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Map of Piraeus, designed according to the Hippodameian grid plan
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Warsaw Old Town after the Warsaw uprising with 85% of the city destroyed File:Warsaw Old Town 1945.jpg
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Geography |
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Geography (from Ancient Greek γεωγραφία geōgraphía; combining gê 'Earth' and gráphō 'write') is the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. [1] Geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks an understanding of Earth and its human and natural complexities—not merely where objects are, but also how they have changed and come to be. While geography is specific to Earth, many concepts can be applied more broadly to other celestial bodies in the field of planetary science. [2] Geography has been called "a bridge between natural science and social science disciplines." [3]
Origins of many of the concepts in geography can be traced to Greek Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who may have coined the term "geographia" ( c. 276 BC – c. 195/194 BC). [4] The first recorded use of the word γεωγραφία was as the title of a book by Greek scholar Claudius Ptolemy (100 – 170 AD). [1] This work created the so called "Ptolemaic tradition" of geography, which included "Ptolemaic cartographic theory." [5] However, the concepts of geography (such as cartography) date back to the earliest attempts to understand the world spatially, with the earliest example of an attempted world map dating to the 9th century BCE in ancient Babylon. [6] The history of geography as a discipline spans cultures and millennia, being independently developed by multiple groups, and cross-pollinated by trade between these groups. The core concepts of geography consistent between all approaches are a focus on space, place, time, and scale. [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
Today, geography is an extremely broad discipline with multiple approaches and modalities. There have been multiple attempts to organize the discipline, including the four traditions of geography, and into branches. [13] [3] [14] Techniques employed can generally be broken down into quantitative [15] and qualitative [16] approaches, with many studies taking mixed-methods approaches. [17] Common techniques include cartography, remote sensing, interviews, and surveying.
Geography is a systematic study of the Earth (other celestial bodies are specified, such as "geography of Mars", or given another name, such as areography in the case of Mars), its features, and phenomena that take place on it. [18] [19] [20] For something to fall into the domain of geography, it generally needs some sort of spatial component that can be placed on a map, such as coordinates, place names, or addresses. This has led to geography being associated with cartography and place names. Although many geographers are trained in toponymy and cartology, this is not their main preoccupation. Geographers study the Earth's spatial and temporal distribution of phenomena, processes, and features as well as the interaction of humans and their environment. [21] Because space and place affect a variety of topics, such as economics, health, climate, plants, and animals, geography is highly interdisciplinary. The interdisciplinary nature of the geographical approach depends on an attentiveness to the relationship between physical and human phenomena and their spatial patterns. [22]
Names of places...are not geography...To know by heart a whole gazetteer full of them would not, in itself, constitute anyone a geographer. Geography has higher aims than this: it seeks to classify phenomena (alike of the natural and of the political world, in so far as it treats of the latter), to compare, to generalize, to ascend from effects to causes, and, in doing so, to trace out the laws of nature and to mark their influences upon man. This is 'a description of the world'—that is Geography. In a word, Geography is a Science—a thing not of mere names but of argument and reason, of cause and effect. [23]
— William Hughes, 1863
Geography as a discipline can be split broadly into three main branches: human geography, physical geography, and technical geography. [3] [24] Human geography largely focuses on the built environment and how humans create, view, manage, and influence space. [24] Physical geography examines the natural environment and how organisms, climate, soil, water, and landforms produce and interact. [25] The difference between these approaches led to the development of integrated geography, which combines physical and human geography and concerns the interactions between the environment and humans. [21] Technical geography involves studying and developing the tools and techniques used by geographers, such as remote sensing, cartography, and geographic information system. [26]
Narrowing down geography to a few key concepts is extremely challenging, and subject to tremendous debate within the discipline. [27] In one attempt, the 1st edition of the book "Key Concepts in Geography" broke down this into chapters focusing on "Space," "Place," "Time," "Scale," and "Landscape." [28] The 2nd edition of the book expanded on these key concepts by adding "Environmental systems," "Social Systems," "Nature," " Globalization," "Development," and "Risk," demonstrating how challenging narrowing the field can be. [27]
Another approach used extensively in teaching geography are the Five themes of geography established by "Guidelines for Geographic Education: Elementary and Secondary Schools," published jointly by the National Council for Geographic Education and the Association of American Geographers in 1984. [29] [30] These themes are Location, place, relationships within places (often summarized as Human-Environment Interaction), movement, and regions [30] [31] The five themes of geography have shaped how American education approaches the topic in the years since. [30] [31]
Just as all phenomena exist in time and thus have a history, they also exist in space and have a geography. [32]
For something to exist in the realm of geography, it must be able to be described spatially. [32] [33] Thus, space is the most fundamental concept at the foundation of geography. [7] [8] The concept is so basic, that geographers often have difficulty defining exactly what it is. Absolute space is the exact site, or spatial coordinates, of objects, persons, places, or phenomena under investigation. [7] We exist in space. [9] Absolute space leads to the view of the world as a photograph, with everything frozen in place when the coordinates were recorded. Today, geographers are trained to recognize the world as a dynamic space where all processes interact and take place, rather than a static image on a map. [7] [34]
Place is one of the most complex and important terms in geography. [9] [10] [11] [12] In human geography, place is the synthesis of the coordinates on the Earth's surface, the activity and use that occurs, has occurred, and will occur at the coordinates, and the meaning ascribed to the space by human individuals and groups. [33] [11] This can be extraordinarily complex, as different spaces may have different uses at different times and mean different things to different people. In physical geography, a place includes all of the physical phenomena that occur in space, including the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. [12] Places do not exist in a vacuum and instead have complex spatial relationships with each other, and place is concerned how a location is situated in relation to all other locations. [35] [36] As a discipline then, the term place in geography includes all spatial phenomena occurring at a location, the diverse uses and meanings humans ascribe to that location, and how that location impacts and is impacted by all other locations on Earth. [11] [12] In one of Yi-Fu Tuan's papers, he explains that in his view, geography is the study of Earth as a home for humanity, and thus place and the complex meaning behind the term is central to the discipline of geography. [10]
Time is usually thought to be within the domain of history, however, it is of significant concern in the discipline of geography. [37] [38] [39] In physics, space and time are not separated, and are combined into the concept of spacetime. [40] Geography is subject to the laws of physics, and in studying things that occur in space, time must be considered. Time in geography is more than just the historical record of events that occurred at various discrete coordinates; but also includes modeling the dynamic movement of people, organisms, and things through space. [9] Time facilitates movement through space, ultimately allowing things to flow through a system. [37] The amount of time an individual, or group of people, spends in a place will often shape their attachment and perspective to that place. [9] Time constrains the possible paths that can be taken through space, given a starting point, possible routes, and rate of travel. [41] Visualizing time over space is challenging in terms of cartography, and includes Space-Prism, advanced 3D geovisualizations, and animated maps. [35] [41] [42] [34]
Scale in the context of a map is the ratio between a distance measured on the map and the corresponding distance as measured on the ground. [2] [43] This concept is fundamental to the discipline of geography, not just cartography, in that phenomena being investigated appear different depending on the scale used. [44] [45] Scale is the frame that geographers use to measure space, and ultimately to try and understand a place. [43]
During the quantitative revolution, geography shifted to an empirical law-making ( nomothetic) approach. [46] [47] Several laws of geography have been proposed since then, most notably by Waldo Tobler and can be viewed as a product of the quantitative revolution. [48] In general, some dispute the entire concept of laws in geography and the social sciences. [35] [49] [50] These criticisms have been addressed by Tobler and others, such as Michael Frank Goodchild. [49] [50] However, this is an ongoing source of debate in geography and is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. Several laws have been proposed, and Tobler's first law of geography is the most generally accepted in geography. Some have argued that geographic laws do not need to be numbered. The existence of a first invites a second, and many have proposed themselves as that. It has also been proposed that Tobler's first law of geography should be moved to the second and replaced with another. [50] A few of the proposed laws of geography are below:
Additionally, several variations or amendments to these laws exist within the literature, although not as well supported. For example, one paper proposed an amendmended version of Tobler's first law of geography, referred to in the text as the Tobler–von Thünen law, [48] which states: "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things, as a consequence of accessibility." [Note 1] [48]
Geography is a branch of inquiry that focuses on spatial information on Earth. It is an extremely broad topic and can be broken down multiple ways. [14] There have been several approaches to doing this spanning at least several centuries, including "four traditions of geography" and into distinct branches. [56] [13] The Four traditions of geography are often used to divide the different historical approaches theories geographers have taken to the discipline. [13] In contrast, geography's branches describe contemporary applied geographical approaches. [3]
Geography is an extremely broad field. Because of this, many view the various definitions of geography proposed over the decades as inadequate. To address this, William D. Pattison proposed the concept of the "Four traditions of Geography" in 1964. [13] [57] [58] These traditions are the Spatial or Locational Tradition, the Man-Land or Human-Environment Interaction Tradition (sometimes referred to as Integrated geography), the Area Studies or Regional Tradition, and the Earth Science Tradition. [13] [57] [58] These concepts are broad sets of geography philosophies bound together within the discipline. They are one of many ways geographers organize the major sets of thoughts and philosophies within the discipline. [13] [57] [58]
In another approach to the abovementioned four traditions, geography is organized into applied branches. [59] [60] The UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems organizes geography into the three categories of human geography, physical geography, and technical geography. [3] [61] [59] [14] Some publications limit the number of branches to physical and human, describing them as the principal branches. [33] Geographers rarely focus on just one of these topics, often using one as their primary focus and then incorporating data and methods from the other branches. Often, geographers are asked to describe what they do by individuals outside the discipline [10] and are likely to identify closely with a specific branch, or sub-branch when describing themselves to lay people. Human geography studies people and their communities, cultures, economies, and environmental interactions by studying their relations with and across space and place. [33] Physical geography is concerned with the study of processes and patterns in the natural environment like the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and geosphere. [33] Technical geography is interested in studying and applying techniques and methods to store, process, analyze, visualize, and use spatial data. [60] It is the newest of the branches, the most controversial, and often other terms are used in the literature to describe the emerging category. These branches use similar geographic philosophies, concepts, and tools and often overlap significantly.
Physical geography (or physiography) focuses on geography as an Earth science. [62] [63] [64] It aims to understand the physical problems and the issues of lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, pedosphere, and global flora and fauna patterns ( biosphere). Physical geography is the study of earth's seasons, climate, atmosphere, soil, streams, landforms, and oceans. [65] Physical geographers will often work in identifying and monitoring the use of natural resources.
Human geography (or anthropogeography) is a branch of geography that focuses on studying patterns and processes that shape human society. [66] It encompasses the human, political, cultural, social, and economic aspects. In industry, human geographers often work in city planning, public health, or business analysis.
Various approaches to the study of human geography have also arisen through time and include:
Technical geography concerns studying and developing tools, techniques, and statistical methods employed to collect, analyze, use, and understand spatial data. [26] [3] [59] [61] Technical geography is the most recently recognized, and controversial, of the branches. Its use dates back to 1749, when a book published by Edward Cave organized the discipline into a section containing content such as cartographic techniques and globes. [56] There are several other terms, often used interchangeably with technical geography to subdivide the discipline, including "techniques of geographic analysis," [67] "Geographic Information Technology," [1] "Geography method's and techniques," [68] " Geographic Information Science," [69] " geoinformatics," " geomatics," and "information geography". There are subtle differences to each concept and term; however, technical geography is one of the broadest, is consistent with the naming convention of the other two branches, has been in use since the 1700s, and has been used by the UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems to divide geography into themes. [3] [59] [56] As academic fields increasingly specialize in their nature, technical geography has emerged as a branch of geography specializing in geographic methods and thought. [26] The emergence of technical geography has brought new relevance to the broad discipline of geography by serving as a set of unique methods for managing the interdisciplinary nature of the phenomena under investigation. While human and physical geographers use the techniques employed by technical geographers, technical geography is more concerned with the fundamental spatial concepts and technologies than the nature of the data. [26] [60] It is therefore closely associated with the spatial tradition of geography while being applied to the other two major branches. A technical geographer might work as a GIS analyst, a GIS developer working to make new software tools, or create general reference maps incorporating human and natural features. [70]
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All geographic research and analysis start with asking the question "where," followed by "why there." Geographers start with the fundamental assumption set forth in Tobler's first law of geography, that "everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." [35] [36] As spatial interrelationships are key to this synoptic science, maps are a key tool. Classical cartography has been joined by a more modern approach to geographical analysis, computer-based geographic information systems (GIS).
In their study, geographers use four interrelated approaches:
Quantitative methods in geography became particularly influential in the discipline during the quantitative revolution of the 1950s and 60s. [15] These methods revitalized the discipline in many ways, allowing scientific testing of hypotheses and proposing scientific geographic theories and laws. [71] The quantitative revolution heavily influenced and revitalized technical geography, and lead to the development of the subfield of quantitative geography. [26] [15]
Cartography is the art, science, and technology of making maps. [72] Cartographers study the Earth's surface representation with abstract symbols (map making). Although other subdisciplines of geography rely on maps for presenting their analyses, the actual making of maps is abstract enough to be regarded separately. [73] Cartography has grown from a collection of drafting techniques into an actual science.
Cartographers must learn cognitive psychology and ergonomics to understand which symbols convey information about the Earth most effectively and behavioural psychology to induce the readers of their maps to act on the information. They must learn geodesy and fairly advanced mathematics to understand how the shape of the Earth affects the distortion of map symbols projected onto a flat surface for viewing. It can be said, without much controversy, that cartography is the seed from which the larger field of geography grew.
Geographic information systems (GIS) deal with storing information about the Earth for automatic retrieval by a computer in an accurate manner appropriate to the information's purpose. [74] In addition to all of the other subdisciplines of geography, GIS specialists must understand computer science and database systems. GIS has revolutionized the field of cartography: nearly all mapmaking is now done with the assistance of some form of GIS software. The science of using GIS software and GIS techniques to represent, analyse, and predict the spatial relationships is called geographic information science (GISc). [75]
Remote sensing is the art, science, and technology of obtaining information about Earth's features from measurements made at a distance. [76] Remotely sensed data can be either passive, such as traditional photography, or active, such as LiDAR. [76] A variety of platforms can be used for remote sensing, including satellite imagery, aerial photography (including consumer drones), and data obtained from hand-held sensors. [76] Products from remote sensing include Digital elevation model and cartographic base maps. Geographers increasingly use remotely sensed data to obtain information about the Earth's land surface, ocean, and atmosphere, because it: (a) supplies objective information at a variety of spatial scales (local to global), (b) provides a synoptic view of the area of interest, (c) allows access to distant and inaccessible sites, (d) provides spectral information outside the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and (e) facilitates studies of how features/areas change over time. Remotely sensed data may be analyzed independently or in conjunction with other digital data layers (e.g., in a geographic information system). Remote sensing aids in land use, land cover (LULC) mapping, by helping to determine both what is naturally occurring on a piece of land and what human activities are taking place on it. [77]
Geostatistics deal with quantitative data analysis, specifically the application of a statistical methodology to the exploration of geographic phenomena. [78] Geostatistics is used extensively in a variety of fields, including hydrology, geology, petroleum exploration, weather analysis, urban planning, logistics, and epidemiology. The mathematical basis for geostatistics derives from cluster analysis, linear discriminant analysis and non-parametric statistical tests, and a variety of other subjects. Applications of geostatistics rely heavily on geographic information systems, particularly for the interpolation (estimate) of unmeasured points. Geographers are making notable contributions to the method of quantitative techniques.
Qualitative methods geography in geography are descriptive rather than numerical or statistical in nature. [79] [16] [46] They add context to concepts, and explore human concepts like beliefs and perspective that are difficult or impossible to quantify. [16] Human geography is much more likely to employ qualitative methods than physical. Increasingly, technical geographers are attempting to employ GIS methods to qualitative datasets. [16] [80]
Qualitative cartography employs many of the same software and techniques as quantitative. [80] It may be employed to inform on map practices, or to visualize perspectives and ideas that are not strictly quantitative in nature. [80] [16] An example of a form of qualitative cartography is a Chorochromatic map of nominal data, such as land cover or dominant language group in an area. [81] Another example is a deep map, or maps that combine geography and storytelling to produce a product with greater information than a two-dimensional image of places, names, and topography. [82] [83] This approach offers more inclusive strategies than more traditional cartographic approaches for connecting the complex layers that makeup places. [83]
Ethnographical research techniques are used by human geographers. [84] In cultural geography, there is a tradition of employing qualitative research techniques, also used in anthropology and sociology. Participant observation and in-depth interviews provide human geographers with qualitative data.
