“A city is more than a place in space, it is a
drama in time.”
- Patrick Geddes, first urban planner, Cities
in Evolution (1915)
In the year 1800, only 3% of the world population lived in
cities. Today there are 4,000 large
cities worldwide. By 2030, it is predicted that 60% of us will live in cities—and
some very large ones. The 33 megacities,
with 10 million or more, (UN, 2018), are growing, many in Asia. The great majority of human beings, 75-85% of
the populations of North America and Western Europe, now live in major cities
and their metroplex extensions, as does half the world population. Rome
passed the one-million mark by the end of the first century BC, then declined
when the Western Empire’s capital moved to Ravenna in 402 AD.
By 1850 London became the first city after antiquity to
attain a population of a million; fifty years later, in 1900, Greater London had
5 million people.
60,000 years ago, modern humans had populated Europe. The Holocene period saw agriculture and
domesticated animals—and the appearance of Jericho, an ongoing small walled
settlement on the West Bank that dates to 9000 BC. Around
5000 BC, people began to live together in formal groups with work and social
roles in permanent settlements—like Athens in Greece, and Byblos in Lebanon. In Serbia, Belgrade remains one of Europe’s
oldest cities, with settlements back to the Neolithic in 7000 BC. Plovdiv, Bulgaria is nearly as old, back to
6000 BC. Towns and cities began to form the beginnings of urbanity, predating
the Bronze Age back to the Neolithic.
A social psychology of urbanity developed as the mindset
that we now recognize as civilized thought and behavior. The proximity principle – the propinquity
effect that contributes to attraction between people--also requires moderation
of behavior, voice and speech, manners, working and leisure behavior—like
sports--and the management of complex networks of people, activities, and
beliefs. Religious affiliation is an
example of a continuously self-reinforcing colleagueship that builds community
and subcultures. But group continuity is
also a lightning rod for conflicts between groups. Clashes between and among Christian, Moslem,
and Jew, and between their many sects, date from their founding and are ongoing
global forces.
The practice of group living allowed specialized knowledge that
led to the metamorphosis of small settlements into larger and larger groups,
cities, and regional civilizations with lasting influence on human development. As the historian Jacob Bronowski noted in The
Ascent of Man, agriculture and the settled way of life engendered “a form
of human harmony which was to bear fruit into the far future: the origin of the
city.” In the Mesopotamian world of Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, the first networked
urbanization occurred among city-states, leaving the largest set of ancient
artifacts, the invention of writing, the wheel, the 60-based counting system,
and large-scale agriculture. In the
Indus Valley developed water management and drainage, harvesting routines, and
town planning. Egypt produced the
pyramids, astronomy for horticulture, and engineering. On the Yucatan Peninsula, the Mayan world evolved
astronomy and calendars, large-scale agriculture, and engraved stone
architecture. All these developments
called for management science. Cities
are the curators of human knowledge and the care and feeding of that knowledge—the
art and science of knowledge preservation and transmission.
The city is the original and ultimate mixed-media creation
including augmented reality, arts and architecture, customs and etiquette,
words and images, ancient craft and state-of-the- art technology, life and art. Every city is a multi-layered reality that
presents with novelty and dynamism on one hand, as well as established
structural, infrastructural, and natural or peri-natural features on the other. Trees, parks, hillsides, mountain, field, beach
and ocean backdrops –these landscapes are there as staging, folded into the
city’s design as ornamentation. The
city’s setting changes the way we look at nature as aesthetics, a kind of
design operating ancillary to streets, monuments, buildings, open spaces, and
the city profile, the skyline. These are
in constant flux.
Cities are complex permanent exhibits that, like museums and
theme parks, invite us back by steadily updating their content and
presentation. Commercially, we see this
everywhere, from supermarket shelves to the showcase windows of
Tiffany’s and the bakery case at Starbucks.
The human pageantry—the population who live in and use the site--is the
theatrical vitality that makes everything come alive as what Disney Imagineers call
“streetmosphere,” the cityscape of human drama. Just by sheer numbers alone, the
myriad factors that make up a city can be combined and recombined to
recapitulate the history of the world and prefigure the future as a design for
living. Along with their human
inhabitants, cities showcase diversity across many categories—as fashion,
music, food, literature, the arts, industry, language, religion, and
learning. This diversity extended beyond
the arts in the form of intermarriage between groups, mixing the gene pool and
raising opportunities for new adaptations that hastened evolutionary
advantage.
10,000 years ago, agriculture as a revolutionary way of life
for communities made cities possible, as did language, writing, money, science,
and universal religion – forming the first shared cultural platform that would
make living together possible. The
world’s oldest surviving city is, by a margin of millennia, Damascus in Iraq, the first sizeable city of
2 million still standing (Jericho, which may be the first town, dating from 9000
BC, is a small settlement of 20,000 today).
Just as agriculture at a distance (the “hinterlands”) made the city
possible, high and mobile tech have made of the megacity the smart and super-extended
city-state, like Singapore or Dubai. From
their origins as protective fortresses that were adaptable as well as livable, cities
have blossomed into the megastructures we know today that carry forward the
cultural mandate to evolve our thinking and expression.
As cities began to proliferate, they promoted large-scale
cooperation, density, and diversity, and role-identity versus just personality
differences between citizens. From 4000
BC the urban lifestyle has given us 6,000 years of living with the stressors of
hierarchy, activity schedules matched to commerce, worship, sociability, industry
and knowledge work, and seasonal events, sports culture, and the natural strain
of strangers stressing each other out by constant needs to be mind-readers, wary
and watchful about the behavior and motives of people with different
agendas. Unlike small Stone Age village
life, cities mean daily contact with strangers, people who serve very contained
work roles, and a 24-hour media presence —with whom we have no ongoing personal
relationship but a steady psychological one.
The urban way of life kicked off networking, social
striving, and multiple associations, and constant change as an expected part of
human existence, as well as placemaking, managerial and middle classes, and
consumerism as the “urban species” lifestyle (Monica L. Smith, Cities: The
First 6000 Years, 2019). Smith calls
cities “the first internet.”
