In general usage the term city is applied to any large and relatively dense concentration of population where the inhabitants are engaged primarily in nonagricultural occupations. Legal definitions are more specific. In the United States a city is an incorporated municipality; the city's boundaries and powers of self-government are set forth in a charter from the state in which it is located. In Great Britain a city is usually a town or borough with a royal charter and one that has been, or still is, the see of a bishop. HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF CITIES In the 20th century the world has become more and more urbanized. Large numbers of people have left the countryside; in the United States and some countries of Western Europe, more than 75 percent of the population live in urban areas. Throughout most of history, however, the world was predominantly rural. People lived on the land and depended on what the land could provide for food and shelter. Ancient Cities Cities did not become possible until humans were able to produce more than they consumed and had found ways of storing the surplus. The earliest permanent settlements were in the alluvial plains of the Nile in Egypt, the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Indus in India, and the Yangtze and Hwang Ho in China. It was necessary to learn how to store and preserve food in order to provision large numbers of people living close together and away from the fields. The ruins of ancient palaces in Crete, one of the earliest civilizations, have large storage rooms with vessels for keeping oil. Cities resulted from specialization. The earliest cities were inhabited by officials and priests, who administered empires and invoked the gods. Around them in the city lived the lower classes of craftspersons, artisans, and laborers. The inhabitants of the city were supported by the labor of those outside it who worked on the land. Another reason for the development of the city was defense. In ancient Greece, the typical \Tcity-state\t was built on an elevated place called an acropolis, surrounded by fortifications. Since it depended on the hinterland for supplies, the city had to be strong enough to dominate and defend this area against enemies. From its walled safety the city sent out soldiers, who kept order in the hinterland and defended it from roving marauders and from incursions by other city-states. Cities grew up at the intersections of trade routes, at harbors, and at the mouths of rivers with easy access to the sea. \TAthens\t, \TRome\t, \TAlexandria\t, and \TCarthage\t were near the sea. \TMecca\t, \TDamascus\t, and \TSamarkand\t were inland cities located on caravan routes. The trading function has been important for cities throughout history. All the major cities of the United States, including the cities of the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, began as centers of trade. The same is true of \TLondon\t, \TVienna\t, \TStockholm\t, \TIstanbul\t, \TBombay\t, \THong Kong\t, and \TSingapore\t. Medieval Cities In the early Middle Ages the European towns almost ceased to exist. The Muslim conquest of North Africa and Spain deprived Europe of most of the commerce that had gone through Mediterranean ports. When commerce began to revive after the 10th century, the towns grew into trading and manufacturing centers. The typical medieval town formed around a castle or walled settlement. The newer inhabitants, mainly merchants and artisans, established their quarters outside the walls and eventually came to dominate the town. The townspeople then erected new walls and fortifications, sometimes a succession of them as the town grew. Fortifications were needed when roving bands pillaged the countryside; plunder was then the primary goal of war. The city gates were closed at night and guarded. Citizens who returned late did so at their peril, and no one who did not belong was allowed in. These fortifications can still be seen in some European cities: \TCarcassonne\t in France, for example, and the Italian cities of \TSiena\t, Lucca, and San Gimignano. The economic hub of the city was the marketplace, which often faced the cathedral or major church. Most medieval cities were dominated by the spires of a Gothic church, many of which remain today. The church, symbolizing the religious function of the city, also served as physical organizer of its form and as the center of the city's life. The later medieval city was also a cultural and educational center. \TBologna\t, \TPadua\t, \TParis\t, and Vienna were noted for their universities. The medieval city was not large, by either ancient or modern standards. Rome at its height under the empire is estimated to have had perhaps 800,000 inhabitants, and Carthage not more than 300,000. Medieval cities rarely attained populations as large