Geopoetics is an interdisciplinary approach that combines geography and poetry to explore the interconnectedness between humans, space, place, and the environment. [85] [86] Geopoetics is employed as a mixed methods tool to explain the implications of geographic research. [87] It is often employed to address and communicate the implications of complex topics, such as the anthropocene. [88] [89] [90] [91] [92]
Geographers employ interviews to gather data and acquire valuable understandings from individuals or groups regarding their encounters, outlooks, and opinions concerning spatial phenomena. [93] [94] Interviews can be carried out through various mediums, including face-to-face interactions, phone conversations, online platforms, or written exchanges. [46] Geographers typically adopt a structured or semi-structured approach during interviews involving specific questions or discussion points when utilized for research purposes. [93] These questions are designed to extract focused information about the research topic while being flexible enough to allow participants to express their experiences and viewpoints, such as through open-ended questions. [93]
The concept of geography is present in all cultures, and therefore the history of the discipline is a series of competing narratives, with concepts emerging at various points across space and time. [95] The oldest known world maps date back to ancient Babylon from the 9th century BC. [96] The best known Babylonian world map, however, is the Imago Mundi of 600 BC. [97] The map as reconstructed by Eckhard Unger shows Babylon on the Euphrates, surrounded by a circular landmass showing Assyria, Urartu, and several cities, in turn surrounded by a "bitter river" ( Oceanus), with seven islands arranged around it so as to form a seven-pointed star. [98] The accompanying text mentions seven outer regions beyond the encircling ocean. The descriptions of five of them have survived. [99] In contrast to the Imago Mundi, an earlier Babylonian world map dating back to the 9th century BC depicted Babylon as being further north from the center of the world, though it is not certain what that center was supposed to represent. [96]
The ideas of Anaximander (c. 610–545 BC): considered by later Greek writers to be the true founder of geography, come to us through fragments quoted by his successors. [100] Anaximander is credited with the invention of the gnomon, the simple, yet efficient Greek instrument that allowed the early measurement of latitude. [100] Thales is also credited with the prediction of eclipses. The foundations of geography can be traced to ancient cultures, such as the ancient, medieval, and early modern Chinese. The Greeks, who were the first to explore geography as both art and science, achieved this through Cartography, Philosophy, and Literature, or through Mathematics. There is some debate about who was the first person to assert that the Earth is spherical in shape, with the credit going either to Parmenides or Pythagoras. Anaxagoras was able to demonstrate that the profile of the Earth was circular by explaining eclipses. However, he still believed that the Earth was a flat disk, as did many of his contemporaries. One of the first estimates of the radius of the Earth was made by Eratosthenes. [101]
The first rigorous system of latitude and longitude lines is credited to Hipparchus. He employed a sexagesimal system that was derived from Babylonian mathematics. The meridians were subdivided into 360°, with each degree further subdivided into 60 ( minutes). To measure the longitude at different locations on Earth, he suggested using eclipses to determine the relative difference in time. [102] The extensive mapping by the Romans as they explored new lands would later provide a high level of information for Ptolemy to construct detailed atlases. He extended the work of Hipparchus, using a grid system on his maps and adopting a length of 56.5 miles for a degree. [103]
From the 3rd century onwards, Chinese methods of geographical study and writing of geographical literature became much more comprehensive than what was found in Europe at the time (until the 13th century). [104] Chinese geographers such as Liu An, Pei Xiu, Jia Dan, Shen Kuo, Fan Chengda, Zhou Daguan, and Xu Xiake wrote important treatises, yet by the 17th century advanced ideas and methods of Western-style geography were adopted in China.
During the Middle Ages, the fall of the Roman empire led to a shift in the evolution of geography from Europe to the Islamic world. [104] Muslim geographers such as Muhammad al-Idrisi produced detailed world maps (such as Tabula Rogeriana), while other geographers such as Yaqut al-Hamawi, Abu Rayhan Biruni, Ibn Battuta, and Ibn Khaldun provided detailed accounts of their journeys and the geography of the regions they visited. Turkish geographer Mahmud al-Kashgari drew a world map on a linguistic basis, and later so did Piri Reis ( Piri Reis map). Further, Islamic scholars translated and interpreted the earlier works of the Romans and the Greeks and established the House of Wisdom in Baghdad for this purpose. [105] Abū Zayd al-Balkhī, originally from Balkh, founded the "Balkhī school" of terrestrial mapping in Baghdad. [106] Suhrāb, a late tenth century Muslim geographer accompanied a book of geographical coordinates, with instructions for making a rectangular world map with equirectangular projection or cylindrical equidistant projection. [107]
Abu Rayhan Biruni (976–1048) first described a polar equi- azimuthal equidistant projection of the celestial sphere. [108] He was regarded as the most skilled when it came to mapping cities and measuring the distances between them, which he did for many cities in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. He often combined astronomical readings and mathematical equations to develop methods of pin-pointing locations by recording degrees of latitude and longitude. He also developed similar techniques when it came to measuring the heights of mountains, depths of the valleys, and expanse of the horizon. He also discussed human geography and the planetary habitability of the Earth. He also calculated the latitude of Kath, Khwarezm, using the maximum altitude of the Sun, and solved a complex geodesic equation to accurately compute the Earth's circumference, which was close to modern values of the Earth's circumference. [109] His estimate of 6,339.9 km for the Earth radius was only 16.8 km less than the modern value of 6,356.7 km. In contrast to his predecessors, who measured the Earth's circumference by sighting the Sun simultaneously from two different locations, al-Biruni developed a new method of using trigonometric calculations based on the angle between a plain and mountain top, which yielded more accurate measurements of the Earth's circumference, and made it possible for it to be measured by a single person from a single location. [110]
The European Age of Discovery during the 16th and the 17th centuries, where many new lands were discovered and accounts by European explorers such as Christopher Columbus, Marco Polo, and James Cook revived a desire for both accurate geographic detail and more solid theoretical foundations in Europe. The problem facing both explorers and geographers was finding the latitude and longitude of a geographic location. The problem of latitude was solved long ago, but that of longitude remained; agreeing on what zero meridians should be was only part of the problem. It was left to John Harrison to solve it by inventing the chronometer H-4 in 1760, and later in 1884 for the International Meridian Conference to adopt by convention the Greenwich meridian as zero meridians. [109]
The 18th and 19th centuries were the times when geography became recognized as a discrete academic discipline, and became part of a typical university curriculum in Europe (especially Paris and Berlin). The development of many geographic societies also occurred during the 19th century, with the foundations of the Société de Géographie in 1821, the Royal Geographical Society in 1830, Russian Geographical Society in 1845, American Geographical Society in 1851, and the National Geographic Society in 1888. The influence of Immanuel Kant, Alexander von Humboldt, Carl Ritter, and Paul Vidal de la Blache can be seen as a major turning point in geography from philosophy to an academic subject. [111] [112] [113] [114] [115]
Over the past two centuries, the advancements in technology with computers have led to the development of geomatics and new practices such as participant observation and geostatistics being incorporated into geography's portfolio of tools. In the West during the 20th century, the discipline of geography went through four major phases: environmental determinism, regional geography, the quantitative revolution, and critical geography. The strong interdisciplinary links between geography and the sciences of geology and botany, as well as economics, sociology, and demographics, have also grown greatly, especially as a result of earth system science that seeks to understand the world in a holistic view. New concepts and philosophies have emerged from the rapid advancement of computers, quantitative methods, and interdisciplinary approaches. In 1970, Waldo Tobler proposed the first law of geography, "everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." [35] [36] This law summarizes the first assumption geographers make about the world.
The discipline of geography, especially physical geography, and geology have significant overlap. In the past, the two have often shared academic departments at universities, a point that has led to conflict over resources. [120] Both disciplines do seek to understand the rocks on the Earth's surface and the processes that change them over time. Geology employs many of the tools and techniques of technical geographers, such as GIS and remote sensing to aid in geological mapping. [121] However, geology includes research that goes beyond the spatial component, such as the chemical analysis of rocks and biogeochemistry. [122]
The discipline of History has significant overlap with geography, especially human geography. [123] [124] Like geology, history and geography have shared university departments. Geography provides the spatial context within which historical events unfold. [123] The physical geographic features of a region, such as its landforms, climate, and resources, shape human settlements, trade routes, and economic activities, which in turn influence the course of historical events. [123] Thus, a historian must have a strong foundation in geography. [123] [124] Historians employ the techniques of technical geographers to create historical atlases and maps.
While the discipline of geography is normally concerned with the Earth, the term can also be informally used to describe the study of other worlds, such as the planets of the Solar System and even beyond. The study of systems larger than the Earth itself usually forms part of Astronomy or Cosmology. The study of other planets is usually called planetary science. Alternative terms such as areography (geography of Mars) have been employed to describe the study of other celestial objects. Ultimately, geography may be considered a subdiscipline within planetary science.
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It was Biruni, not Avicenna, who found a way for a single man, at a single moment, to measure the earth's circumference, by trigonometric calculations based on angles measured from a mountaintop and the plain beneath it – thus improving on Eratosthenes' method of sighting the sun simultaneously from two different sites, applied in the ninth century by astronomers of the Khalif al-Ma'mun.
A city is a human settlement of a notable size. The term "city" has different meanings around the world and in some places the settlement can be very small. Even where the term is limited to larger settlements, there is no universally agreed definition of the lower boundary for their size. [1] [2] In a more narrow sense, a city can be defined as a permanent and densely settled place with administratively defined boundaries whose members work primarily on non-agricultural tasks. [3] Cities generally have extensive systems for housing, transportation, sanitation, utilities, land use, production of goods, and communication. [4] [5] Their density facilitates interaction between people, government organizations, and businesses, sometimes benefiting different parties in the process, such as improving the efficiency of goods and service distribution.
Historically, city dwellers have been a small proportion of humanity overall, but following two centuries of unprecedented and rapid urbanization, more than half of the world population now lives in cities, which has had profound consequences for global sustainability. [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] Present-day cities usually form the core of larger metropolitan areas and urban areas—creating numerous commuters traveling toward city centres for employment, entertainment, and education. However, in a world of intensifying globalization, all cities are to varying degrees also connected globally beyond these regions. This increased influence means that cities also have significant influences on global issues, such as sustainable development, climate change, and global health. Because of these major influences on global issues, the international community has prioritized investment in sustainable cities through Sustainable Development Goal 11. Due to the efficiency of transportation and the smaller land consumption, dense cities hold the potential to have a smaller ecological footprint per inhabitant than more sparsely populated areas. [11] [12] Therefore, compact cities are often referred to as a crucial element in fighting climate change. [13] [14] [15] However, this concentration can also have significant negative consequences, such as forming urban heat islands, concentrating pollution, and stressing water supplies and other resources.
Other important traits of cities besides population include the capital status and relative continued occupation of the city. For example, country capitals such as Beijing, Berlin, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, London, Manila, Mexico City, Moscow, Nairobi, New Delhi, Paris, Rome, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. reflect the identity and apex of their respective nations. [16] Some historic capitals, such as Istanbul, Yogyakarta, and Xi'an, maintain their reflection of cultural identity even without modern capital status. Religious holy sites offer another example of capital status within a religion; examples include Jerusalem, Mecca, Varanasi, Ayodhya, Haridwar, and Prayagraj.
A city can be distinguished from other human settlements by its relatively great size, but also by its functions and its special symbolic status, which may be conferred by a central authority. The term can also refer either to the physical streets and buildings of the city or to the collection of people who dwell there and can be used in a general sense to mean urban rather than rural territory. [18] [19]
National censuses use a variety of definitions – invoking factors such as population, population density, number of dwellings, economic function, and infrastructure – to classify populations as urban. Typical working definitions for small-city populations start at around 100,000 people. [20] Common population definitions for an urban area (city or town) range between 1,500 and 50,000 people, with most U.S. states using a minimum between 1,500 and 5,000 inhabitants. [21] [22] Some jurisdictions set no such minima. [23] In the United Kingdom, city status is awarded by the Crown and then remains permanent. (Historically, the qualifying factor was the presence of a cathedral, resulting in some very small cities such as Wells, with a population of 12,000 as of 2018 [update], and St Davids, with a population of 1,841 as of 2011 [update].) According to the "functional definition", a city is not distinguished by size alone, but also by the role it plays within a larger political context. Cities serve as administrative, commercial, religious, and cultural hubs for their larger surrounding areas. [24] [25]
The presence of a literate elite is often associated with cities because of the cultural diversities present in a city. [26] [27] A typical city has professional administrators, regulations, and some form of taxation (food and other necessities or means to trade for them) to support the government workers. (This arrangement contrasts with the more typically horizontal relationships in a tribe or village accomplishing common goals through informal agreements between neighbors, or the leadership of a chief.) The governments may be based on heredity, religion, military power, work systems such as canal-building, food distribution, land-ownership, agriculture, commerce, manufacturing, finance, or a combination of these. Societies that live in cities are often called civilizations.
The degree of urbanization is a modern metric to help define what comprises a city: "a population of at least 50,000 inhabitants in contiguous dense grid cells (>1,500 inhabitants per square kilometer)". [28] This metric was "devised over years by the European Commission, OECD, World Bank and others, and endorsed in March [2021] by the United Nations ... largely for the purpose of international statistical comparison". [29]
The word city and the related civilization come from the Latin root civitas, originally meaning 'citizenship' or 'community member' and eventually coming to correspond with urbs, meaning 'city' in a more physical sense. [18] The Roman civitas was closely linked with the Greek polis—another common root appearing in English words such as metropolis. [30]
In toponymic terminology, names of individual cities and towns are called astionyms (from Ancient Greek ἄστυ 'city or town' and ὄνομα 'name'). [31]
Urban geography deals both with cities in their larger context and with their internal structure. [32] Cities are estimated to cover about 3% of the land surface of the Earth. [33]
Town siting has varied through history according to natural, technological, economic, and military contexts. Access to water has long been a major factor in city placement and growth, and despite exceptions enabled by the advent of rail transport in the nineteenth century, through the present most of the world's urban population lives near the coast or on a river. [34]
Urban areas as a rule cannot produce their own food and therefore must develop some relationship with a hinterland that sustains them. [35] Only in special cases such as mining towns which play a vital role in long-distance trade, are cities disconnected from the countryside which feeds them. [36] Thus, centrality within a productive region influences siting, as economic forces would, in theory, favor the creation of marketplaces in optimal mutually reachable locations. [37]
The vast majority of cities have a central area containing buildings with special economic, political, and religious significance. Archaeologists refer to this area by the Greek term temenos or if fortified as a citadel. [38] These spaces historically reflect and amplify the city's centrality and importance to its wider sphere of influence. [37] Today cities have a city center or downtown, sometimes coincident with a central business district.
Cities typically have public spaces where anyone can go. These include privately owned spaces open to the public as well as forms of public land such as public domain and the commons. Western philosophy since the time of the Greek agora has considered physical public space as the substrate of the symbolic public sphere. [39] [40] Public art adorns (or disfigures) public spaces. Parks and other natural sites within cities provide residents with relief from the hardness and regularity of typical built environments. Urban green spaces are another component of public space that provides the benefit of mitigating the urban heat island effect, especially in cities that are in warmer climates. These spaces prevent carbon imbalances, extreme habitat losses, electricity and water consumption, and human health risks. [41]
The urban structure generally follows one or more basic patterns: geomorphic, radial, concentric, rectilinear, and curvilinear. The physical environment generally constrains the form in which a city is built. If located on a mountainside, urban structures may rely on terraces and winding roads. It may be adapted to its means of subsistence (e.g. agriculture or fishing). And it may be set up for optimal defense given the surrounding landscape. [42] Beyond these "geomorphic" features, cities can develop internal patterns, due to natural growth or to city planning.
In a radial structure, main roads converge on a central point. This form could evolve from successive growth over a long time, with concentric traces of town walls and citadels marking older city boundaries. In more recent history, such forms were supplemented by ring roads moving traffic around the outskirts of a town. Dutch cities such as Amsterdam and Haarlem are structured as a central square surrounded by concentric canals marking every expansion. In cities such as Moscow, this pattern is still clearly visible.
