A big city, or metropolis, is usually accompanied by a subcity; for example, Aurora, Colorado is a subcity of Denver, Colorado. Such cities also contain large amounts of urban sprawl, creating large amounts of business commuters. Once a city sprawls far enough to reach another city, this region can be deemed a megalopolis, or a cluster of urban areas. There is currently insufficient evidence to assert what conditions in world history spawned the first true cities. Theorists, however, have offered arguments for what the right conditions might have been and have identified some basic mechanisms that might have been the important driving forces. The conventional materialist perspective holds that cities first formed after the Neolithic revolution. The Neolithic revolution brought agriculture, which made denser human populations possible, thereby supporting city development (Bairoch 1988, p.�3-4). The advent of farming encouraged hunter-gatherers to abandon nomadic lifestyles and to choose to settle near others who lived off of agricultural production. The increased population density encouraged by farming and the increased output of food per unit of land, created conditions that seem more suitable for city-like activities. In his book, “Cities and Economic Development,” Paul Bairoch takes up this position as he provides a seemingly straightforward argument, which makes agricultural activity appear necessary before true cities can form. According to Vere Gordon Childe, for a settlement to qualify as a city, it must have enough surplus of raw materials to support trade (Pacione 2001, p.�16). Bairoch points out that, due to sparse population densities that would have persisted in pre-Neolithic, hunter-gatherer societies, the amount of land that would be required to produce enough food for subsistence and trade for a large population would make it impossible to control the flow of trade. To illustrate this point, Bairoch offers “Western Europe during the pre-Neolithic, [where] the density must have been less than 0.1 person per square kilometer”, (Bairoch 1988, p.�13) as an example. Using this population density as a base for calculation, and allotting 10% of food towards surplus for trade and assuming that there is no farming taking place among the city dwellers, he calculates that “in order to maintain a city with a population of 1,000, and without taking the cost of transportation into account, an area of 100,000 square kilometers would have been required. When the cost of transportation is taken into account, the figure rises to 200,000 square kilometers..." (Bairoch 1988, p.�13). Bairoch noted that 200,000 square kilometers is roughly the size of Great Britain. In her book “The Economy of Cities,” Jane Jacobs makes the controversial claim that cities saw the birth of agriculture. Jacobs does not lend her theory to any strict definition of a city, but her account suggestively contrasts what could only be thought of as primitive city-like activity to the activity occurring in neighboring hunter-gatherer settlements. To argue that cities came first, Jacobs offers a fictitious scenario where a valued natural resource leads to primitive economic activity that eventually creates conditions for the discovery of grain culture. Jacobs calls the imaginary city New Obsidian, where a stock of obsidian is controlled and traded with neighboring hunting groups. Those that do not control the stock demand the obsidian, so hunters travel great distances to barter what they have. Hunters value obsidian because “[o]bsidian makes the sharpest tools to be had" (Jacobs 1969, p.�23). Hunters arrive with live animals and produce, providing New Obsidian with food imports. When New Obsidians want goods that they do not have access to at their settlement, they take the obsidian as a currency to other settlements for trade. This basic economic activity turns the little city into a sort of “depot” where, in addition to exporting obsidian, a service of obtaining, handling and trading of goods that are brought in from elsewhere are made available for secondary customers. This activity brings more people to the center as jobs are created and goods are being traded. Among the goods traded are seeds of all different sorts and they are stored in unprecedented combinations. In various ways, some accidental, the seeds are sown, and the variation in yields among the different types of seeds are readily observed, more readily than they would in the wild. The seeds that yield the most grain are noticed and trading them begins to occur within the city. Owing to this local dealing, New Obsidians find that their grain yields are the best and for the first time “the selection becomes deliberate and conscious. The choices made now are purposeful, and they are made among various strains of already cultivated crosses, and their crosses, mutants and hybrids (Jacobs 1969, p.