as 50,000. Among the exceptions were the larger Italian cities such as \TVenice\t, \TFlorence\t, \TMilan\t, \TNaples\t, and \TGenoa\t. Paris may have had 200,000 inhabitants in the 14th century, but \TFrankfurt am Main\t and \TBasel\t in 1450 had only about 8,000, \TNuremberg\t 20,000, Louvain 25,000, and \TBrussels\t 40,000. It was usually a half-hour walk from the center to the outskirts of a typical city. Because transportation was limited to horses or horse-drawn carts, cities had to be small and compact. To accommodate the growing populations, houses were built close together in rows, two or three stories high. The streets were rarely paved and therefore turned into muddy tracks in bad weather. The Industrial City The \TIndustrial Revolution\t transformed the city. With its concentration of workers and its access to trade, the city was the natural place to locate factories. Villages turned into towns, and towns multiplied in size. In Britain, where the Industrial Revolution began in the latter part of the 18th century, the number of towns of 5,000 inhabitants or more increased from 106 in 1801 to 265 in 1851, and to 622 by 1891. Nearly 20 million people lived in urban districts of 5,000 or more by 1891. People came in large numbers from the countryside to work in the factories and to live in the cheap, jerry-built housing that was constructed near the new industrial sites. The sanitary conditions and water supplies of these industrial towns were dismally inadequate, and epidemics of typhoid, cholera, and dysentery were frequent. Tuberculosis was a common cause of death. Industrialization spread to Europe and America during the 19th century. In the United States, by 1890, one-third of the population lived in towns. In the decade from 1880 to 1890, the number of U.S. cities of 45,000-75,000 increased from 23 to 39. \TChicago\t doubled in size during that decade; \TDetroit\t, \TMilwaukee\t, \TColumbus\t, and \TCleveland\t grew by 80 percent. Industrialization in the United States coincided with heavy immigration from Europe, and by 1890 one-fifth of the inhabitants of the cities were foreign-born. In the Northeast more than half the population lived in towns of more than 4,000 people. Although industrialization transformed the cities of Europe, it furnished the very basis of urban development in America. The expansion of the city in the industrial era was made possible by improvements in transportation. The building of canals, followed by the great railroad boom in the latter part of the 19th century, enabled the industrial towns to draw their materials from great distances. In the early cities, workers had to live within walking distance of their place of employment, and the city itself was limited in size to the distance a person could cover on foot. In the 19th century, public transportation enabled a somewhat greater dispersion of the population away from the center, although in most industrial towns workers still lived close to the factories. Trolley lines had been established in 300 U.S. cities by 1886. Cities began to spread in star-shaped patterns along streetcar lines and suburban railroads. The major effect of industrialization on the city in the 19th century, however, was to destroy the physical form inherited from the past. In place of the old, narrow, winding streets, the industrial city was characterized by more or less uniform rectangular blocks that could be laid out wherever there was an open space. The factory and the slum became the most conspicuous features. By the end of the 19th century many U.S. cities had paved the main streets. Since most of these cities were located on rivers or harbors, it was necessary to build bridges as the cities grew. The \TBrooklyn Bridge\t, completed in 1883, was an engineering achievement that ushered in a period of municipal bridge building. But traffic congestion continued to be a major problem. Elevated railroads were built in \TNew York\t, Chicago, \TKansas City\t, \TBoston\t, and other cities and were later followed by subways. By 1880, 138 telephone exchanges were operating in U.S. cities. Electric lighting began to replace kerosene and gas. The development of plumbing and municipal sewage systems made the cities more habitable, although the congestion, pollution, and noise continued to increase. THE CONTEMPORARY CITY The contemporary U.S. city differs greatly from both the old industrial city and the traditional city of Europe. Growth of the Suburbs In the United States the widespread use of the automobile has acted as a centrifugal force, dispersing population from the central city outward into the suburbs and even beyond. Another form of transportation, the elevator, has had the opposite effect of concentrating workers into skyscraper office buildings in the heart of the city. Consequently there is a great tidal