A system of rectilinear city streets and land plots, known as the grid plan, has been used for millennia in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The Indus Valley civilization built Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa, and other cities on a grid pattern, using ancient principles described by Kautilya, and aligned with the compass points. [43] [24] [44] [45] The ancient Greek city of Priene exemplifies a grid plan with specialized districts used across the Hellenistic Mediterranean.
The urban-type settlement extends far beyond the traditional boundaries of the city proper [48] in a form of development sometimes described critically as urban sprawl. [49] Decentralization and dispersal of city functions (commercial, industrial, residential, cultural, political) has transformed the very meaning of the term and has challenged geographers seeking to classify territories according to an urban-rural binary. [22]
Metropolitan areas include suburbs and exurbs organized around the needs of commuters, and sometimes edge cities characterized by a degree of economic and political independence. (In the US these are grouped into metropolitan statistical areas for purposes of demography and marketing.) Some cities are now part of a continuous urban landscape called urban agglomeration, conurbation, or megalopolis (exemplified by the BosWash corridor of the Northeastern United States.) [50]
The emergence of cities from proto-urban settlements, such as Çatalhöyük, is a non-linear development that demonstrates the varied experiences of early urbanization. [51]
The cities of Jericho, Aleppo, Faiyum, Yerevan, Athens, Matera, Damascus, and Argos are among those laying claim to the longest continual inhabitation. [52] [53]
Cities, characterized by population density, symbolic function, and urban planning, have existed for thousands of years. [54] In the conventional view, civilization and the city were both followed by the development of agriculture, which enabled the production of surplus food and thus a social division of labor (with concomitant social stratification) and trade. [55] [56] Early cities often featured granaries, sometimes within a temple. [57] A minority viewpoint considers that cities may have arisen without agriculture, due to alternative means of subsistence (fishing), [58] to use as communal seasonal shelters, [59] to their value as bases for defensive and offensive military organization, [60] [61] or to their inherent economic function. [62] [63] [64] Cities played a crucial role in the establishment of political power over an area, and ancient leaders such as Alexander the Great founded and created them with zeal. [65]
Jericho and Çatalhöyük, dated to the eighth millennium BC, are among the earliest proto-cities known to archaeologists. [59] [66] However, the Mesopotamian city of Uruk from the mid-fourth millennium BC (ancient Iraq) is considered by most archaeologists to be the first true city, innovating many characteristics for cities to follow, with its name attributed to the Uruk period. [67] [68] [69]
In the fourth and third millennium BC, complex civilizations flourished in the river valleys of Mesopotamia, India, [70] [71] China, [72] and Egypt. Excavations in these areas have found the ruins of cities geared variously towards trade, politics, or religion. Some had large, dense populations, but others carried out urban activities in the realms of politics or religion without having large associated populations.
Among the early Old World cities, Mohenjo-Daro of the Indus Valley civilization in present-day Pakistan, existing from about 2600 BC, was one of the largest, with a population of 50,000 or more and a sophisticated sanitation system. [73] China's planned cities were constructed according to sacred principles to act as celestial microcosms. [74]
The Ancient Egyptian cities known physically by archaeologists are not extensive. [24] They include (known by their Arab names) El Lahun, a workers' town associated with the pyramid of Senusret II, and the religious city Amarna built by Akhenaten and abandoned. These sites appear planned in a highly regimented and stratified fashion, with a minimalistic grid of rooms for the workers and increasingly more elaborate housing available for higher classes. [75]
In Mesopotamia, the civilization of Sumer, followed by Assyria and Babylon, gave rise to numerous cities, governed by kings and fostered multiple languages written in cuneiform. [76] The Phoenician trading empire, flourishing around the turn of the first millennium BC, encompassed numerous cities extending from Tyre, Cydon, and Byblos to Carthage and Cádiz.
In the following centuries, independent city-states of Greece, especially Athens, developed the polis, an association of male landowning citizens who collectively constituted the city. [77] The agora, meaning "gathering place" or "assembly", was the center of the athletic, artistic, spiritual, and political life of the polis. [78] Rome was the first city that surpassed one million inhabitants. Under the authority of its empire, Rome transformed and founded many cities ( Colonia), and with them brought its principles of urban architecture, design, and society. [79]
In the ancient Americas, early urban traditions developed in the Andes and Mesoamerica. In the Andes, the first urban centers developed in the Norte Chico civilization, Chavin and Moche cultures, followed by major cities in the Huari, Chimu, and Inca cultures. The Norte Chico civilization included as many as 30 major population centers in what is now the Norte Chico region of north-central coastal Peru. It is the oldest known civilization in the Americas, flourishing between the 30th and 18th centuries BC. [80] Mesoamerica saw the rise of early urbanism in several cultural regions, beginning with the Olmec and spreading to the Preclassic Maya, the Zapotec of Oaxaca, and Teotihuacan in central Mexico. Later cultures such as the Aztec, Andean civilizations, Mayan, Mississippians, and Pueblo peoples drew on these earlier urban traditions. Many of their ancient cities continue to be inhabited, including major metropolitan cities such as Mexico City, in the same location as Tenochtitlan; while ancient continuously inhabited Pueblos are near modern urban areas in New Mexico, such as Acoma Pueblo near the Albuquerque metropolitan area and Taos Pueblo near Taos; while others like Lima are located nearby ancient Peruvian sites such as Pachacamac.
Jenné-Jeno, located in present-day Mali and dating to the third century BC, lacked monumental architecture and a distinctive elite social class—but nevertheless had specialized production and relations with a hinterland. [81] Pre-Arabic trade contacts probably existed between Jenné-Jeno and North Africa. [82] Other early urban centers in sub-Saharan Africa, dated to around 500 AD, include Awdaghust, Kumbi-Saleh the ancient capital of Ghana, and Maranda a center located on a trade route between Egypt and Gao. [83]
In the remnants of the Roman Empire, cities of late antiquity gained independence but soon lost population and importance. The locus of power in the West shifted to Constantinople and to the ascendant Islamic civilization with its major cities Baghdad, Cairo, and Córdoba. [84] From the 9th through the end of the 12th century, Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, was the largest and wealthiest city in Europe, with a population approaching 1 million. [85] [86] The Ottoman Empire gradually gained control over many cities in the Mediterranean area, including Constantinople in 1453.
In the Holy Roman Empire, beginning in the 12th century, free imperial cities such as Nuremberg, Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Basel, Zürich, and Nijmegen became a privileged elite among towns having won self-governance from their local lord or having been granted self-governance by the emperor and being placed under his immediate protection. By 1480, these cities, as far as still part of the empire, became part of the Imperial Estates governing the empire with the emperor through the Imperial Diet. [87]
By the 13th and 14th centuries, some cities become powerful states, taking surrounding areas under their control or establishing extensive maritime empires. In Italy, medieval communes developed into city-states including the Republic of Venice and the Republic of Genoa. In Northern Europe, cities including Lübeck and Bruges formed the Hanseatic League for collective defense and commerce. Their power was later challenged and eclipsed by the Dutch commercial cities of Ghent, Ypres, and Amsterdam. [88] [89] Similar phenomena existed elsewhere, as in the case of Sakai, which enjoyed considerable autonomy in late medieval Japan.
In the first millennium AD, the Khmer capital of Angkor in Cambodia grew into the most extensive preindustrial settlement in the world by area, [90] [91] covering over 1,000 km2 and possibly supporting up to one million people. [90] [92]
In the West, nation-states became the dominant unit of political organization following the Peace of Westphalia in the seventeenth century. [93] [94] Western Europe's larger capitals (London and Paris) benefited from the growth of commerce following the emergence of an Atlantic trade. However, most towns remained small.
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 regarding administration, finances, and urbanism.
The growth of the 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. England led the way as London became the capital of a world empire and cities across the country grew in locations strategic for manufacturing. [95] In the United States from 1860 to 1910, the introduction of railroads reduced transportation costs, and large manufacturing centers began to emerge, fueling migration from rural to city areas.
Some industrialized cities were confronted with health challenges associated with overcrowding, occupational hazards of industry, contaminated water and air, poor sanitation, and communicable diseases such as typhoid and cholera. Factories and slums emerged as regular features of the urban landscape. [96]
In the second half of the 20th century, deindustrialization (or " economic restructuring") in the West led to poverty, homelessness, and urban decay in formerly prosperous cities. America's "Steel Belt" became a " Rust Belt" and cities such as Detroit, Michigan, and Gary, Indiana began to shrink, contrary to the global trend of massive urban expansion. [97] Such cities have shifted with varying success into the service economy and public-private partnerships, with concomitant gentrification, uneven revitalization efforts, and selective cultural development. [98] Under the Great Leap Forward and subsequent five-year plans continuing today, China has undergone concomitant urbanization and industrialization and become the world's leading manufacturer. [99] [100]
Amidst these economic changes, high technology and instantaneous telecommunication enable select cities to become centers of the knowledge economy. [101] [102] [103] A new smart city paradigm, supported by institutions such as the RAND Corporation and IBM, is bringing computerized surveillance, data analysis, and governance to bear on cities and city dwellers. [104] Some companies are building brand-new master-planned cities from scratch on greenfield sites.
Urbanization is the process of migration from rural to urban areas, driven by various political, economic, and cultural factors. Until the 18th century, an equilibrium existed between the rural agricultural population and towns featuring markets and small-scale manufacturing. [106] [107] With the agricultural and industrial revolutions urban population began its unprecedented growth, both through migration and demographic expansion. In England, the proportion of the population living in cities jumped from 17% in 1801 to 72% in 1891. [108] In 1900, 15% of the world's population lived in cities. [109] The cultural appeal of cities also plays a role in attracting residents. [110]
Urbanization rapidly spread across Europe and the Americas and since the 1950s has taken hold in Asia and Africa as well. The Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs reported in 2014 that for the first time, more than half of the world population lives in cities. [111] [a]
Latin America is the most urban continent, with four-fifths of its population living in cities, including one-fifth of the population said to live in shantytowns ( favelas, poblaciones callampas, etc.). [118] Batam, Indonesia, Mogadishu, Somalia, Xiamen, China, and Niamey, Niger, are considered among the world's fastest-growing cities, with annual growth rates of 5–8%. [119] In general, the more developed countries of the " Global North" remain more urbanized than the less developed countries of the " Global South"—but the difference continues to shrink because urbanization is happening faster in the latter group. Asia is home to by far the greatest absolute number of city-dwellers: over two billion and counting. [107] The UN predicts an additional 2.5 billion city dwellers (and 300 million fewer country dwellers) worldwide by 2050, with 90% of urban population expansion occurring in Asia and Africa. [111] [120]
Megacities, cities with populations in the multi-millions, have proliferated into the dozens, arising especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. [121] [122] Economic globalization fuels the growth of these cities, as new torrents of foreign capital arrange for rapid industrialization, as well as the relocation of major businesses from Europe and North America, attracting immigrants from near and far. [123] A deep gulf divides the rich and poor in these cities, with usually contain a super-wealthy elite living in gated communities and large masses of people living in substandard housing with inadequate infrastructure and otherwise poor conditions. [124]
Cities around the world have expanded physically as they grow in population, with increases in their surface extent, with the creation of high-rise buildings for residential and commercial use, and with development underground. [125] [126]
Urbanization can create rapid demand for water resources management, as formerly good sources of freshwater become overused and polluted, and the volume of sewage begins to exceed manageable levels. [127]
The local government of cities takes different forms including prominently the municipality (especially in England, in the United States, India, and other British colonies; legally, the municipal corporation; [128] municipio in Spain and Portugal, and, along with municipalidad, in most former parts of the Spanish and Portuguese empires) and the commune ( in France and Chile; or comune in Italy).
The chief official of the city has the title of mayor. Whatever their true degree of political authority, the mayor typically acts as the figurehead or personification of their city. [129]
Legal conflicts and issues arise more frequently in cities than elsewhere due to the bare fact of their greater density. [130] Modern city governments thoroughly regulate everyday life in many dimensions, including public and personal health, transport, burial, resource use and extraction, recreation, and the nature and use of buildings. Technologies, techniques, and laws governing these areas—developed in cities—have become ubiquitous in many areas. [131] Municipal officials may be appointed from a higher level of government or elected locally. [132]
Cities typically provide municipal services such as education, through school systems; policing, through police departments; and firefighting, through fire departments; as well as the city's basic infrastructure. These are provided more or less routinely, in a more or less equal fashion. [133] [134] Responsibility for administration usually falls on the city government, but some services may be operated by a higher level of government, [135] while others may be privately run. [136] Armies may assume responsibility for policing cities in states of domestic turmoil such as America's King assassination riots of 1968.
The traditional basis for municipal finance is local property tax levied on real estate within the city. Local government can also collect revenue for services, or by leasing land that it owns. [137] However, financing municipal services, as well as urban renewal and other development projects, is a perennial problem, which cities address through appeals to higher governments, arrangements with the private sector, and techniques such as privatization (selling services into the private sector), corporatization (formation of quasi-private municipally-owned corporations), and financialization (packaging city assets into tradeable financial public contracts and other related rights). This situation has become acute in deindustrialized cities and in cases where businesses and wealthier citizens have moved outside of city limits and therefore beyond the reach of taxation. [138] [139] [140] [141] Cities in search of ready cash increasingly resort to the municipal bond, essentially a loan with interest and a repayment date. [142] City governments have also begun to use tax increment financing, in which a development project is financed by loans based on future tax revenues which it is expected to yield. [141] Under these circumstances, creditors and consequently city governments place a high importance on city credit ratings. [143]
Governance includes government but refers to a wider domain of social control functions implemented by many actors including non-governmental organizations. [144] The impact of globalization and the role of multinational corporations in local governments worldwide, has led to a shift in perspective on urban governance, away from the "urban regime theory" in which a coalition of local interests functionally govern, toward a theory of outside economic control, widely associated in academics with the philosophy of neoliberalism. [145] In the neoliberal model of governance, public utilities are privatized, the industry is deregulated, and corporations gain the status of governing actors—as indicated by the power they wield in public-private partnerships and over business improvement districts, and in the expectation of self-regulation through corporate social responsibility. The biggest investors and real estate developers act as the city's de facto urban planners. [146]
The related concept of good governance places more emphasis on the state, with the purpose of assessing urban governments for their suitability for development assistance. [147] The concepts of governance and good governance are especially invoked in emergent megacities, where international organizations consider existing governments inadequate for their large populations. [148]
Urban planning, the application of forethought to city design, involves optimizing land use, transportation, utilities, and other basic systems, in order to achieve certain objectives. Urban planners and scholars have proposed overlapping theories as ideals for how plans should be formed. Planning tools, beyond the original design of the city itself, include public capital investment in infrastructure and land-use controls such as zoning. The continuous process of comprehensive planning involves identifying general objectives as well as collecting data to evaluate progress and inform future decisions. [150] [151]
Government is legally the final authority on planning but in practice, the process involves both public and private elements. The legal principle of eminent domain is used by the government to divest citizens of their property in cases where its use is required for a project. [151] Planning often involves tradeoffs—decisions in which some stand to gain and some to lose—and thus is closely connected to the prevailing political situation. [152]
The history of urban planning dates to some of the earliest known cities, especially in the Indus Valley and Mesoamerican civilizations, which built their cities on grids and apparently zoned different areas for different purposes. [24] [153] The effects of planning, ubiquitous in today's world, can be seen most clearly in the layout of planned communities, fully designed prior to construction, often with consideration for interlocking physical, economic, and cultural systems.