�23). The new way of producing food allows for food surplus and the surplus is offset by the population increase that results from an increase in labor that the new production method has created. The new source of food allows New Obsidian to switch its imports from mostly food, to mostly other materials that neighboring settlements are rich in, but could not barter with before. The craftsman that develop in New Obsidian make good use of the explosion of the new material imports and the work to be done increases rapidly along with the population as neighboring settlements are absorbed by the city activities. Older cities appear to be jumbled together, seemingly without a structural plan. This quality is a legacy of earlier unplanned or organic development, and is often perceived by today's tourists to be picturesque. In contrast, cities founded after the advent of the automobile and planned accordingly tend to have expansive boulevards impractical to navigate on foot. Modern city planning has seen many different schemes for how a city should look. The most commonly seen pattern is the grid, favoured by the Romans, almost a rule in parts of the New World, and used for thousands of years in China. Derry was the first ever planned city in Ireland, begun in 1613, with the walls being completed five years later. The central diamond within a walled city with four gates was thought to be a good design for defence. The grid pattern chosen was widely copied in the colonies of British North America. However, the grid has been around for far longer than the British Empire. The Ancient Greeks often gave their colonies around the Mediterranean a grid plan. One of the best examples is the city of Priene. This city even had its different districts, much like modern city planning today. Fifteen centuries earlier the Indus Valley Civilization was using grids in such cities as Mohenjo-Daro. Also in Medieval times we see a preference for linear planning. Good examples are the cities established in the south of France by various rulers and city expansions in old Dutch and Flemish cities. Other forms may include a radial structure in which main roads converge on a central point, often the effect of successive growth over long time with concentric traces of town walls and citadels - recently supplemented by ring-roads that take traffic around the edge of a town. Many Dutch cities are structured this way: a central square surrounded by concentric canals. Every city expansion would imply a new circle (canals + town walls). In cities like Amsterdam and Haarlem, and elsewhere, such as in Moscow, this pattern is still clearly visible. Towns and cities have a long history, although opinions vary on whether any particular ancient settlement can be considered to be a city. Cities formed as central places of trade for the benefit of the members living there. Benefits include reduced transport costs, exchange of ideas, sharing of natural resources, and later in their development, ameneties such as running water and sewage disposal. The first true towns are sometimes considered to be large settlements where the inhabitants were no longer simply farmers of the surrounding area, but began to take on specialized occupations, and where trade, food storage and power was centralized. In 1950 Gordon Childe attempted to define a historic city with 10 general metrics[1]. These are: One characteristic that can be used to distinguish a small city from a large town is organized government. A town accomplishes common goals through informal agreements between neighbors or the leadership of a chief. A city has professional administrators, regulations, and some form of taxation (food and other necessities or means to trade for them) to feed the government workers. The governments may be based on heredity, religion, military power, work projects (such as canal building), food distribution, land ownership, agriculture, commerce, manufacturing, finance, or a combination of those. Societies that live in cities are often called civilizations. A city can also be defined as an absence of physical space between people and firms. By Gordon Childe's definition, the first cities we know of were located in Mesopotamia, such as Eridu, Uruk, and Ur, and in Egypt along the Nile, the Indus Valley Civilization and China. Before this time it was rare for settlements to reach significant size, although there were exceptions such as Jericho, Çatalhöyük and Mehrgarh. Among the early cities, Mohenjo-daro of the Indus Valley Civilization was one of the largest, with an estimated population of 41,250,[2] as well as one of the most developed in many ways, as it was the first to use urban planning, municipal governments, grid plans, drainage, flush toilets, urban sanitation systems, and sewage systems. The growth of the population of ancient civilizations, the formation of ancient empires concentrating political power, and the growth in commerce and manufacturing led to ever greater capital cities and centres of commerce and industry, with Alexandria, Antioch and Seleucia of the Hellenistic civilization, Pataliputra (now Patna) in India, Chang'an (now Xi'an) in China, Carthage, ancient Rome, its eastern successor Constantinople (later Istanbul), and successive Chinese, Indian and Muslim capitals approaching or exceeding the half-million population level. It is estimated that ancient Rome had a population of about a million people by the end of the first century BC, after growing continually during the 3rd, 2nd, and 1st centuries BCE.