surge of humanity into the city in the morning and out again at night. At noon the business area hums with activity, but at night and on weekends it takes on the appearance of a ghost town. The evolution of the private car has made a highly mobile life possible for nearly everyone, particularly for those who live in the expanding suburbs. The mass production of cars enabled most workers to own them, even if secondhand, and by midcentury the car had become a necessary article of life. In 1975 there was one car for every two people in the United States. The expansion of the suburbs was also fostered by governmental policies that had consequences not foreseen by their initiators. The federal income tax was used as a lever to encourage home ownership by permitting homeowners to deduct the interest on mortgage loans from their taxable incomes. Other laws enabled middle-income families to obtain mortgages at relatively easy terms. Families moved outward into a world of lawns, privacy, open space, and new schools. By the 1970s most cities were surrounded by residential satellites over which they had no political control. While the suburbs depended in many ways on the city for their existence, they had little interest in the city's problems. The former city residents were replaced by lower-income people who migrated from the countryside, particularly from the South. The city became increasingly the home of the very poor, many of them drawn there because of its public welfare institutions. Thus the tax revenues of the cities decreased while the expenditures increased. The difficulties of the cities were aggravated by the departure of industry. No longer tied to rail and water transportation and drawn by lower rentals, and in some cases cheaper labor costs, light industry could move out to the suburbs and even into the countryside. THE RISE OF MEGALOPOLIS The dispersal of urban areas led to a new type of social entity that was not circumscribed by the political boundaries of the city. In the United States it was called the metropolitan area and consisted of a city and its adjacent suburbs. The people who lived in a metropolitan area often thought of it as a single city, although they might in fact be living 10 or 20 miles beyond the city boundaries. For example, residents of Winnetka, Ill., usually thought of themselves as Chicagoans, just as inhabitants of Bucks County were at heart Philadelphians. Seen from an airplane, the metropolitan area is indeed a single urban entity. In the northeastern United States some metropolitan areas constitute one continuous urban belt extending from Boston to \TWashington, D.C\t., over 960 km (about 600 mi) long and about 50 to 160 km (30 to 100 mi) wide. About 40 million people live in this "Boswash" area. Similar areas seem to be emerging in California, around the Great Lakes in Illinois and Indiana, in England (London and the Midlands), in the \TRuhr\t basin of Germany, and in the \TTokyo\t-\TOsaka\t region of Japan. European cities have grown more gradually than those of the United States, and no wholesale flight to the suburbs has occurred. Many people prefer to live in the central cities or in "new towns" developed by government planning. But even European cities suffer from the traffic congestion that is endemic in other large cities of the world. Nowhere is this congestion greater than in Tokyo-Osaka, where highways raised on concrete pillars weave above the closely packed houses. Some cities in Asia and Latin America have grown to enormous size even though the countries as a whole are still largely rural. In fact, the urban population of poor countries now equals or exceeds that of the industrialized countries. \TMexico City\t has about 12 million people, and \TShanghai\t about 10 million. Other large cities such as Bombay, \TCairo\t, \TCalcutta\t, \TJakarta\t, and \TManila\t, to name only a few, are growing at rapid rates. These cities tend to grow from the outside rather than the inside; that is, the migrants from rural areas settle on the periphery rather than in the central cities. Shantytowns (or bidonvilles as the French call them), built out of oil drums and corrugated metal sheets, surround many cities in developing countries. In 1977 the Argentine government began to demolish ramshackle dwellings on the outskirts of \TBuenos Aires\t where half a million Bolivians had settled, drawn there in the vain hope of employment. URBAN RENEWAL IN THE UNITED STATES The vast and unplanned growth of many cities has created problems that are beyond the capacity of the cities themselves to handle. In the larger U.S. cities, one often finds an \Tinner city\t of poverty, inhabited by masses of people who are supported by public welfare and who suffer from unemployment, inadequate housing, poor schools, and a general exclusion from the mainstream of American