Urban society is typically stratified. Spatially, cities are formally or informally segregated along ethnic, economic, and racial lines. People living relatively close together may live, work, and play in separate areas, and associate with different people, forming ethnic or lifestyle enclaves or, in areas of concentrated poverty, ghettoes. While in the US and elsewhere poverty became associated with the inner city, in France it has become associated with the banlieues, areas of urban development that surround the city proper. Meanwhile, across Europe and North America, the racially white majority is empirically the most segregated group. Suburbs in the West, and, increasingly, gated communities and other forms of "privatopia" around the world, allow local elites to self-segregate into secure and exclusive neighborhoods. [154]
Landless urban workers, contrasted with peasants and known as the proletariat, form a growing stratum of society in the age of urbanization. In Marxist doctrine, the proletariat will inevitably revolt against the bourgeoisie as their ranks swell with disenfranchised and disaffected people lacking all stake[ clarification needed] in the status quo. [155] The global urban proletariat of today, however, generally lacks the status of factory workers which in the nineteenth century provided access to the means of production. [156]
Historically, cities rely on rural areas for intensive farming to yield surplus crops, in exchange for which they provide money, political administration, manufactured goods, and culture. [35] [36] Urban economics tends to analyze larger agglomerations, stretching beyond city limits, in order to reach a more complete understanding of the local labor market. [157]
As hubs of trade, cities have long been home to retail commerce and consumption through the interface of shopping. In the 20th century, department stores using new techniques of advertising, public relations, decoration, and design, transformed urban shopping areas into fantasy worlds encouraging self-expression and escape through consumerism. [158] [159]
In general, the density of cities expedites commerce and facilitates knowledge spillovers, helping people and firms exchange information and generate new ideas. [160] [161] A thicker labor market allows for better skill matching between firms and individuals. Population density enables also sharing of common infrastructure and production facilities; however, in very dense cities, increased crowding and waiting times may lead to some negative effects. [162]
Although manufacturing fueled the growth of cities, many now rely on a tertiary or service economy. The services in question range from tourism, hospitality, entertainment, and housekeeping to grey-collar work in law, financial consulting, and administration. [98] [163]
According to a scientific model of cities by Professor Geoffrey West, with the doubling of a city's size, salaries per capita will generally increase by 15%. [164]
Cities are typically hubs for education and the arts, supporting universities, museums, temples, and other cultural institutions. [25] They feature impressive displays of architecture ranging from small to enormous and ornate to brutal; skyscrapers, providing thousands of offices or homes within a small footprint, and visible from miles away, have become iconic urban features. [166] Cultural elites tend to live in cities, bound together by shared cultural capital, and themselves play some role in governance. [167] By virtue of their status as centers of culture and literacy, cities can be described as the locus of civilization, human history, and social change. [168] [169]
Density makes for effective mass communication and transmission of news, through heralds, printed proclamations, newspapers, and digital media. These communication networks, though still using cities as hubs, penetrate extensively into all populated areas. In the age of rapid communication and transportation, commentators have described urban culture as nearly ubiquitous [22] [170] [171] or as no longer meaningful. [172]
Today, a city's promotion of its cultural activities dovetails with place branding and city marketing, public diplomacy techniques used to inform development strategy; attract businesses, investors, residents, and tourists; and to create shared identity and sense of place within the metropolitan area. [173] [174] [175] [176] Physical inscriptions, plaques, and monuments on display physically transmit a historical context for urban places. [177] Some cities, such as Jerusalem, Mecca, and Rome have indelible religious status and for hundreds of years have attracted pilgrims. Patriotic tourists visit Agra to see the Taj Mahal, or New York City to visit the World Trade Center. Elvis lovers visit Memphis to pay their respects at Graceland. [178] Place brands (which include place satisfaction and place loyalty) have great economic value (comparable to the value of commodity brands) because of their influence on the decision-making process of people thinking about doing business in—"purchasing" (the brand of)—a city. [176]
Bread and circuses among other forms of cultural appeal, attract and entertain the masses. [110] [179] Sports also play a major role in city branding and local identity formation. [180] Cities go to considerable lengths in competing to host the Olympic Games, which bring global attention and tourism. [181] Paris, a city known for its cultural history, is the site of the next Olympics in the summer of 2024. [182]
Cities play a crucial strategic role in warfare due to their economic, demographic, symbolic, and political centrality. For the same reasons, they are targets in asymmetric warfare. Many cities throughout history were founded under military auspices, a great many have incorporated fortifications, and military principles continue to influence urban design. [183] Indeed, war may have served as the social rationale and economic basis for the very earliest cities. [60] [61]
Powers engaged in geopolitical conflict have established fortified settlements as part of military strategies, as in the case of garrison towns, America's Strategic Hamlet Program during the Vietnam War, and Israeli settlements in Palestine. [184] While occupying the Philippines, the US Army ordered local people to concentrate in cities and towns, in order to isolate committed insurgents and battle freely against them in the countryside. [185] [186]
During World War II, national governments on occasion declared certain cities open, effectively surrendering them to an advancing enemy in order to avoid damage and bloodshed. Urban warfare proved decisive, however, in the Battle of Stalingrad, where Soviet forces repulsed German occupiers, with extreme casualties and destruction. In an era of low-intensity conflict and rapid urbanization, cities have become sites of long-term conflict waged both by foreign occupiers and by local governments against insurgency. [156] [187] Such warfare, known as counterinsurgency, involves techniques of surveillance and psychological warfare as well as close combat, [188] and functionally extends modern urban crime prevention, which already uses concepts such as defensible space. [189]
Although capture is the more common objective, warfare has in some cases spelled complete destruction for a city. Mesopotamian tablets and ruins attest to such destruction, [190] as does the Latin motto Carthago delenda est. [191] [192] Since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and throughout the Cold War, nuclear strategists continued to contemplate the use of " counter-value" targeting: crippling an enemy by annihilating its valuable cities, rather than aiming primarily at its military forces. [193] [194]
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Because of the high density and effects like the urban heat island affect, weather changes due to climate change are likely to greatly effect cities, [206] exacerbating existing problems, such as air pollution, water scarcity, [207] and heat illness in the metropolitan areas. Moreover, because most cities have been built on rivers or coastal areas, cities are frequently vulnerable to the subsequent effects of sea level rise, which cause flooding [206] and erosion, and those effects are deeply connected with other urban environmental problems, like subsidence and aquifer depletion.
A report by the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group described consumption based emissions as having significantly more impact than production-based emissions within cities. The report estimates that 85% of the emissions associated with goods within a city is generated outside of that city. [208] Climate change adaptation and mitigation investments in cities will be important in reducing the impacts of some of the largest contributors of greenhouse gas emissions: for example, increased density allows for redistribution of land use for agriculture and reforestation, improving transportation efficiencies, and greening construction ( largely due to cement's outsized role in climate change and improvements in sustainable construction practices and weatherization).
In the most recent past, increasing urbanization has also been proposed as a phenomenon that has a reducing effect on the global rate of carbon emission primarily because with urbanization comes technical prowess which can help drive sustainability. [209] Lists of high impact climate change solutions tend to include city-focused solutions; for example, Project Drawdown recommends several major urban investments, including improved bicycle infrastructure, [210] building retrofitting, [211] district heating, [212] public transit, [213] and walkable cities as important solutions. [214]
Because of this, the international community has formed coalitions of cities (such as the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and ICLEI) and policy goals, such as Sustainable Development Goal 11 ("sustainable cities and communities"), to activate and focus attention on these solutions. Currently, in 2022, there is a deterioration in the progress of the goal. There is limited progress on making cities and human settlements more appropriate to live in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and the Pacific Island countries. There is fair progress in Central and Southern Asia and Eastern and South-Eastern Asian. However, it has been achieved in Developed countries. [215]
Urban infrastructure involves various physical networks and spaces necessary for transportation, water use, energy, recreation, and public functions. [216] Infrastructure carries a high initial cost in fixed capital but lower marginal costs and thus positive economies of scale. [217] Because of the higher barriers to entry, these networks have been classified as natural monopolies, meaning that economic logic favors control of each network by a single organization, public or private. [127] [218]
Infrastructure in general plays a vital role in a city's capacity for economic activity and expansion, underpinning the very survival of the city's inhabitants, as well as technological, commercial, industrial, and social activities. [216] [217] Structurally, many infrastructure systems take the form of networks with redundant links and multiple pathways, so that the system as a whole continue to operate even if parts of it fail. [218] The particulars of a city's infrastructure systems have historical path dependence because new development must build from what exists already. [217]
Megaprojects such as the construction of airports, power plants, and railways require large upfront investments and thus tend to require funding from the national government or the private sector. [219] [218] Privatization may also extend to all levels of infrastructure construction and maintenance. [220]
Urban infrastructure ideally serves all residents equally but in practice may prove uneven—with, in some cities, clear first-class and second-class alternatives. [134] [221] [127]
Public utilities (literally, useful things with general availability) include basic and essential infrastructure networks, chiefly concerned with the supply of water, electricity, and telecommunications capability to the populace. [222]
Sanitation, necessary for good health in crowded conditions, requires water supply and waste management as well as individual hygiene. Urban water systems include principally a water supply network and a network ( sewerage system) for sewage and stormwater. Historically, either local governments or private companies have administered urban water supply, with a tendency toward government water supply in the 20th century and a tendency toward private operation at the turn of the twenty-first. [127] [b] The market for private water services is dominated by two French companies, Veolia Water (formerly Vivendi) and Engie (formerly Suez), said to hold 70% of all water contracts worldwide. [127] [224]
Modern urban life relies heavily on the energy transmitted through electricity for the operation of electric machines (from household appliances to industrial machines to now-ubiquitous electronic systems used in communications, business, and government) and for traffic lights, street lights, and indoor lighting. Cities rely to a lesser extent on hydrocarbon fuels such as gasoline and natural gas for transportation, heating, and cooking. Telecommunications infrastructure such as telephone lines and coaxial cables also traverse cities, forming dense networks for mass and point-to-point communications. [225]
Because cities rely on specialization and an economic system based on wage labor, their inhabitants must have the ability to regularly travel between home, work, commerce, and entertainment. [226] City dwellers travel by foot or by wheel on roads and walkways, or use special rapid transit systems based on underground, overground, and elevated rail. Cities also rely on long-distance transportation (truck, rail, and airplane) for economic connections with other cities and rural areas. [227]
City streets historically were the domain of horses and their riders and pedestrians, who only sometimes had sidewalks and special walking areas reserved for them. [228] In the West, bicycles or ( velocipedes), efficient human-powered machines for short- and medium-distance travel, [229] enjoyed a period of popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century before the rise of automobiles. [230] Soon after, they gained a more lasting foothold in Asian and African cities under European influence. [231] In Western cities, industrializing, expanding, and electrifying public transit systems, and especially streetcars enabled urban expansion as new residential neighborhoods sprung up along transit lines and workers rode to and from work downtown. [227] [232]
Since the mid-20th century, cities have relied heavily on motor vehicle transportation, with major implications for their layout, environment, and aesthetics. [233] (This transformation occurred most dramatically in the US—where corporate and governmental policies favored automobile transport systems—and to a lesser extent in Europe.) [227] [232] The rise of personal cars accompanied the expansion of urban economic areas into much larger metropolises, subsequently creating ubiquitous traffic issues with the accompanying construction of new highways, wider streets, and alternative walkways for pedestrians. [234] [235] [236] [174] However, severe traffic jams still occur regularly in cities around the world, as private car ownership and urbanization continue to increase, overwhelming existing urban street networks. [137]
The urban bus system, the world's most common form of public transport, uses a network of scheduled routes to move people through the city, alongside cars, on the roads. [237] The economic function itself also became more decentralized as concentration became impractical and employers relocated to more car-friendly locations (including edge cities). [227] Some cities have introduced bus rapid transit systems which include exclusive bus lanes and other methods for prioritizing bus traffic over private cars. [137] [238] Many big American cities still operate conventional public transit by rail, as exemplified by the ever-popular New York City Subway system. Rapid transit is widely used in Europe and has increased in Latin America and Asia. [137]
Walking and cycling ("non-motorized transport") enjoy increasing favor (more pedestrian zones and bike lanes) in American and Asian urban transportation planning, under the influence of such trends as the Healthy Cities movement, the drive for sustainable development, and the idea of a carfree city. [137] [239] [240] Techniques such as road space rationing and road use charges have been introduced to limit urban car traffic. [137]
The housing of residents presents one of the major challenges every city must face. Adequate housing entails not only physical shelters but also the physical systems necessary to sustain life and economic activity. [241]
Homeownership represents status and a modicum of economic security, compared to renting which may consume much of the income of low-wage urban workers. Homelessness, or lack of housing, is a challenge currently faced by millions of people in countries rich and poor. [242] Because cities generally have higher population densities than rural areas, city dwellers are more likely to reside in apartments and less likely to live in a single-family home.
Urban ecosystems, influenced as they are by the density of human buildings and activities, differ considerably from those of their rural surroundings. Anthropogenic buildings and waste, as well as cultivation in gardens, create physical and chemical environments which have no equivalents in the wilderness, in some cases enabling exceptional biodiversity. They provide homes not only for immigrant humans but also for immigrant plants, bringing about interactions between species that never previously encountered each other. They introduce frequent disturbances (construction, walking) to plant and animal habitats, creating opportunities for recolonization and thus favoring young ecosystems with r-selected species dominant. On the whole, urban ecosystems are less complex and productive than others, due to the diminished absolute amount of biological interactions. [243] [244] [245] [246]
Typical urban fauna includes insects (especially ants), rodents ( mice, rats), and birds, as well as cats and dogs ( domesticated and feral). Large predators are scarce. [245] However, in North America, large predators such as coyotes and other large animals like white-tailed deer persist. [247]
Cities generate considerable ecological footprints, locally and at longer distances, due to concentrated populations and technological activities. From one perspective, cities are not ecologically sustainable due to their resource needs. From another, proper management may be able to ameliorate a city's ill effects. [248] [249] Air pollution arises from various forms of combustion, [250] including fireplaces, wood or coal-burning stoves, other heating systems, [251] and internal combustion engines. Industrialized cities, and today third-world megacities, are notorious for veils of smog (industrial haze) that envelop them, posing a chronic threat to the health of their millions of inhabitants. [252] Urban soil contains higher concentrations of heavy metals (especially lead, copper, and nickel) and has lower pH than soil in the comparable wilderness. [245]
Modern cities are known for creating their own microclimates, due to concrete, asphalt, and other artificial surfaces, which heat up in sunlight and channel rainwater into underground ducts. The temperature in New York City exceeds nearby rural temperatures by an average of 2–3 °C and at times 5–10 °C differences have been recorded. This effect varies nonlinearly with population changes (independently of the city's physical size). [245] [253] Aerial particulates increase rainfall by 5–10%. Thus, urban areas experience unique climates, with earlier flowering and later leaf dropping than in nearby countries. [245]
Poor and working-class people face disproportionate exposure to environmental risks (known as environmental racism when intersecting also with racial segregation). For example, within the urban microclimate, less-vegetated poor neighborhoods bear more of the heat (but have fewer means of coping with it). [254]
One of the main methods of improving the urban ecology is including in the cities more urban green spaces: parks, gardens, lawns, and trees. [255] [256] These areas improve the health and well-being of the human, animal, and plant populations of the cities. [257] Well-maintained urban trees can provide many social, ecological, and physical benefits to the residents of the city. [258]
A study published in Nature's Scientific Reports journal in 2019 found that people who spent at least two hours per week in nature were 23 percent more likely to be satisfied with their life and were 59 percent more likely to be in good health than those who had zero exposure. The study used data from almost 20,000 people in the UK. Benefits increased for up to 300 minutes of exposure. The benefits are applied to men and women of all ages, as well as across different ethnicities, socioeconomic statuses, and even those with long-term illnesses and disabilities. People who did not get at least two hours – even if they surpassed an hour per week – did not get the benefits. The study is the latest addition to a compelling body of evidence for the health benefits of nature. Many doctors already give nature prescriptions to their patients. The study didn't count time spent in a person's own yard or garden as time in nature, but the majority of nature visits in the study took place within two miles of home. "Even visiting local urban green spaces seems to be a good thing," Dr. White said in a press release. "Two hours a week is hopefully a realistic target for many people, especially given that it can be spread over an entire week to get the benefit." [259] [260]
As the world becomes more closely linked through economics, politics, technology, and culture (a process called globalization), cities have come to play a leading role in transnational affairs, exceeding the limitations of international relations conducted by national governments. [261] [262] [263] This phenomenon, resurgent today, can be traced back to the Silk Road, Phoenicia, and the Greek city-states, through the Hanseatic League and other alliances of cities. [264] [161] [265] Today the information economy based on high-speed internet infrastructure enables instantaneous telecommunication around the world, effectively eliminating the distance between cities for the purposes of the international markets and other high-level elements of the world economy, as well as personal communications and mass media. [266]
A global city, also known as a world city, is a prominent centre of trade, banking, finance, innovation, and markets. [267] [268] Saskia Sassen used the term "global city" in her 1991 work, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo to refer to a city's power, status, and cosmopolitanism, rather than to its size. [269] Following this view of cities, it is possible to rank the world's cities hierarchically. [270] Global cities form the capstone of the global hierarchy, exerting command and control through their economic and political influence. Global cities may have reached their status due to early transition to post-industrialism [271] or through inertia which has enabled them to maintain their dominance from the industrial era. [272] This type of ranking exemplifies an emerging discourse in which cities, considered variations on the same ideal type, must compete with each other globally to achieve prosperity. [181] [174]
Critics of the notion point to the different realms of power and interchange. The term "global city" is heavily influenced by economic factors and, thus, may not account for places that are otherwise significant. Paul James, for example argues that the term is "reductive and skewed" in its focus on financial systems. [273]
Multinational corporations and banks make their headquarters in global cities and conduct much of their business within this context. [274] American firms dominate the international markets for law and engineering and maintain branches in the biggest foreign global cities. [275]
Large cities have a great divide between populations of both ends of the financial spectrum. [276] Regulations on immigration promote the exploitation of low- and high-skilled immigrant workers from poor areas. [277] [278] [279] During employment, migrant workers may be subject to unfair working conditions, including working overtime, low wages, and lack of safety in workplaces. [280]
Cities increasingly participate in world political activities independently of their enclosing nation-states. Early examples of this phenomenon are the sister city relationship and the promotion of multi-level governance within the European Union as a technique for European integration. [262] [281] [282] Cities including Hamburg, Prague, Amsterdam, The Hague, and City of London maintain their own embassies to the European Union at Brussels. [283] [284] [285]
New urban dwellers are increasingly transmigrants, keeping one foot each (through telecommunications if not travel) in their old and their new homes. [286]
Cities participate in global governance by various means including membership in global networks which transmit norms and regulations. At the general, global level, United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) is a significant umbrella organization for cities; regionally and nationally, Eurocities, Asian Network of Major Cities 21, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities the National League of Cities, and the United States Conference of Mayors play similar roles. [287] [288] UCLG took responsibility for creating Agenda 21 for culture, a program for cultural policies promoting sustainable development, and has organized various conferences and reports for its furtherance. [289]
Networks have become especially prevalent in the arena of environmentalism and specifically climate change following the adoption of Agenda 21. Environmental city networks include the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, the United Nations Global Compact Cities Programme, the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance (CNCA), the Covenant of Mayors and the Compact of Mayors, [290] ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, and the Transition Towns network. [287] [288]
Cities with world political status as meeting places for advocacy groups, non-governmental organizations, lobbyists, educational institutions, intelligence agencies, military contractors, information technology firms, and other groups with a stake in world policymaking. They are consequently also sites for symbolic protest. [161] [c] South Africa has one of the highest rate of protests in the world. Pretoria, a city in South Africa had a rally where 5 thousand people took part in order to advocate for increasing wages to afford living costs. [291]
The United Nations System has been involved in a series of events and declarations dealing with the development of cities during this period of rapid urbanization.
