Towns Research Paper - Research Paper Examples

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Towns have usually accommodated great social diversity, making them places of magnificent human achievements as well as sometimes-violent struggles over resources and power. The words town and city are largely interchangeable, with the former used more in Britain than in the United States, where it is typically reserved for smaller settlements. The names are applied to places with substantial clusters of residents and buildings as well as complex social and economic structures. In some times and places, towns have been independent and self-governing; in others, they have been granted limited self-government.

The earliest towns emerged in the Middle East and are known only from archaeological evidence. Jericho is sometimes identified as the first town, around 7000 BCE, but many scholars believe that the first true towns were those that arose after the development of agriculture, beginning with Sumerian cities such as Ur, around 3000 BCE. At later dates, towns also developed in productive agricultural regions of Egypt, India, China, and Mesoamerica. Early towns were typically ceremonial centers, home to priests, soldiers, and administrators as well as skilled artisans who made luxury goods for members of the ruling class. Often the demand for luxuries stimulated long-distance trade, and some towns became centers of commerce, in which merchants were among the most wealthy and powerful residents. Coastal towns devoted to trade and commerce first flourished around the eastern Mediterranean in the Phoenician and Greek civilizations, which were later conquered by the Roman Empire. After Rome lost control of the Mediterranean around the fifth century CE, and Muslim invaders subsequently conquered much of the region, many Mediterranean towns became important Islamic administrative and commercial centers, whereas Christian Europe became a much more exclusively rural civilization. Although Italian commercial towns such as Venice and Amalfi revived by the tenth century, towns remained marginal to the rural and feudal society of medieval Europe. Partial exceptions were northern Italy and the Low Countries, where commercial towns ruled much of the countryside. These towns and regions dominated the European cultural revival known as the Renaissance, which began in the fourteenth century.

Urbanization And Industrialization

For several centuries more, Europe, like the rest of the world, remained a place where a tiny percentage of the population lived in towns, and economies as well as political power were rural-based, with the great majority of the population working in subsistence agriculture, producing a small surplus that supported priestly, warrior, and ruling elites. These elites were sometimes based in towns, and here and there cities grew to great size, for example ancient Rome, medieval Baghdad, Tenochtitlan in Mexico, and several Chinese capitals.

A fundamental change in the role of towns came with urbanization—that is, when larger percentages of a region’s or nation’s population came to live in them. This shift coincided with the growth of large-scale industry, beginning in eighteenth-century England and spreading across much of Europe, and beyond, in the nineteenth century. Many towns grew rapidly as rural migrants arrived in search of work in the new factories or in other trades stimulated by urban growth and industrial wealth. Around 1800 London became the first European city with a million inhabitants; a century later, at least eight more had crossed that threshold, and London’s six million made it far larger than any city in history. Outside of Europe, North America experienced the most dramatic nineteenth-century urban growth. The twentieth century, especially its second half, saw rapid urbanization in other regions, notably East Asia. Whereas the world’s population was still 70 percent rural in 1950, sometime around 2007, town dwellers became a majority. By then, twenty cities, most of them in Asia, had at least ten million inhabitants.

In many poor countries, urban growth has been concentrated in a single city, typically the capital, with floods of migrants drawn by rural overpopulation, political turmoil, and the collapse of agricultural or subsistence economies. In one respect this recent phase differs fundamentally from nineteenth-century Europe: This is often urbanization without industrialization. That had been the exception in nineteenth-century Europe, characteristic of only a few of Europe’s poorest cities, such as Naples and Dublin. By the late twentieth century, however, as political and economic turmoil continued to push rural people toward large cities in their home countries or foreign ones, they arrived in places where there were few industrial jobs, and they joined a vast informal sector of intermittent, insecure, and often illegal work. Following a long tradition, these migrants see towns as places of opportunity, but most of them have little chance for security or prosperity.

Social and Spatial Structures

From their earliest origins, towns have been associated with complex social structures and a diversity of occupations and roles. Far more than the countryside, towns have usually encompassed extremes of wealth and poverty, with rulers and wealthy merchants living near their slaves, servants, and laborers. As a result, towns have typically been centers of economic dynamism, cultural innovation, and social and political tensions. These urban phenomena have interested social scientists since the eighteenth century, when Adam Smith’s theory of the division of labor explained the great economic potential inherent in the occupational specialization found in towns. Many liberal theorists following Smith have also contended that towns fostered individual opportunity and individual identities, thus promoting economic growth as well as new doctrines of citizenship and human rights that challenged traditional barriers of caste and status. However, Karl Marx and other socialists (including Vladimir Lenin), observing the concentration of poverty and misery among urban factory workers and casual laborers, predicted that revolutionary change would begin in towns, where oppressed classes would forge bonds of solidarity.

The combination of urban growth and the breakdown of traditional hierarchies has encouraged the urban upper classes to live apart from their poorer neighbors. The modern town has thus been characterized by horizontal segregation, following two basic patterns that have developed in different times and places. In one, the prestigious town center, the traditional site of palaces and shrines, is reserved for the wealthy, and the poor live on the urban edge in suburbs or shantytowns. This arrangement became typical of many European cities (Paris is the best known) as well as former colonial cities in Asia and Latin America. Alternatively, in some places the city center became a stronghold of business and employment, not a prestigious residential district, and the wealthy moved out to suburbs. This pattern emerged in eighteenth-century England and became even more typical of the United States, where premodern urban traditions are scant. By the end of the twentieth century, suburbanization had become increasingly apparent elsewhere, as communications and transportation technology made it easy for elites to live far from their workplaces. The urban core may remain as an office center, but surrounding areas have become poor, even largely abandoned in the case of the most devastated U.S. cities. Many cities in the United States saw rapid change in the decades after World War II (1939—1945), as white working-class residents moved to the suburbs in large numbers, and industrial jobs either followed or left the area entirely. Left behind in the inner cities were concentrations of poverty, unemployment, and minority groups (mainly African Americans), with high crime rates and poor schools continuing to push upwardly mobile residents outward while making life more difficult for those left behind. By the end of the century, similar problems were becoming apparent in major cities of other wealthy countries, such as Britain and France, sometimes in poor suburbs rather than inner cities. At the same time, a countervailing trend has been the “gentrification” that has created or expanded enclaves of wealthy inner-city residents, sometimes dislodging but not necessarily reducing the concentrations of poverty.

Bibliography:

Bairoch, Paul. 1988. Cities and Economic Development: From the Dawn of History to the Present. Trans. Christopher Braider. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Davis, Mike. 2006. Planet of Slums. London: Verso.
Hohenberg, Paul M., and Lynn Hollen Lees. 1995. The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1994. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
LeGates, Richard T., and Frederic Stout, eds. 2007. The City Reader. 4th ed. New York: Routledge.