life. Escape from the inner city is difficult because economically and socially it constitutes a different world from the rest of the city and the suburbs. Even for those who might hope to find jobs in the expanding suburbs, migration is difficult because low-income housing is generally lacking there. The Need for Metropolitan Government Some urban areas, such as those of \TMiami\t, Fla., and \TMinneapolis\t-ST. \TPaul\t, Minn., have developed governmental bodies that are capable of dealing with some of the problems confronting the cities and their satellite towns. But in most urban areas an effective approach to the problems of the metropolis is hampered by the lack of metropolitan governments. For example, New York City's metropolitan area lies in the states of New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Chicago's lies in Illinois and Indiana, and Detroit's covers parts of two counties. The metropolitan area of Boston is made up of 78 cities and towns, each with its own administration. Much the same is true of other large urban areas in the United States. Federal Efforts The U.S. government has made a number of attempts to help the cities address their problems. The Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954 were directed toward the replanning and rebuilding of blighted areas in central cities. Under them federal money was allotted to cities that created renewal agencies and made their own plans. The money was used to buy and assemble tracts of land and demolish the old buildings on them. These tracts were then resold to developers who entered competitive bids. Each developer had to submit a proposal that was economically feasible, would have community participation and support, and met the agency's design standards. Many cities created urban renewal authorities and embarked on large projects. Some, notably Philadelphia and Boston, had considerable success in renewing their central city areas. Others were unable to complete the programs they started: the land was cleared, but no developers could be found. Often the urban renewal agencies created consternation by acquiring land and buildings through their power of eminent domain from people who did not want to move. Some black leaders dubbed it the "Negro Removal Program," charging that it cleared out the slum dwellers and replaced them with middle-income people. Other federal programs followed, aimed at improving conditions in the cities. The extent to which they fell short was demonstrated by \Trace riots\t, large-scale arson, and looting in the slums of a number of cities in the mid-1960s. Ten years later, the burned-out areas in Chicago, Detroit, Washington, and other cities had not yet been rebuilt. In the meantime, additional decay had occurred in areas such as the South Bronx in New York City, which in the late 1970s became a symbol of urban blight. In March 1978 President Jimmy Carter sent to Congress a program for urban recovery that was a complex set of proposals aimed at helping the cities without spending much more money on them. Many existing federal programs were to be changed to make them more sensitive to urban needs; private business would be offered incentives to locate in the cities and to hire the chronically unemployed; federal \Trevenue-sharing\t funds would go directly to the cities rather than to the states. The proposals were regarded by urban specialists as at best a small step toward restoring the health of U.S. cities. NEW TOWNS Advocates of city planning, faced with the insuperable problems of existing cities, have often turned to designing \Tnew towns\t. They have had their greatest success in England, where Sir Ebenezer Howard began the \Tgarden city\t movement at the turn of the century. This movement tried to show that workers could be housed just as easily in a pleasant environment surrounded by green areas as in the traditional slums. Two early garden cities were Letchworth (1903) and Welwyn Garden City (1920). After World War II the British built 28 new towns, many having their own industries and all carefully planned. These new towns were able to house millions of people near Greater London, \TManchester\t, \TBirmingham\t, and other urban-industrial areas. They were accompanied by much regional planning in an effort to preserve a balance between new industry and the environment. France developed a national plan that kept the Paris region from being strangled by rapid growth in the 1950s and 1960s. Half a dozen new towns were developed in the areas around Paris, \TGrenoble\t, and \TRouen\t. In the United States the new towns of Reston, Va., and Columbia, Md., were begun in the 1960s. These were conceived as self-sufficient communities. In addition, real estate developers put up many satellite towns for upper-middle-income people, such as Irvine near \TLos