UN-Habitat coordinates the U.N. urban agenda, working with the UN Environmental Programme, the UN Development Programme, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank. [293]
The World Bank, a U.N. specialized agency, has been a primary force in promoting the Habitat conferences, and since the first Habitat conference has used their declarations as a framework for issuing loans for urban infrastructure. [295] The bank's structural adjustment programs contributed to urbanization in the Third World by creating incentives to move to cities. [298] [299] The World Bank and UN-Habitat in 1999 jointly established the Cities Alliance (based at the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C.) to guide policymaking, knowledge sharing, and grant distribution around the issue of urban poverty. [300] (UN-Habitat plays an advisory role in evaluating the quality of a locality's governance.) [147] The Bank's policies have tended to focus on bolstering real estate markets through credit and technical assistance. [301]
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO has increasingly focused on cities as key sites for influencing cultural governance. It has developed various city networks including the International Coalition of Cities against Racism and the Creative Cities Network. UNESCO's capacity to select World Heritage Sites gives the organization significant influence over cultural capital, tourism, and historic preservation funding. [289]
Cities figure prominently in traditional Western culture, appearing in the Bible in both evil and holy forms, symbolized by Babylon and Jerusalem. [302] Cain and Nimrod are the first city builders in the Book of Genesis. In Sumerian mythology Gilgamesh built the walls of Uruk.
Cities can be perceived in terms of extremes or opposites: at once liberating and oppressive, wealthy and poor, organized and chaotic. [303] The name anti-urbanism refers to various types of ideological opposition to cities, whether because of their culture or their political relationship with the country. Such opposition may result from identification of cities with oppression and the ruling elite. [304] This and other political ideologies strongly influence narratives and themes in discourse about cities. [19] In turn, cities symbolize their home societies. [305]
Writers, painters, and filmmakers have produced innumerable works of art concerning the urban experience. Classical and medieval literature includes a genre of descriptiones which treat of city features and history. Modern authors such as Charles Dickens and James Joyce are famous for evocative descriptions of their home cities. [306] Fritz Lang conceived the idea for his influential 1927 film Metropolis while visiting Times Square and marveling at the nighttime neon lighting. [307] Other early cinematic representations of cities in the twentieth century generally depicted them as technologically efficient spaces with smoothly functioning systems of automobile transport. By the 1960s, however, traffic congestion began to appear in such films as The Fast Lady (1962) and Playtime (1967). [233]
Literature, film, and other forms of popular culture have supplied visions of future cities both utopian and dystopian. The prospect of expanding, communicating, and increasingly interdependent world cities has given rise to images such as Nylonkong (New York, London, Hong Kong) [308] and visions of a single world-encompassing ecumenopolis. [309]
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Southern Mesopotamia was a land of cities. It became one precociously, before the end of the fourth millennium B.C. Urban traditions remained strong and virtually continuous through the vicissitudes of conquest, internal upheaval accompanied by widespread economic breakdown, and massive linguistic and population replacement. The symbolic and material content of civilization obviously changed, but its cultural ambience remained tied to cities.
TIF is an increasingly popular local redevelopment policy that allows municipalities to designate a 'blighted' area for redevelopment and use the expected increase in property (and occasionally sales) taxes there to pay for initial and ongoing redevelopment expenditures, such as land acquisition, demolition, construction, and project financing. Because developers require cash up-front, cities transform promises of future tax revenues into securities that far-flung buyers and sellers exchange through local markets.
A city's credit rating not only influences its ability to sell bonds, but has become a general signal of fiscal health. Detroit's partial recovery in the early 1990s, for example, was reversed when Moody's downgraded the rating of the city's general obligation bonds, precipitating new rounds of capital flight (Hackworth, 2007). The need to maintain a high credit rating constrains municipal actors by making it difficult to finance discretionary projects in traditional ways.
Beneath state-to-state dealings, a flurry of activity occurs, with interpersonal networks forming policy communities involving embassies, think tanks, academic institutions, lobbying firms, politicians, congressional staff, research centers, NGOs, and intelligence agencies. This interaction at the level of 'technostructure'—heavily oriented toward information gathering and incremental policy modification—is too complex and voluminous to be monitored by top leadership, yet nevertheless often has important implications for policy.
As noted above, nuclear weapons designed for countervalue or city-killing purposes tend to be of the strategic class, with known yields of deployed warheads averaging somewhere between two and three times and 1500 times the firepower of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Against those writers who, by emphasizing the importance of financial exchange systems, distinguish a few special cities as 'global cities'—commonly London, Paris, New York and Tokyo—we recognize the uneven global dimensions of all the cities that we study. Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood, is a globalizing city, though perhaps more significantly in cultural than economic terms. And so is Dili globalizing, the small and 'insignificant' capital of Timor Leste—except this time it is predominantly in political terms...
And not withstanding some major world cities that do not have comparatively high levels of immigration, like Tokyo, it may in fact be the presence of such large-scale immigrant economic 'communities' (with their attendant global financial remittances and their ability to incubate small business growth, rather than their complementarity to producer services employment) which partially distinguishes mega-cities from other more nationally oriented urban centres.
These apparently rather different takes on London's 'global city' status are of course not so far removed from one another as they may first appear. Holding them together is the figure of the migrant worker. The reliance of London's financial institutions and business services industries on the continuing flow of highly skilled labour from overseas is now well known (Beaverstock and Smith 1996). Less well known is the extent to which London's economy as a whole is now dependent upon the labour power of low-paid workers from across the world.
Garnered by its interest in the urban poor the Bank, along with other international donors, became an active and influential participant in the Habitat deliberations, confirming both Habitat I and Habitat II's focus on 'development in cities' instead of the role of 'cities in development'.
A country is a distinct part of the world, such as a state, nation, or other political entity. When referring to a specific polity, the term "country" may refer to a sovereign state, states with limited recognition, constituent country, or a dependent territory. [1] [2] [3] [4] Most sovereign states, but not all countries, are members of the United Nations. [5] There is no universal agreement on the number of "countries" in the world since several states have disputed sovereignty status, limited recognition and a number of non-sovereign entities are commonly called countries. [6] [5]
The definition and usage of the word "country" are flexible and has changed over time. The Economist wrote in 2010 that "any attempt to find a clear definition of a country soon runs into a thicket of exceptions and anomalies." [7]
Areas much smaller than a political entity may be referred to as a "country", such as the West Country in England, "big sky country" (used in various contexts of the American West), "coal country" (used to describe coal-mining regions), or simply "the country" (used to describe a rural area). [8] [9] The term "country" is also used as a qualifier descriptively, such as country music or country living. [10]
The word country comes from Old French contrée, which derives from Vulgar Latin (terra) contrata ("(land) lying opposite"; "(land) spread before"), derived from contra ("against, opposite"). It most likely entered the English language after the Franco-Norman invasion during the 11th century. [11][ better source needed]
In English the word has increasingly become associated with political divisions, so that one sense, associated with the indefinite article – "a country" – is now frequently applied as a synonym for a state or a former sovereign state. It may also be used as a synonym for "nation". Taking as examples Canada, Sri Lanka, and Yugoslavia, cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in 1997 that "it is clear that the relationships between 'country' and 'nation' are so different from one [place] to the next as to be impossible to fold into a dichotomous opposition as they are into a promiscuous fusion." [12]
Areas much smaller than a political state may be referred to as countries, such as the West Country in England, "big sky country" (used in various contexts of the American West), "coal country" (used to describe coal-mining regions in several sovereign states) and many other terms. [8] The word "country" is also used for the sense of native sovereign territory, such as the widespread use of Indian country in the United States. [13] The term "country" in English may also be wielded to describe rural areas, or used in the form "countryside." Raymond Williams, a Welsh scholar, wrote in 1975: [14]
'Country' and 'city' are very powerful words, and this is not surprising when we remember how much they seem to stand for in the experience of human communities. In English, 'country' is both a nation and a part of a 'land'; 'the country' can be the whole society or its rural area. In the long history of human settlements, this connection between the land from which directly or indirectly we all get our living and the achievements of human society has been deeply known.
The unclear definition of "country" in modern English was further commented upon by philosopher Simon Keller: [15]
Often, a country is presumed to be identical with a collection of citizens. Sometimes, people say that a country is a project, or an idea, or an ideal. Occasionally, philosophers entertain more metaphysically ambitious pictures, suggesting that a country is an organic entity with its own independent life and character, or that a country is an autonomous agent, just like you or me. Such claims are rarely explained or defended, however, and it is not clear how they should be assessed. We attribute so many different kinds of properties to countries, speaking as though a country can feature wheat fields waving or be girt by sea, can have a founding date and be democratic and free, can be English speaking, culturally diverse, war torn or Islamic.
— New Waves In Political Philosophy, "Making Nonsense of Loyalty to Country", page 96
Melissa Lucashenko, an Aboriginal Australian writer, expressed the difficulty of defining "country" in a 2005 essay, "Unsettlement": [16]
...What is this thing country? What does country mean? ... I spoke with others who said country meant Home, but who added the caveat that Home resided in people rather than places – a kind of portable Country... I tried to tease out some ways in which non-Indigenous people have understood country. I made categories: Country as Economy. Country as Geography. Country as Society. Country as Myth. Country as History. For all that I walked, slept, breathed and dreamed Country, the language still would not come.
When referring to a specific polity, the term "country" may refer to a sovereign state, states with limited recognition, constituent country, or a dependent territory. [1] [2] [3] A sovereign state is a political entity that has supreme legitimate authority over a part of the world. [17] There is no universal agreement on the number of "countries" in the world since several states have disputed sovereignty status, and a number of non-sovereign entities are commonly called countries. [5] [6] No definition is binding on all the members of the community of nations on the criteria for statehood. [18] [6] State practice relating to the recognition of a country typically falls somewhere between the declaratory and constitutive approaches. [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] International law defines sovereign states as having a permanent population, defined territory, a government not under another, and the capacity to interact with other states. [24]
The declarative theory outlined in the 1933 Montevideo Convention describes a state in Article 1 as: [25] [26]
The Montevideo Convention in Article 3 implies that a sovereign state can still be a sovereign state even if no other countries recognise that it exists. [25] [27] As a restatement of customary international law, the Montevideo Convention merely codified existing legal norms and its principles, [28] and therefore does not apply merely to the signatories of international organizations (such as the United Nations), [6] [29] [26] but to all subjects of international law as a whole. [30] [31] A similar opinion has been expressed by the European Economic Community, [32] reiterated by the European Union, in the principal statement of its Badinter Committee, [33] and by Judge Challis Professor, James Crawford. [29]
According to the constitutive theory a state is a legal entity of international law if, and only if, it is recognised as sovereign by at least one other country. [34] Because of this, new states could not immediately become part of the international community or be bound by international law, and recognised nations did not have to respect international law in their dealings with them. [35] In 1912, L. F. L. Oppenheim said the following, regarding constitutive theory:
International Law does not say that a State is not in existence as long as it is not recognised, but it takes no notice of it before its recognition. Through recognition only and exclusively a State becomes an International Person and a subject of International Law. [36]
In 1976 the Organisation of African Unity define state recognition as: [37]
..the recognition of an independent and sovereign state is an act of sovereignty pertaining each member of the international community, an act to be taken individually, and it is, therefore, up to member states and each OAU power [to decide] whether to recognise or not the newly independent state.