[3] And it is generally considered the largest city before 19th century London.[4] Alexandria's population was also close to Rome's population at around the same time, the historian Rostovtzeff estimates a total population close to a million based on a census dated from 32 CE that counted 180,000 adult male citizens in Alexandria.[5] Similar administrative, commercial, industrial and ceremonial centres emerged in other areas, most notably Baghdad, which to some urban historians, later became the first city to exceed a population of one million by the 8th century instead of Rome. During the European Middle Ages, a town was as much a political entity as a collection of houses. City residence brought freedom from customary rural obligations to lord and community: "Stadtluft macht frei" ("City air makes you free") was a saying in Germany. In Continental Europe cities with a legislature of their own were not unheard of, the laws for towns as a rule other than for the countryside, the lord of a town often being another than for surrounding land. In the Holy Roman Empire some cities had no other lord than the emperor. In Italy, Medieval communes had quite a statelike power. In exceptional cases like Venice, Genoa or Lübeck, cities themselves became powerful states, sometimes taking surrounding areas under their control or establishing extensive maritime empires. Similar phenomena existed elsewhere, as in the case of Sakai, which enjoyed a considerable autonomy in late medieval Japan. While the city-states, or poleis, of the Mediterranean and Baltic Sea languished from the 16th century, Europe's larger capitals benefited from the growth of commerce following the emergence of an Atlantic trade. By the late 18th century, London had become the largest city in the world with a population of over a million, while Paris rivaled the well-developed regionally-traditional capital cities of Baghdad, Beijing, Istanbul and Kyoto. During the Spanish colonization of the Americas the old Roman city concept was extensively used. Cities were founded in the middle of the newly conquered territories, and were bound to several laws about administration, finances and urbanism. Most towns remained far smaller places, so that in 1500 only some two dozen places in the world contained more than 100,000 inhabitants: as late as 1700 there were fewer than forty, a figure which would rise thereafter to 300 in 1900. A small city of the early modern period might contain as few as 10,000 inhabitants, a town far fewer still. The growth of modern industry from the late 18th century onward led to massive urbanization and the rise of new great cities, first in Europe and then in other regions, as new opportunities brought huge numbers of migrants from rural communities into urban areas. In the United States from 1860 to 1910, the invention of railroads reduced transportation costs, and large manufacturing centers began to emerge, thus allowing migration from rural to city areas. However, cities during those periods of time were deadly places to live in, due to health problems resulting from contaminated water and air, and communicable diseases. In the Great Depression of the 1930s cities were hard hit by unemployment, especially those with a base in heavy industry. In the U.S. urbanization rate increased forty to eighty percent during 1900-1990. Today the world's population is slightly over half urban,[7] with millions still streaming annually into the growing cities of Asia, Africa and Latin America. There has also been a shift to suburbs, perhaps to avoid crime and traffic, which are two costs of living in an urban area. Waste and sewage are two major problems for cities, as is air pollution coming from internal combustion engines. The impact of cities on places elsewhere, be it hinterlands or places far away, is considered in the notion of city footprinting (ecological footprint). Other negative external effects include health consequences such as communicable diseases, crime, and high traffic and commuting times. Cities cause more interaction with more people than rural areas, thus a higher probability to contracting contagious diseases. However, many inventions such as inoculations, vaccines, and water filtration systems have also lowered health concerns. Crime is also a concern in the cities. Studies have shown that crime rates in cities are higher and the chance of punishment after getting caught is lower. In cases such as burglary, the higher concentration of people in cities create more items of higher value worth the risk of crime. The high concentration of people also create traffic problems and higher commute times, causing less time to be spent on other pursuits. The difference between towns and cities is differently understood in different parts of the English-speaking world. There is no one standard international definition of a city: the term may be used either for a town possessing city status; for an urban locality exceeding an arbitrary population size; for a town dominating other towns with particular regional economic or administrative significance. Although city can refer to an agglomeration including suburban