Angeles\t, Jonathan near Minneapolis, and Park Forest near Chicago, but these offered no solution to the chronic problems of the metropolitan areas. The federal Urban Growth and New Community Development Act (1970) provided loan guarantees for developers of new towns if they included a certain amount of low-income housing. But by 1978 all 13 of the sponsored projects had failed and had been placed in receivership. LIFE IN LARGE CITIES Aristotle wrote that "people come to the city to find safety and happiness, to lead the good life." One attraction of the city is the greater number of choices it offers residents in work, recreation, and social contacts. Cultural and recreational facilities have historically been part of every city, with parks, green areas, and open spaces designed for people's use and enjoyment. Festivals and fairs, parades, and celebrations have always attracted people to cities, and have contributed to the sense of community of those who live in them. In Europe, even provincial cities have had their theaters, opera houses, and museums. In the United States until recent years, cultural life was heavily concentrated in the very largest cities such as New York, Chicago, and \TSan Francisco\t, but many medium-sized cities now have resident theater groups and even symphony orchestras. The freedom afforded the city dweller has its costs. Laws and police control human behavior in the city, rather than the customs and folkways of rural life. The opportunities for such deviant behavior as crime, alcoholism, and drug abuse are much greater in the city. On the one hand, the city makes available the best of human culture--from restaurants and theaters to museums, art galleries, symphony orchestras, and great universities. On the other hand, it spawns juvenile delinquency, prostitution, rape, murder, muggings, suicides, and mental breakdowns. A city is more than an agglomeration of people. Within the city many people live in neighborhoods or communities that resemble small towns, where they have families, friends, and relatives. The ethnic neighborhoods of U.S. cities are well-known: the Little Italys, the Chinatowns, and the enclaves where people of Central European or Baltic origin have put down roots. In London, the Notting Hill area has been settled by blacks from the West Indies. French cities have their Algerian quarters. One hope for the city lies in the preservation and strengthening of the sense of community in such neighborhoods, both ethnic and nonethnic. In 1976 the British government announced that more emphasis would be given to renovating run-down urban housing rather than demolishing whole areas and rebuilding them. Urbanization seems to be an inevitable part of modernization. Toward the end of the 20th century the world's fastest growing urban areas were in developing countries, which were also experiencing the greatest overall population increases. In the Western Hemisphere, Mexico City and Sao Paulo showed the most explosive growth. Other burgeoning Third World centers, with populations straining resources, include Calcutta, Bombay, Cairo, and \TLagos\t. In contrast, many large cities in the developed world are scarcely growing; some are losing population. The urban areas of most developing countries show a stark juxtaposition of modern, Western technology and architecture with traditional customs and styles of living. One of the principal problems of developing countries is that their cities grow faster than their capacity to provide the basic necessities of life, and much of their working population is either unemployed or underemployed. Franziska P. Hosken Bibliography: Bottles, Scott L., Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of a Modern City (1987); Brunn, S., and Williams, J., Cities of the World (1983); Ewers, H. J., et al., eds., The Future of the Metropolis (1987); Fishman, Robert, Urban Utopias of the Twentieth Century (1977); Fox, Richard G., Urban Anthropology (1977); Gillette, H., Jr., and Miller, Z. L., eds., American Urbanization: A Historiographical Review (1987); Gottdiener, M., ed., Cities in Stress (1986); Hibbert, Christopher, Cities and Civilizations (1986); Hosken, F. P., The Functions of Cities (1973); Jacobs, Jane, Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1985) and The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961); Mackay, D. A., The Building of Manhattan (1987); Miskimin, Harry A., et al., The Medieval City (1977); Mumford, Lewis, The City in History (1961; repr. 1966); Mundy, J. H., and Riesenberg, P., The Medieval Town (1979); Squires, G. C., Chicago: Race, Class, and the Response tp Urban Decline (1987); Ward, Barbara, The Home of Man (1976); Whyte, W. H., City: Recovering the Center (1989). See also: \Tfinance, state and local\t; \Tmunicipal government\t; \Turban anthropology\t; \Turban planning\t.