Some countries, such as Taiwan, Sahrawi Republic and Kosovo have disputed sovereignty and/or limited recognition among some countries. [38] [39] Some sovereign states are unions of separate polities, each of which may also be considered a country in its own right, called constituent countries. The Danish Realm consists of Denmark proper, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland. [40] The Kingdom of the Netherlands consists of the Netherlands proper, Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten. [41] The United Kingdom consists of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. [42]
Dependent territories are the territories of a sovereign state that are outside of its proper territory. These include the overseas territories of New Zealand, the dependencies of Norway, the British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies, the territories of the United States, the external territories of Australia, the special administrative regions of China, the autonomous regions of the Danish Realm, Åland, Overseas France, and the Caribbean Netherlands. Some dependent territories are treated as a separate " country of origin" in international trade, [43] [44] such as Hong Kong, [45] [46] [47] Greenland, [48] and Macau. [49]
Symbols of a country may incorporate cultural, religious or political symbols of any nation that the country includes. Many categories of symbols can be seen in flags, coats of arms, or seals. [50]
Most countries have a long name and a short name. [51] The long name is typically used in formal contexts and often describes the country's form of government. The short name is the country's common name by which it is typically identified. [52] [53] [54] [55] The International Organization for Standardization maintains a list of country codes as part of ISO 3166 to designate each country with a two-letter country code. [56] The name of a country can hold cultural and diplomatic significance. Upper Volta changed its name to Burkina Faso to reflect the end of French colonization, and the name of North Macedonia was disputed for years due to a conflict with the similarly named Macedonia region in Greece. [57] The ISO 3166-1 standard currently comprises 249 countries, 193 of which are sovereign states that are members of the United Nations. [58]
Originally, flags representing a country would generally be the personal flag of its rulers; however, over time, the practice of using personal banners as flags of places was abandoned in favor of flags that had some significance to the nation, often its patron saint. Early examples of these were the maritime republics such as Genoa which could be said to have a national flag as early as the 12th century. [59] However, these were still mostly used in the context of marine identification. [60]
Although some flags date back earlier, widespread use of flags outside of military or naval context begins only with the rise of the idea of the nation state at the end of the 18th century and particularly are a product of the Age of Revolution. Revolutions such as those in France and America called for people to begin thinking of themselves as citizens as opposed to subjects under a king, and thus necessitated flags that represented the collective citizenry, not just the power and right of a ruling family. [61] [62] With nationalism becoming common across Europe in the 19th century, national flags came to represent most of the states of Europe. [61] Flags also began fostering a sense of unity between different peoples, such as the Union Jack representing a union between England and Scotland, or began to represent unity between nations in a perceived shared struggle, for example, the Pan-Slavic colors or later Pan-Arab colors. [63]
As Europeans colonized significant portions of the world, they exported ideas of nationhood and national symbols, including flags, with the adoption of a flag becoming seen as integral to the nation-building process. [64] Political change, social reform, and revolutions combined with a growing sense of nationhood among ordinary people in the 19th and 20th centuries led to the birth of new nations and flags around the globe. [65] With so many flags being created, interest in these designs began to develop and the study of flags, vexillology, at both professional and amateur levels, emerged. After World War II, Western vexillology went through a phase of rapid development, with many research facilities and publications being established. [66]
A national anthem is a patriotic musical composition symbolizing and evoking eulogies of the history and traditions of a country or nation. [68] Though the custom of an officially adopted national anthem became popular only in the 19th century, some national anthems predate this period, often existing as patriotic songs long before designation as national anthem.[ citation needed] Several countries remain without an official national anthem. In these cases, there are established de facto anthems played at sporting events or diplomatic receptions. These include the United Kingdom (" God Save the King") and Sweden ( Du gamla, Du fria). Some sovereign states that are made up of multiple countries or constituencies have associated musical compositions for each of them (such as with the United Kingdom, Russia, and the Soviet Union). These are sometimes referred to as national anthems even though they are not sovereign states (for example, " Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau" is used for Wales, part of the United Kingdom). [69]
A positive emotional connection to a country a person belongs to is called patriotism. Patriotism is a sense of love for, devotion to, and sense of attachment to one's country. This attachment can be a combination of many different feelings, and language relating to one's homeland, including ethnic, cultural, political, or historical aspects. It encompasses a set of concepts closely related to nationalism, mostly civic nationalism and sometimes cultural nationalism. [70] [71]
Several organizations seek to identify trends to produce economy country classifications. Countries are often distinguished as developing countries or developed countries. [72]
The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs annually produces the World Economic Situation and Prospects Report classifies states as developed countries, economies in transition, or developing countries. The report classifies country development based on per capita gross national income (GNI). [73] The UN identifies subgroups within broad categories based on geographical location or ad hoc criteria. The UN outlines the geographical regions for developing economies like Africa, East Asia, South Asia, Western Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The 2019 report recognizes only developed countries in North America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. The majority of economies in transition and developing countries are found in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. [74]
The World Bank also classifies countries based on GNI per capita. The World Bank Atlas method classifies countries as low-income economies, lower-middle-income economies, upper-middle-income economies, or high-income economies. For the 2020 fiscal year, the World Bank defines low-income economies as countries with a GNI per capita of $1,025 or less in 2018; lower-middle-income economies as countries with a GNI per capita between $1,026 and $3,995; upper-middle-income economies as countries with a GNI per capita between $3,996 and $12,375; high-income economies as countries with a GNI per capita of $12,376 or more.. [75]
It also identifies regional trends. The World Bank defines its regions as East Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, North America, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Lastly, the World Bank distinguishes countries based on its operational policies. The three categories include International Development Association (IDA) countries, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) countries, and Blend countries. [75]
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Part of a series on |
Geography |
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Geography (from Ancient Greek γεωγραφία geōgraphía; combining gê 'Earth' and gráphō 'write') is the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. [1] Geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks an understanding of Earth and its human and natural complexities—not merely where objects are, but also how they have changed and come to be. While geography is specific to Earth, many concepts can be applied more broadly to other celestial bodies in the field of planetary science. [2] Geography has been called "a bridge between natural science and social science disciplines." [3]
Origins of many of the concepts in geography can be traced to Greek Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who may have coined the term "geographia" ( c. 276 BC – c. 195/194 BC). [4] The first recorded use of the word γεωγραφία was as the title of a book by Greek scholar Claudius Ptolemy (100 – 170 AD). [1] This work created the so called "Ptolemaic tradition" of geography, which included "Ptolemaic cartographic theory." [5] However, the concepts of geography (such as cartography) date back to the earliest attempts to understand the world spatially, with the earliest example of an attempted world map dating to the 9th century BCE in ancient Babylon. [6] The history of geography as a discipline spans cultures and millennia, being independently developed by multiple groups, and cross-pollinated by trade between these groups. The core concepts of geography consistent between all approaches are a focus on space, place, time, and scale. [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
Today, geography is an extremely broad discipline with multiple approaches and modalities. There have been multiple attempts to organize the discipline, including the four traditions of geography, and into branches. [13] [3] [14] Techniques employed can generally be broken down into quantitative [15] and qualitative [16] approaches, with many studies taking mixed-methods approaches. [17] Common techniques include cartography, remote sensing, interviews, and surveying.
Geography is a systematic study of the Earth (other celestial bodies are specified, such as "geography of Mars", or given another name, such as areography in the case of Mars), its features, and phenomena that take place on it. [18] [19] [20] For something to fall into the domain of geography, it generally needs some sort of spatial component that can be placed on a map, such as coordinates, place names, or addresses. This has led to geography being associated with cartography and place names. Although many geographers are trained in toponymy and cartology, this is not their main preoccupation. Geographers study the Earth's spatial and temporal distribution of phenomena, processes, and features as well as the interaction of humans and their environment. [21] Because space and place affect a variety of topics, such as economics, health, climate, plants, and animals, geography is highly interdisciplinary. The interdisciplinary nature of the geographical approach depends on an attentiveness to the relationship between physical and human phenomena and their spatial patterns. [22]
Names of places...are not geography...To know by heart a whole gazetteer full of them would not, in itself, constitute anyone a geographer. Geography has higher aims than this: it seeks to classify phenomena (alike of the natural and of the political world, in so far as it treats of the latter), to compare, to generalize, to ascend from effects to causes, and, in doing so, to trace out the laws of nature and to mark their influences upon man. This is 'a description of the world'—that is Geography. In a word, Geography is a Science—a thing not of mere names but of argument and reason, of cause and effect. [23]
— William Hughes, 1863
Geography as a discipline can be split broadly into three main branches: human geography, physical geography, and technical geography. [3] [24] Human geography largely focuses on the built environment and how humans create, view, manage, and influence space. [24] Physical geography examines the natural environment and how organisms, climate, soil, water, and landforms produce and interact. [25] The difference between these approaches led to the development of integrated geography, which combines physical and human geography and concerns the interactions between the environment and humans. [21] Technical geography involves studying and developing the tools and techniques used by geographers, such as remote sensing, cartography, and geographic information system. [26]
Narrowing down geography to a few key concepts is extremely challenging, and subject to tremendous debate within the discipline. [27] In one attempt, the 1st edition of the book "Key Concepts in Geography" broke down this into chapters focusing on "Space," "Place," "Time," "Scale," and "Landscape." [28] The 2nd edition of the book expanded on these key concepts by adding "Environmental systems," "Social Systems," "Nature," " Globalization," "Development," and "Risk," demonstrating how challenging narrowing the field can be. [27]
Another approach used extensively in teaching geography are the Five themes of geography established by "Guidelines for Geographic Education: Elementary and Secondary Schools," published jointly by the National Council for Geographic Education and the Association of American Geographers in 1984. [29] [30] These themes are Location, place, relationships within places (often summarized as Human-Environment Interaction), movement, and regions [30] [31] The five themes of geography have shaped how American education approaches the topic in the years since. [30] [31]
Just as all phenomena exist in time and thus have a history, they also exist in space and have a geography. [32]
For something to exist in the realm of geography, it must be able to be described spatially. [32] [33] Thus, space is the most fundamental concept at the foundation of geography. [7] [8] The concept is so basic, that geographers often have difficulty defining exactly what it is. Absolute space is the exact site, or spatial coordinates, of objects, persons, places, or phenomena under investigation. [7] We exist in space. [9] Absolute space leads to the view of the world as a photograph, with everything frozen in place when the coordinates were recorded. Today, geographers are trained to recognize the world as a dynamic space where all processes interact and take place, rather than a static image on a map. [7] [34]
Place is one of the most complex and important terms in geography. [9] [10] [11] [12] In human geography, place is the synthesis of the coordinates on the Earth's surface, the activity and use that occurs, has occurred, and will occur at the coordinates, and the meaning ascribed to the space by human individuals and groups. [33] [11] This can be extraordinarily complex, as different spaces may have different uses at different times and mean different things to different people. In physical geography, a place includes all of the physical phenomena that occur in space, including the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. [12] Places do not exist in a vacuum and instead have complex spatial relationships with each other, and place is concerned how a location is situated in relation to all other locations. [35] [36] As a discipline then, the term place in geography includes all spatial phenomena occurring at a location, the diverse uses and meanings humans ascribe to that location, and how that location impacts and is impacted by all other locations on Earth. [11] [12] In one of Yi-Fu Tuan's papers, he explains that in his view, geography is the study of Earth as a home for humanity, and thus place and the complex meaning behind the term is central to the discipline of geography. [10]
Time is usually thought to be within the domain of history, however, it is of significant concern in the discipline of geography. [37] [38] [39] In physics, space and time are not separated, and are combined into the concept of spacetime. [40] Geography is subject to the laws of physics, and in studying things that occur in space, time must be considered. Time in geography is more than just the historical record of events that occurred at various discrete coordinates; but also includes modeling the dynamic movement of people, organisms, and things through space. [9] Time facilitates movement through space, ultimately allowing things to flow through a system. [37] The amount of time an individual, or group of people, spends in a place will often shape their attachment and perspective to that place. [9] Time constrains the possible paths that can be taken through space, given a starting point, possible routes, and rate of travel. [41] Visualizing time over space is challenging in terms of cartography, and includes Space-Prism, advanced 3D geovisualizations, and animated maps. [35] [41] [42] [34]
Scale in the context of a map is the ratio between a distance measured on the map and the corresponding distance as measured on the ground. [2] [43] This concept is fundamental to the discipline of geography, not just cartography, in that phenomena being investigated appear different depending on the scale used. [44] [45] Scale is the frame that geographers use to measure space, and ultimately to try and understand a place. [43]
During the quantitative revolution, geography shifted to an empirical law-making ( nomothetic) approach. [46] [47] Several laws of geography have been proposed since then, most notably by Waldo Tobler and can be viewed as a product of the quantitative revolution. [48] In general, some dispute the entire concept of laws in geography and the social sciences. [35] [49] [50] These criticisms have been addressed by Tobler and others, such as Michael Frank Goodchild. [49] [50] However, this is an ongoing source of debate in geography and is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. Several laws have been proposed, and Tobler's first law of geography is the most generally accepted in geography. Some have argued that geographic laws do not need to be numbered. The existence of a first invites a second, and many have proposed themselves as that. It has also been proposed that Tobler's first law of geography should be moved to the second and replaced with another. [50] A few of the proposed laws of geography are below:
Additionally, several variations or amendments to these laws exist within the literature, although not as well supported. For example, one paper proposed an amendmended version of Tobler's first law of geography, referred to in the text as the Tobler–von Thünen law, [48] which states: "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things, as a consequence of accessibility." [Note 1] [48]
Geography is a branch of inquiry that focuses on spatial information on Earth. It is an extremely broad topic and can be broken down multiple ways. [14] There have been several approaches to doing this spanning at least several centuries, including "four traditions of geography" and into distinct branches. [56] [13] The Four traditions of geography are often used to divide the different historical approaches theories geographers have taken to the discipline. [13] In contrast, geography's branches describe contemporary applied geographical approaches. [3]
Geography is an extremely broad field. Because of this, many view the various definitions of geography proposed over the decades as inadequate. To address this, William D. Pattison proposed the concept of the "Four traditions of Geography" in 1964. [13] [57] [58] These traditions are the Spatial or Locational Tradition, the Man-Land or Human-Environment Interaction Tradition (sometimes referred to as Integrated geography), the Area Studies or Regional Tradition, and the Earth Science Tradition. [13] [57] [58] These concepts are broad sets of geography philosophies bound together within the discipline. They are one of many ways geographers organize the major sets of thoughts and philosophies within the discipline. [13] [57] [58]
In another approach to the abovementioned four traditions, geography is organized into applied branches. [59] [60] The UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems organizes geography into the three categories of human geography, physical geography, and technical geography. [3] [61] [59] [14] Some publications limit the number of branches to physical and human, describing them as the principal branches. [33] Geographers rarely focus on just one of these topics, often using one as their primary focus and then incorporating data and methods from the other branches. Often, geographers are asked to describe what they do by individuals outside the discipline [10] and are likely to identify closely with a specific branch, or sub-branch when describing themselves to lay people. Human geography studies people and their communities, cultures, economies, and environmental interactions by studying their relations with and across space and place. [33] Physical geography is concerned with the study of processes and patterns in the natural environment like the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and geosphere. [33] Technical geography is interested in studying and applying techniques and methods to store, process, analyze, visualize, and use spatial data. [60] It is the newest of the branches, the most controversial, and often other terms are used in the literature to describe the emerging category. These branches use similar geographic philosophies, concepts, and tools and often overlap significantly.
Physical geography (or physiography) focuses on geography as an Earth science. [62] [63] [64] It aims to understand the physical problems and the issues of lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, pedosphere, and global flora and fauna patterns ( biosphere). Physical geography is the study of earth's seasons, climate, atmosphere, soil, streams, landforms, and oceans. [65] Physical geographers will often work in identifying and monitoring the use of natural resources.
Human geography (or anthropogeography) is a branch of geography that focuses on studying patterns and processes that shape human society. [66] It encompasses the human, political, cultural, social, and economic aspects. In industry, human geographers often work in city planning, public health, or business analysis.
Various approaches to the study of human geography have also arisen through time and include:
Technical geography concerns studying and developing tools, techniques, and statistical methods employed to collect, analyze, use, and understand spatial data. [26] [3] [59] [61] Technical geography is the most recently recognized, and controversial, of the branches. Its use dates back to 1749, when a book published by Edward Cave organized the discipline into a section containing content such as cartographic techniques and globes. [56] There are several other terms, often used interchangeably with technical geography to subdivide the discipline, including "techniques of geographic analysis," [67] "Geographic Information Technology," [1] "Geography method's and techniques," [68] " Geographic Information Science," [69] " geoinformatics," " geomatics," and "information geography". There are subtle differences to each concept and term; however, technical geography is one of the broadest, is consistent with the naming convention of the other two branches, has been in use since the 1700s, and has been used by the UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems to divide geography into themes. [3] [59] [56] As academic fields increasingly specialize in their nature, technical geography has emerged as a branch of geography specializing in geographic methods and thought. [26] The emergence of technical geography has brought new relevance to the broad discipline of geography by serving as a set of unique methods for managing the interdisciplinary nature of the phenomena under investigation. While human and physical geographers use the techniques employed by technical geographers, technical geography is more concerned with the fundamental spatial concepts and technologies than the nature of the data. [26] [60] It is therefore closely associated with the spatial tradition of geography while being applied to the other two major branches. A technical geographer might work as a GIS analyst, a GIS developer working to make new software tools, or create general reference maps incorporating human and natural features. [70]
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All geographic research and analysis start with asking the question "where," followed by "why there." Geographers start with the fundamental assumption set forth in Tobler's first law of geography, that "everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." [35] [36] As spatial interrelationships are key to this synoptic science, maps are a key tool. Classical cartography has been joined by a more modern approach to geographical analysis, computer-based geographic information systems (GIS).
In their study, geographers use four interrelated approaches:
Quantitative methods in geography became particularly influential in the discipline during the quantitative revolution of the 1950s and 60s. [15] These methods revitalized the discipline in many ways, allowing scientific testing of hypotheses and proposing scientific geographic theories and laws. [71] The quantitative revolution heavily influenced and revitalized technical geography, and lead to the development of the subfield of quantitative geography. [26] [15]
Cartography is the art, science, and technology of making maps. [72] Cartographers study the Earth's surface representation with abstract symbols (map making). Although other subdisciplines of geography rely on maps for presenting their analyses, the actual making of maps is abstract enough to be regarded separately. [73] Cartography has grown from a collection of drafting techniques into an actual science.