and satellite areas, the term is not usually applied to a conurbation (cluster) of distinct urban places, nor for a wider metropolitan area including more than one city, each acting as a focus for parts of the area. And the word "town" (also "downtown") may mean the center of the city. In the United Kingdom (UK), a city is a town which has been known as a city since time immemorial, or which has received city status by letters patent — which is normally granted on the basis of size, importance or royal connection (the traditional test was whether the town had a cathedral). For example Ripon was granted city status in 1836 to coincide with the creation of the Diocese of Ripon, but also in recognition of its long-standing role as a supplier of spurs to royalty. In the United Kingdom, when people talk about cities, they generally include the suburbs in that. Some cathedral cities, such as St David's in Wales and Wells in England, are quite small, and may not be known as cities in common parlance. Preston became England's newest city in the year 2002 to mark the Queen's jubilee, as did Newport in Wales, Stirling in Scotland, and Lisburn and Newry in Northern Ireland. In the United States (USA), the definition of cities (and town, villages, townships, etc.) is a matter of state laws and the definitions vary widely by state. A city may, in some places, be run by an elected mayor and city council, while a town is governed by people, select board (or board of trustees), or open town meeting. There are some very large towns (such as Hempstead, New York, with a population of 755,785 in 2004) and some very small cities (such as Lake Angelus, Michigan, with a population of 326 in 2000), and the line between town and city, if it exists at all, varies from state to state. Cities in the United States do have many oddities, like Maza, North Dakota, the smallest city in the country, has only 5 inhabitants, but is still incorporated. It does not have an active government, and the mayoral hand changes frequently (due to the lack of city laws). California has both towns and cities but the terms "town" and "city" are considered synonymous. In some U.S. states, any incorporated town is also called a city. If a distinction is being made between towns and cities, exactly what that distinction is often depends on the context. The context will differ depending on whether the issue is the legal authority it possesses, the availability of shopping and entertainment, and the scope of the group of places under consideration. Intensifiers such as "small town" and "big city" are also common, though the flip side of each is rarely used. Some states make a distinction between villages and other forms of municipalities. In some cases, villages combine with larger other communities to form larger towns; a well-known example of an urban village is New York City's famed Greenwich Village, which started as a quiet country settlement but was absorbed by the growing city. The word has often been co-opted by enterprising developers to make their projects sound welcoming and friendly. In Illinois, cities must have a minimum population of 2,500 but in Nebraska, cities must have a minimum of only 800 residents. In Idaho, all incorporated municipalities are cities. In Ohio, a municipality automatically becomes a city if it has 5,000 residents counted in a federal census but it reverts to a village if its population drops below 5,000. In Nebraska, 5,000 residents is the minimum for a city of the first class while 800 is the minimum for a city of the second class. In all the New England states, city status is conferred by the form of government, not population. Town government has a board of selectmen for the executive branch, and a town meeting for the legislative branch. New England cities, on the other hand, have a mayor for the executive, and a legislature referred to as either the city council or the board of aldermen. In Virginia, all incorporated municipalities designated as cities are independent of the adjacent or surrounding county while a town is an incorporated municipality which remains a part of an adjacent or surrounding county. The largest incorporated municipalities by population are all cities, although some smaller cities have a smaller population than some towns. For example, the smallest city of Norton has a population of 3,904 and the largest town of Blacksburg has a population of 39,573. Independent cities in other states include Baltimore, Maryland and Carson City, Nevada. In Pennsylvania any municipality with more than 10 persons can incorporate as a Borough. Any Township or Borough with at least 10,000 population can ask the legislature to charter as a city. In Pennsylvania a village is simply an unincorporated community within a township. In many other languages, there is no difference between city and town. The German word for both is Stadt, while a town with more than 100,000 inhabitants is called a Großstadt (major city), which is the most adequate equivalence for city (in terms of differentiating it from a town). On the other hand, most towns are communities belonging to a Landkreis (county), but there are some cities, usually with at