory-policy disjuncture, this
intervention identifies potentially productive tensions
between aspects of the planetary urbanization and
urban age theses. We argue that: (1) inclusion of the
experiences of Southern cities in the formulation of
multilateral urban agendas are openings to
consideration of urban processes that extend well
beyond the city; (2) the city as an established locus of
ground-level political action provides a window onto the
role of human dynamics in extended geographies of
urbanization” (Martinez et al., 2021: 1011).
Temporal perspective of urbanisation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW_cCayb
HL8
(Metrocosm, 2016)
 References and further reading
• BBC. 2023. Studying changes of a major UK city - London. Available from:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z3h7sg8/revision/2 [Accessed 25 July
2023].
• Beall, J. and Fox, S. 2009. Cities and development. Oxon: Routledge. (Chapter
2).
• Burgess, E.W. 1925. The growth of the city: An introduction to a research
project. In: Park, R.E., Burgess, E.W. and McKenzie, R.D. The city. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press. pp. 47-62. Available from:
http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1050993.files/2-15%20-
%20Ernest%20Burgess%20-%20The%20growth%20of%20the%20City.pdf
[Accessed 13 August 2015].
• Fox, S. and Goodfellow, T. 2016. Cities and development. Second edition.
London: Routledge. (Chapter 2).
• Jonas, A.E.G., McCann, E. and Thomas, M. 2015. Urban geography: A critical
introduction. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. (Chapter 1).
• Martinez, R., Bunnell, T. and Acuto, M. 2021. Productive tensions? The “city”
across geographies of planetary urbanization and the urban age. Urban
Geography, 42(7): 1011-1022.
 References and further reading
• Metrocosm. 2016. Visualizing the History of World Urbanization, 3700 BC to
2000 AD. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW_cCaybHL8
[Accessed 4 August 2023].
• Pacione, M. 2009. Urban geography: A global perspective. Third edition.
London: Routledge. (Chapters 1, 3, 7).
• Picard, L. 2009. The built environment. British Library. Available from:
http://www.bl.uk/victorian-britain/articles/the-built-environment [Accessed
25 July 2023].
• Soja, E. 2015. Accentuate the regional. International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research, 39(2): 372-381.
• Soja, E. 2001. Exploring the postmetropolis. In: Minca, C. (ed.). Postmodern
geography: Theory and praxis. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 37-56.
• Wikipedia. 2023. Multiple nuclei model. Wikipedia. Available from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_nuclei_model [Accessed 25 July
2023].
• Wilson, D. and Jonas, A.E.G. 2018. Planetary urbanization: New perspectives
on the debate. Urban Geography, 39(10): 1576-1580.