Cartographers must learn cognitive psychology and ergonomics to understand which symbols convey information about the Earth most effectively and behavioural psychology to induce the readers of their maps to act on the information. They must learn geodesy and fairly advanced mathematics to understand how the shape of the Earth affects the distortion of map symbols projected onto a flat surface for viewing. It can be said, without much controversy, that cartography is the seed from which the larger field of geography grew.
Geographic information systems (GIS) deal with storing information about the Earth for automatic retrieval by a computer in an accurate manner appropriate to the information's purpose. [74] In addition to all of the other subdisciplines of geography, GIS specialists must understand computer science and database systems. GIS has revolutionized the field of cartography: nearly all mapmaking is now done with the assistance of some form of GIS software. The science of using GIS software and GIS techniques to represent, analyse, and predict the spatial relationships is called geographic information science (GISc). [75]
Remote sensing is the art, science, and technology of obtaining information about Earth's features from measurements made at a distance. [76] Remotely sensed data can be either passive, such as traditional photography, or active, such as LiDAR. [76] A variety of platforms can be used for remote sensing, including satellite imagery, aerial photography (including consumer drones), and data obtained from hand-held sensors. [76] Products from remote sensing include Digital elevation model and cartographic base maps. Geographers increasingly use remotely sensed data to obtain information about the Earth's land surface, ocean, and atmosphere, because it: (a) supplies objective information at a variety of spatial scales (local to global), (b) provides a synoptic view of the area of interest, (c) allows access to distant and inaccessible sites, (d) provides spectral information outside the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and (e) facilitates studies of how features/areas change over time. Remotely sensed data may be analyzed independently or in conjunction with other digital data layers (e.g., in a geographic information system). Remote sensing aids in land use, land cover (LULC) mapping, by helping to determine both what is naturally occurring on a piece of land and what human activities are taking place on it. [77]
Geostatistics deal with quantitative data analysis, specifically the application of a statistical methodology to the exploration of geographic phenomena. [78] Geostatistics is used extensively in a variety of fields, including hydrology, geology, petroleum exploration, weather analysis, urban planning, logistics, and epidemiology. The mathematical basis for geostatistics derives from cluster analysis, linear discriminant analysis and non-parametric statistical tests, and a variety of other subjects. Applications of geostatistics rely heavily on geographic information systems, particularly for the interpolation (estimate) of unmeasured points. Geographers are making notable contributions to the method of quantitative techniques.
Qualitative methods geography in geography are descriptive rather than numerical or statistical in nature. [79] [16] [46] They add context to concepts, and explore human concepts like beliefs and perspective that are difficult or impossible to quantify. [16] Human geography is much more likely to employ qualitative methods than physical. Increasingly, technical geographers are attempting to employ GIS methods to qualitative datasets. [16] [80]
Qualitative cartography employs many of the same software and techniques as quantitative. [80] It may be employed to inform on map practices, or to visualize perspectives and ideas that are not strictly quantitative in nature. [80] [16] An example of a form of qualitative cartography is a Chorochromatic map of nominal data, such as land cover or dominant language group in an area. [81] Another example is a deep map, or maps that combine geography and storytelling to produce a product with greater information than a two-dimensional image of places, names, and topography. [82] [83] This approach offers more inclusive strategies than more traditional cartographic approaches for connecting the complex layers that makeup places. [83]
Ethnographical research techniques are used by human geographers. [84] In cultural geography, there is a tradition of employing qualitative research techniques, also used in anthropology and sociology. Participant observation and in-depth interviews provide human geographers with qualitative data.
Geopoetics is an interdisciplinary approach that combines geography and poetry to explore the interconnectedness between humans, space, place, and the environment. [85] [86] Geopoetics is employed as a mixed methods tool to explain the implications of geographic research. [87] It is often employed to address and communicate the implications of complex topics, such as the anthropocene. [88] [89] [90] [91] [92]
Geographers employ interviews to gather data and acquire valuable understandings from individuals or groups regarding their encounters, outlooks, and opinions concerning spatial phenomena. [93] [94] Interviews can be carried out through various mediums, including face-to-face interactions, phone conversations, online platforms, or written exchanges. [46] Geographers typically adopt a structured or semi-structured approach during interviews involving specific questions or discussion points when utilized for research purposes. [93] These questions are designed to extract focused information about the research topic while being flexible enough to allow participants to express their experiences and viewpoints, such as through open-ended questions. [93]
The concept of geography is present in all cultures, and therefore the history of the discipline is a series of competing narratives, with concepts emerging at various points across space and time. [95] The oldest known world maps date back to ancient Babylon from the 9th century BC. [96] The best known Babylonian world map, however, is the Imago Mundi of 600 BC. [97] The map as reconstructed by Eckhard Unger shows Babylon on the Euphrates, surrounded by a circular landmass showing Assyria, Urartu, and several cities, in turn surrounded by a "bitter river" ( Oceanus), with seven islands arranged around it so as to form a seven-pointed star. [98] The accompanying text mentions seven outer regions beyond the encircling ocean. The descriptions of five of them have survived. [99] In contrast to the Imago Mundi, an earlier Babylonian world map dating back to the 9th century BC depicted Babylon as being further north from the center of the world, though it is not certain what that center was supposed to represent. [96]
The ideas of Anaximander (c. 610–545 BC): considered by later Greek writers to be the true founder of geography, come to us through fragments quoted by his successors. [100] Anaximander is credited with the invention of the gnomon, the simple, yet efficient Greek instrument that allowed the early measurement of latitude. [100] Thales is also credited with the prediction of eclipses. The foundations of geography can be traced to ancient cultures, such as the ancient, medieval, and early modern Chinese. The Greeks, who were the first to explore geography as both art and science, achieved this through Cartography, Philosophy, and Literature, or through Mathematics. There is some debate about who was the first person to assert that the Earth is spherical in shape, with the credit going either to Parmenides or Pythagoras. Anaxagoras was able to demonstrate that the profile of the Earth was circular by explaining eclipses. However, he still believed that the Earth was a flat disk, as did many of his contemporaries. One of the first estimates of the radius of the Earth was made by Eratosthenes. [101]
The first rigorous system of latitude and longitude lines is credited to Hipparchus. He employed a sexagesimal system that was derived from Babylonian mathematics. The meridians were subdivided into 360°, with each degree further subdivided into 60 ( minutes). To measure the longitude at different locations on Earth, he suggested using eclipses to determine the relative difference in time. [102] The extensive mapping by the Romans as they explored new lands would later provide a high level of information for Ptolemy to construct detailed atlases. He extended the work of Hipparchus, using a grid system on his maps and adopting a length of 56.5 miles for a degree. [103]
From the 3rd century onwards, Chinese methods of geographical study and writing of geographical literature became much more comprehensive than what was found in Europe at the time (until the 13th century). [104] Chinese geographers such as Liu An, Pei Xiu, Jia Dan, Shen Kuo, Fan Chengda, Zhou Daguan, and Xu Xiake wrote important treatises, yet by the 17th century advanced ideas and methods of Western-style geography were adopted in China.
During the Middle Ages, the fall of the Roman empire led to a shift in the evolution of geography from Europe to the Islamic world. [104] Muslim geographers such as Muhammad al-Idrisi produced detailed world maps (such as Tabula Rogeriana), while other geographers such as Yaqut al-Hamawi, Abu Rayhan Biruni, Ibn Battuta, and Ibn Khaldun provided detailed accounts of their journeys and the geography of the regions they visited. Turkish geographer Mahmud al-Kashgari drew a world map on a linguistic basis, and later so did Piri Reis ( Piri Reis map). Further, Islamic scholars translated and interpreted the earlier works of the Romans and the Greeks and established the House of Wisdom in Baghdad for this purpose. [105] Abū Zayd al-Balkhī, originally from Balkh, founded the "Balkhī school" of terrestrial mapping in Baghdad. [106] Suhrāb, a late tenth century Muslim geographer accompanied a book of geographical coordinates, with instructions for making a rectangular world map with equirectangular projection or cylindrical equidistant projection. [107]
Abu Rayhan Biruni (976–1048) first described a polar equi- azimuthal equidistant projection of the celestial sphere. [108] He was regarded as the most skilled when it came to mapping cities and measuring the distances between them, which he did for many cities in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. He often combined astronomical readings and mathematical equations to develop methods of pin-pointing locations by recording degrees of latitude and longitude. He also developed similar techniques when it came to measuring the heights of mountains, depths of the valleys, and expanse of the horizon. He also discussed human geography and the planetary habitability of the Earth. He also calculated the latitude of Kath, Khwarezm, using the maximum altitude of the Sun, and solved a complex geodesic equation to accurately compute the Earth's circumference, which was close to modern values of the Earth's circumference. [109] His estimate of 6,339.9 km for the Earth radius was only 16.8 km less than the modern value of 6,356.7 km. In contrast to his predecessors, who measured the Earth's circumference by sighting the Sun simultaneously from two different locations, al-Biruni developed a new method of using trigonometric calculations based on the angle between a plain and mountain top, which yielded more accurate measurements of the Earth's circumference, and made it possible for it to be measured by a single person from a single location. [110]
The European Age of Discovery during the 16th and the 17th centuries, where many new lands were discovered and accounts by European explorers such as Christopher Columbus, Marco Polo, and James Cook revived a desire for both accurate geographic detail and more solid theoretical foundations in Europe. The problem facing both explorers and geographers was finding the latitude and longitude of a geographic location. The problem of latitude was solved long ago, but that of longitude remained; agreeing on what zero meridians should be was only part of the problem. It was left to John Harrison to solve it by inventing the chronometer H-4 in 1760, and later in 1884 for the International Meridian Conference to adopt by convention the Greenwich meridian as zero meridians. [109]
The 18th and 19th centuries were the times when geography became recognized as a discrete academic discipline, and became part of a typical university curriculum in Europe (especially Paris and Berlin). The development of many geographic societies also occurred during the 19th century, with the foundations of the Société de Géographie in 1821, the Royal Geographical Society in 1830, Russian Geographical Society in 1845, American Geographical Society in 1851, and the National Geographic Society in 1888. The influence of Immanuel Kant, Alexander von Humboldt, Carl Ritter, and Paul Vidal de la Blache can be seen as a major turning point in geography from philosophy to an academic subject. [111] [112] [113] [114] [115]
Over the past two centuries, the advancements in technology with computers have led to the development of geomatics and new practices such as participant observation and geostatistics being incorporated into geography's portfolio of tools. In the West during the 20th century, the discipline of geography went through four major phases: environmental determinism, regional geography, the quantitative revolution, and critical geography. The strong interdisciplinary links between geography and the sciences of geology and botany, as well as economics, sociology, and demographics, have also grown greatly, especially as a result of earth system science that seeks to understand the world in a holistic view. New concepts and philosophies have emerged from the rapid advancement of computers, quantitative methods, and interdisciplinary approaches. In 1970, Waldo Tobler proposed the first law of geography, "everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." [35] [36] This law summarizes the first assumption geographers make about the world.
The discipline of geography, especially physical geography, and geology have significant overlap. In the past, the two have often shared academic departments at universities, a point that has led to conflict over resources. [120] Both disciplines do seek to understand the rocks on the Earth's surface and the processes that change them over time. Geology employs many of the tools and techniques of technical geographers, such as GIS and remote sensing to aid in geological mapping. [121] However, geology includes research that goes beyond the spatial component, such as the chemical analysis of rocks and biogeochemistry. [122]
The discipline of History has significant overlap with geography, especially human geography. [123] [124] Like geology, history and geography have shared university departments. Geography provides the spatial context within which historical events unfold. [123] The physical geographic features of a region, such as its landforms, climate, and resources, shape human settlements, trade routes, and economic activities, which in turn influence the course of historical events. [123] Thus, a historian must have a strong foundation in geography. [123] [124] Historians employ the techniques of technical geographers to create historical atlases and maps.
While the discipline of geography is normally concerned with the Earth, the term can also be informally used to describe the study of other worlds, such as the planets of the Solar System and even beyond. The study of systems larger than the Earth itself usually forms part of Astronomy or Cosmology. The study of other planets is usually called planetary science. Alternative terms such as areography (geography of Mars) have been employed to describe the study of other celestial objects. Ultimately, geography may be considered a subdiscipline within planetary science.
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It was Biruni, not Avicenna, who found a way for a single man, at a single moment, to measure the earth's circumference, by trigonometric calculations based on angles measured from a mountaintop and the plain beneath it – thus improving on Eratosthenes' method of sighting the sun simultaneously from two different sites, applied in the ninth century by astronomers of the Khalif al-Ma'mun.
A city is a human settlement of a notable size. The term "city" has different meanings around the world and in some places the settlement can be very small. Even where the term is limited to larger settlements, there is no universally agreed definition of the lower boundary for their size. [1] [2] In a more narrow sense, a city can be defined as a permanent and densely settled place with administratively defined boundaries whose members work primarily on non-agricultural tasks. [3] Cities generally have extensive systems for housing, transportation, sanitation, utilities, land use, production of goods, and communication. [4] [5] Their density facilitates interaction between people, government organizations, and businesses, sometimes benefiting different parties in the process, such as improving the efficiency of goods and service distribution.
Historically, city dwellers have been a small proportion of humanity overall, but following two centuries of unprecedented and rapid urbanization, more than half of the world population now lives in cities, which has had profound consequences for global sustainability. [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] Present-day cities usually form the core of larger metropolitan areas and urban areas—creating numerous commuters traveling toward city centres for employment, entertainment, and education. However, in a world of intensifying globalization, all cities are to varying degrees also connected globally beyond these regions. This increased influence means that cities also have significant influences on global issues, such as sustainable development, climate change, and global health. Because of these major influences on global issues, the international community has prioritized investment in sustainable cities through Sustainable Development Goal 11. Due to the efficiency of transportation and the smaller land consumption, dense cities hold the potential to have a smaller ecological footprint per inhabitant than more sparsely populated areas. [11] [12] Therefore, compact cities are often referred to as a crucial element in fighting climate change. [13] [14] [15] However, this concentration can also have significant negative consequences, such as forming urban heat islands, concentrating pollution, and stressing water supplies and other resources.
Other important traits of cities besides population include the capital status and relative continued occupation of the city. For example, country capitals such as Beijing, Berlin, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, London, Manila, Mexico City, Moscow, Nairobi, New Delhi, Paris, Rome, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. reflect the identity and apex of their respective nations. [16] Some historic capitals, such as Istanbul, Yogyakarta, and Xi'an, maintain their reflection of cultural identity even without modern capital status. Religious holy sites offer another example of capital status within a religion; examples include Jerusalem, Mecca, Varanasi, Ayodhya, Haridwar, and Prayagraj.
A city can be distinguished from other human settlements by its relatively great size, but also by its functions and its special symbolic status, which may be conferred by a central authority. The term can also refer either to the physical streets and buildings of the city or to the collection of people who dwell there and can be used in a general sense to mean urban rather than rural territory. [18] [19]
National censuses use a variety of definitions – invoking factors such as population, population density, number of dwellings, economic function, and infrastructure – to classify populations as urban. Typical working definitions for small-city populations start at around 100,000 people. [20] Common population definitions for an urban area (city or town) range between 1,500 and 50,000 people, with most U.S. states using a minimum between 1,500 and 5,000 inhabitants. [21] [22] Some jurisdictions set no such minima. [23] In the United Kingdom, city status is awarded by the Crown and then remains permanent. (Historically, the qualifying factor was the presence of a cathedral, resulting in some very small cities such as Wells, with a population of 12,000 as of 2018 [update], and St Davids, with a population of 1,841 as of 2011 [update].) According to the "functional definition", a city is not distinguished by size alone, but also by the role it plays within a larger political context. Cities serve as administrative, commercial, religious, and cultural hubs for their larger surrounding areas. [24] [25]
The presence of a literate elite is often associated with cities because of the cultural diversities present in a city. [26] [27] A typical city has professional administrators, regulations, and some form of taxation (food and other necessities or means to trade for them) to support the government workers. (This arrangement contrasts with the more typically horizontal relationships in a tribe or village accomplishing common goals through informal agreements between neighbors, or the leadership of a chief.) The governments may be based on heredity, religion, military power, work systems such as canal-building, food distribution, land-ownership, agriculture, commerce, manufacturing, finance, or a combination of these. Societies that live in cities are often called civilizations.