least 50,000 inhabitants, that are counties by themselves (kreisfreie Städte). The situation is similar in Poland, where the word miasto serves for both town and city. There are formal distinctions which generally differentiate larger towns from smaller ones (such as status as a separate powiat or county, or the conferring of the title prezydent on the mayor rather than burmistrz), but none of these is universally recognized as equivalent to the English city/town distinction. In Italy cities are called città, an uncount noun derivated by latin noun civitas. The grade of city is granted by the President of Repubblic with Presidential Decree Law. The cities more bigger and important, such as Rome, Milan and Naples, are called aree metropolitane (metropolitan areas) because have inclused a lot of minor cities and towns in their areas. There is no limit population for a city. In the coat of arms, for the cities there is a golden crown towered. Chile's Department of National Statistics defines a city (ciudad in Spanish) as an urban entity with more than 5,000 inhabitants. A town (pueblo), is an urban entity with 2,001 to 5,000 persons, however, if the area has some economic activity, the designation may include populations as small as 1,001. The department also defines Major Cities as provincial or regional capitals with populations of 100,001 to 500,000; Great Urban Areas which are comprised of several entities without any appreciable limit between them and populations which total between 500,001 and 1,000,000. A Metropolis is the largest urban area in the country where there are more than one million inhabitants. The "urban entity" is defined as a concentration of habitations with more than 2,000 persons living in them, or more than 1,000 persons if more than half of those persons are in some way gainfully employed. Tourist and recreation areas with more than 250 living units may be considered as urban areas. South Korea has a system of dividing into metropolitan cities, provinces, a special city (Seoul) and one specially self-governing province (Jeju). In South Korea, cities should have a population of more than 150,000, and if a city has more than 500,000, it would be divided into 2 districts and then sub-communities follow as a name of dong with similar system of normal cities. Additionally, if a city's population is over 1,000,000, then it would be promoted to metropolitan city.[10] Critics of the notion point to the different realms of power. The term global city is heavily influenced by economic factors and, thus, may not account for places that are otherwise significant. For example, cities like Rome, Delhi, Mumbai, Istanbul, Mecca, Mashhad, Karbala and Lisbon are powerful in religious and historical terms but would not be considered "global cities." Additionally, it has been questioned whether the city itself can be regarded as an actor. In 1995, Kanter argued that successful cities can be identified by three elements. To be successful, a city needs to have good thinkers (concepts), good makers (competence) or good traders (connections). The interplay of these three elements, Kanter argued, means that good cities are not planned but managed. In the United States, United Kingdom and Ireland, the term "inner city" is sometimes used with the connotation of being an area, perhaps a ghetto, where people are less wealthy and where there is more crime. These connotations are less common in other Western countries, as deprived areas are located in varying parts of other Western cities. In fact, with the gentrification of some formerly run-down central city areas the reverse connotation can apply. In Australia, for example, the term "outer suburban" applied to a person implies a lack of sophistication. In Paris, the inner city is the richest part of the metropolitan area, where housing is the most expensive, and where elites and high-income individuals dwell. In the developing world, economic modernization brings poor newcomers from the countryside to build haphazardly at the edge of current settlement (see favelas, shacks and shanty towns). The United States, in particular, has a culture of anti-urbanism that dates back to colonial times. The American City Beautiful architecture movement of the late 1800s was a reaction to perceived urban decay and sought to provide stately civic buildings and boulevards to inspire civic pride in the motley residents of the urban core. Modern anti-urban attitudes are to be found in America in the form of a planning profession that continues to develop land on a low-density suburban basis, where access to amenities, work and shopping is provided almost exclusively by car rather than on foot. However, there is a growing movement in North America called "New Urbanism" that calls for a return to traditional city planning methods where mixed-use zoning allows people to walk from one type of land-use to another. The idea is that housing, shopping, office space, and leisure facilities are all provided within walking distance of each other, thus reducing the demand for road-space and also improving the efficiency and effectiveness of mass transit.
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