The degree of urbanization is a modern metric to help define what comprises a city: "a population of at least 50,000 inhabitants in contiguous dense grid cells (>1,500 inhabitants per square kilometer)". [28] This metric was "devised over years by the European Commission, OECD, World Bank and others, and endorsed in March [2021] by the United Nations ... largely for the purpose of international statistical comparison". [29]
The word city and the related civilization come from the Latin root civitas, originally meaning 'citizenship' or 'community member' and eventually coming to correspond with urbs, meaning 'city' in a more physical sense. [18] The Roman civitas was closely linked with the Greek polis—another common root appearing in English words such as metropolis. [30]
In toponymic terminology, names of individual cities and towns are called astionyms (from Ancient Greek ἄστυ 'city or town' and ὄνομα 'name'). [31]
Urban geography deals both with cities in their larger context and with their internal structure. [32] Cities are estimated to cover about 3% of the land surface of the Earth. [33]
Town siting has varied through history according to natural, technological, economic, and military contexts. Access to water has long been a major factor in city placement and growth, and despite exceptions enabled by the advent of rail transport in the nineteenth century, through the present most of the world's urban population lives near the coast or on a river. [34]
Urban areas as a rule cannot produce their own food and therefore must develop some relationship with a hinterland that sustains them. [35] Only in special cases such as mining towns which play a vital role in long-distance trade, are cities disconnected from the countryside which feeds them. [36] Thus, centrality within a productive region influences siting, as economic forces would, in theory, favor the creation of marketplaces in optimal mutually reachable locations. [37]
The vast majority of cities have a central area containing buildings with special economic, political, and religious significance. Archaeologists refer to this area by the Greek term temenos or if fortified as a citadel. [38] These spaces historically reflect and amplify the city's centrality and importance to its wider sphere of influence. [37] Today cities have a city center or downtown, sometimes coincident with a central business district.
Cities typically have public spaces where anyone can go. These include privately owned spaces open to the public as well as forms of public land such as public domain and the commons. Western philosophy since the time of the Greek agora has considered physical public space as the substrate of the symbolic public sphere. [39] [40] Public art adorns (or disfigures) public spaces. Parks and other natural sites within cities provide residents with relief from the hardness and regularity of typical built environments. Urban green spaces are another component of public space that provides the benefit of mitigating the urban heat island effect, especially in cities that are in warmer climates. These spaces prevent carbon imbalances, extreme habitat losses, electricity and water consumption, and human health risks. [41]
The urban structure generally follows one or more basic patterns: geomorphic, radial, concentric, rectilinear, and curvilinear. The physical environment generally constrains the form in which a city is built. If located on a mountainside, urban structures may rely on terraces and winding roads. It may be adapted to its means of subsistence (e.g. agriculture or fishing). And it may be set up for optimal defense given the surrounding landscape. [42] Beyond these "geomorphic" features, cities can develop internal patterns, due to natural growth or to city planning.
In a radial structure, main roads converge on a central point. This form could evolve from successive growth over a long time, with concentric traces of town walls and citadels marking older city boundaries. In more recent history, such forms were supplemented by ring roads moving traffic around the outskirts of a town. Dutch cities such as Amsterdam and Haarlem are structured as a central square surrounded by concentric canals marking every expansion. In cities such as Moscow, this pattern is still clearly visible.
A system of rectilinear city streets and land plots, known as the grid plan, has been used for millennia in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The Indus Valley civilization built Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa, and other cities on a grid pattern, using ancient principles described by Kautilya, and aligned with the compass points. [43] [24] [44] [45] The ancient Greek city of Priene exemplifies a grid plan with specialized districts used across the Hellenistic Mediterranean.
The urban-type settlement extends far beyond the traditional boundaries of the city proper [48] in a form of development sometimes described critically as urban sprawl. [49] Decentralization and dispersal of city functions (commercial, industrial, residential, cultural, political) has transformed the very meaning of the term and has challenged geographers seeking to classify territories according to an urban-rural binary. [22]
Metropolitan areas include suburbs and exurbs organized around the needs of commuters, and sometimes edge cities characterized by a degree of economic and political independence. (In the US these are grouped into metropolitan statistical areas for purposes of demography and marketing.) Some cities are now part of a continuous urban landscape called urban agglomeration, conurbation, or megalopolis (exemplified by the BosWash corridor of the Northeastern United States.) [50]
The emergence of cities from proto-urban settlements, such as Çatalhöyük, is a non-linear development that demonstrates the varied experiences of early urbanization. [51]
The cities of Jericho, Aleppo, Faiyum, Yerevan, Athens, Matera, Damascus, and Argos are among those laying claim to the longest continual inhabitation. [52] [53]
Cities, characterized by population density, symbolic function, and urban planning, have existed for thousands of years. [54] In the conventional view, civilization and the city were both followed by the development of agriculture, which enabled the production of surplus food and thus a social division of labor (with concomitant social stratification) and trade. [55] [56] Early cities often featured granaries, sometimes within a temple. [57] A minority viewpoint considers that cities may have arisen without agriculture, due to alternative means of subsistence (fishing), [58] to use as communal seasonal shelters, [59] to their value as bases for defensive and offensive military organization, [60] [61] or to their inherent economic function. [62] [63] [64] Cities played a crucial role in the establishment of political power over an area, and ancient leaders such as Alexander the Great founded and created them with zeal. [65]
Jericho and Çatalhöyük, dated to the eighth millennium BC, are among the earliest proto-cities known to archaeologists. [59] [66] However, the Mesopotamian city of Uruk from the mid-fourth millennium BC (ancient Iraq) is considered by most archaeologists to be the first true city, innovating many characteristics for cities to follow, with its name attributed to the Uruk period. [67] [68] [69]
In the fourth and third millennium BC, complex civilizations flourished in the river valleys of Mesopotamia, India, [70] [71] China, [72] and Egypt. Excavations in these areas have found the ruins of cities geared variously towards trade, politics, or religion. Some had large, dense populations, but others carried out urban activities in the realms of politics or religion without having large associated populations.
Among the early Old World cities, Mohenjo-Daro of the Indus Valley civilization in present-day Pakistan, existing from about 2600 BC, was one of the largest, with a population of 50,000 or more and a sophisticated sanitation system. [73] China's planned cities were constructed according to sacred principles to act as celestial microcosms. [74]
The Ancient Egyptian cities known physically by archaeologists are not extensive. [24] They include (known by their Arab names) El Lahun, a workers' town associated with the pyramid of Senusret II, and the religious city Amarna built by Akhenaten and abandoned. These sites appear planned in a highly regimented and stratified fashion, with a minimalistic grid of rooms for the workers and increasingly more elaborate housing available for higher classes. [75]
In Mesopotamia, the civilization of Sumer, followed by Assyria and Babylon, gave rise to numerous cities, governed by kings and fostered multiple languages written in cuneiform. [76] The Phoenician trading empire, flourishing around the turn of the first millennium BC, encompassed numerous cities extending from Tyre, Cydon, and Byblos to Carthage and Cádiz.
In the following centuries, independent city-states of Greece, especially Athens, developed the polis, an association of male landowning citizens who collectively constituted the city. [77] The agora, meaning "gathering place" or "assembly", was the center of the athletic, artistic, spiritual, and political life of the polis. [78] Rome was the first city that surpassed one million inhabitants. Under the authority of its empire, Rome transformed and founded many cities ( Colonia), and with them brought its principles of urban architecture, design, and society. [79]
In the ancient Americas, early urban traditions developed in the Andes and Mesoamerica. In the Andes, the first urban centers developed in the Norte Chico civilization, Chavin and Moche cultures, followed by major cities in the Huari, Chimu, and Inca cultures. The Norte Chico civilization included as many as 30 major population centers in what is now the Norte Chico region of north-central coastal Peru. It is the oldest known civilization in the Americas, flourishing between the 30th and 18th centuries BC. [80] Mesoamerica saw the rise of early urbanism in several cultural regions, beginning with the Olmec and spreading to the Preclassic Maya, the Zapotec of Oaxaca, and Teotihuacan in central Mexico. Later cultures such as the Aztec, Andean civilizations, Mayan, Mississippians, and Pueblo peoples drew on these earlier urban traditions. Many of their ancient cities continue to be inhabited, including major metropolitan cities such as Mexico City, in the same location as Tenochtitlan; while ancient continuously inhabited Pueblos are near modern urban areas in New Mexico, such as Acoma Pueblo near the Albuquerque metropolitan area and Taos Pueblo near Taos; while others like Lima are located nearby ancient Peruvian sites such as Pachacamac.
Jenné-Jeno, located in present-day Mali and dating to the third century BC, lacked monumental architecture and a distinctive elite social class—but nevertheless had specialized production and relations with a hinterland. [81] Pre-Arabic trade contacts probably existed between Jenné-Jeno and North Africa. [82] Other early urban centers in sub-Saharan Africa, dated to around 500 AD, include Awdaghust, Kumbi-Saleh the ancient capital of Ghana, and Maranda a center located on a trade route between Egypt and Gao. [83]
In the remnants of the Roman Empire, cities of late antiquity gained independence but soon lost population and importance. The locus of power in the West shifted to Constantinople and to the ascendant Islamic civilization with its major cities Baghdad, Cairo, and Córdoba. [84] From the 9th through the end of the 12th century, Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, was the largest and wealthiest city in Europe, with a population approaching 1 million. [85] [86] The Ottoman Empire gradually gained control over many cities in the Mediterranean area, including Constantinople in 1453.
In the Holy Roman Empire, beginning in the 12th century, free imperial cities such as Nuremberg, Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Basel, Zürich, and Nijmegen became a privileged elite among towns having won self-governance from their local lord or having been granted self-governance by the emperor and being placed under his immediate protection. By 1480, these cities, as far as still part of the empire, became part of the Imperial Estates governing the empire with the emperor through the Imperial Diet. [87]
By the 13th and 14th centuries, some cities become powerful states, taking surrounding areas under their control or establishing extensive maritime empires. In Italy, medieval communes developed into city-states including the Republic of Venice and the Republic of Genoa. In Northern Europe, cities including Lübeck and Bruges formed the Hanseatic League for collective defense and commerce. Their power was later challenged and eclipsed by the Dutch commercial cities of Ghent, Ypres, and Amsterdam. [88] [89] Similar phenomena existed elsewhere, as in the case of Sakai, which enjoyed considerable autonomy in late medieval Japan.
In the first millennium AD, the Khmer capital of Angkor in Cambodia grew into the most extensive preindustrial settlement in the world by area, [90] [91] covering over 1,000 km2 and possibly supporting up to one million people. [90] [92]
In the West, nation-states became the dominant unit of political organization following the Peace of Westphalia in the seventeenth century. [93] [94] Western Europe's larger capitals (London and Paris) benefited from the growth of commerce following the emergence of an Atlantic trade. However, most towns remained small.
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 regarding administration, finances, and urbanism.
The growth of the 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. England led the way as London became the capital of a world empire and cities across the country grew in locations strategic for manufacturing. [95] In the United States from 1860 to 1910, the introduction of railroads reduced transportation costs, and large manufacturing centers began to emerge, fueling migration from rural to city areas.
Some industrialized cities were confronted with health challenges associated with overcrowding, occupational hazards of industry, contaminated water and air, poor sanitation, and communicable diseases such as typhoid and cholera. Factories and slums emerged as regular features of the urban landscape. [96]
In the second half of the 20th century, deindustrialization (or " economic restructuring") in the West led to poverty, homelessness, and urban decay in formerly prosperous cities. America's "Steel Belt" became a " Rust Belt" and cities such as Detroit, Michigan, and Gary, Indiana began to shrink, contrary to the global trend of massive urban expansion. [97] Such cities have shifted with varying success into the service economy and public-private partnerships, with concomitant gentrification, uneven revitalization efforts, and selective cultural development. [98] Under the Great Leap Forward and subsequent five-year plans continuing today, China has undergone concomitant urbanization and industrialization and become the world's leading manufacturer. [99] [100]
Amidst these economic changes, high technology and instantaneous telecommunication enable select cities to become centers of the knowledge economy. [101] [102] [103] A new smart city paradigm, supported by institutions such as the RAND Corporation and IBM, is bringing computerized surveillance, data analysis, and governance to bear on cities and city dwellers. [104] Some companies are building brand-new master-planned cities from scratch on greenfield sites.
Urbanization is the process of migration from rural to urban areas, driven by various political, economic, and cultural factors. Until the 18th century, an equilibrium existed between the rural agricultural population and towns featuring markets and small-scale manufacturing. [106] [107] With the agricultural and industrial revolutions urban population began its unprecedented growth, both through migration and demographic expansion. In England, the proportion of the population living in cities jumped from 17% in 1801 to 72% in 1891. [108] In 1900, 15% of the world's population lived in cities. [109] The cultural appeal of cities also plays a role in attracting residents. [110]
Urbanization rapidly spread across Europe and the Americas and since the 1950s has taken hold in Asia and Africa as well. The Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs reported in 2014 that for the first time, more than half of the world population lives in cities. [111] [a]
Latin America is the most urban continent, with four-fifths of its population living in cities, including one-fifth of the population said to live in shantytowns ( favelas, poblaciones callampas, etc.). [118] Batam, Indonesia, Mogadishu, Somalia, Xiamen, China, and Niamey, Niger, are considered among the world's fastest-growing cities, with annual growth rates of 5–8%. [119] In general, the more developed countries of the " Global North" remain more urbanized than the less developed countries of the " Global South"—but the difference continues to shrink because urbanization is happening faster in the latter group. Asia is home to by far the greatest absolute number of city-dwellers: over two billion and counting. [107] The UN predicts an additional 2.5 billion city dwellers (and 300 million fewer country dwellers) worldwide by 2050, with 90% of urban population expansion occurring in Asia and Africa. [111] [120]
Megacities, cities with populations in the multi-millions, have proliferated into the dozens, arising especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. [121] [122] Economic globalization fuels the growth of these cities, as new torrents of foreign capital arrange for rapid industrialization, as well as the relocation of major businesses from Europe and North America, attracting immigrants from near and far. [123] A deep gulf divides the rich and poor in these cities, with usually contain a super-wealthy elite living in gated communities and large masses of people living in substandard housing with inadequate infrastructure and otherwise poor conditions. [124]
Cities around the world have expanded physically as they grow in population, with increases in their surface extent, with the creation of high-rise buildings for residential and commercial use, and with development underground. [125] [126]
Urbanization can create rapid demand for water resources management, as formerly good sources of freshwater become overused and polluted, and the volume of sewage begins to exceed manageable levels. [127]
The local government of cities takes different forms including prominently the municipality (especially in England, in the United States, India, and other British colonies; legally, the municipal corporation; [128] municipio in Spain and Portugal, and, along with municipalidad, in most former parts of the Spanish and Portuguese empires) and the commune ( in France and Chile; or comune in Italy).
The chief official of the city has the title of mayor. Whatever their true degree of political authority, the mayor typically acts as the figurehead or personification of their city. [129]
Legal conflicts and issues arise more frequently in cities than elsewhere due to the bare fact of their greater density. [130] Modern city governments thoroughly regulate everyday life in many dimensions, including public and personal health, transport, burial, resource use and extraction, recreation, and the nature and use of buildings. Technologies, techniques, and laws governing these areas—developed in cities—have become ubiquitous in many areas. [131] Municipal officials may be appointed from a higher level of government or elected locally. [132]
Cities typically provide municipal services such as education, through school systems; policing, through police departments; and firefighting, through fire departments; as well as the city's basic infrastructure. These are provided more or less routinely, in a more or less equal fashion. [133] [134] Responsibility for administration usually falls on the city government, but some services may be operated by a higher level of government, [135] while others may be privately run. [136] Armies may assume responsibility for policing cities in states of domestic turmoil such as America's King assassination riots of 1968.
The traditional basis for municipal finance is local property tax levied on real estate within the city. Local government can also collect revenue for services, or by leasing land that it owns. [137] However, financing municipal services, as well as urban renewal and other development projects, is a perennial problem, which cities address through appeals to higher governments, arrangements with the private sector, and techniques such as privatization (selling services into the private sector), corporatization (formation of quasi-private municipally-owned corporations), and financialization (packaging city assets into tradeable financial public contracts and other related rights). This situation has become acute in deindustrialized cities and in cases where businesses and wealthier citizens have moved outside of city limits and therefore beyond the reach of taxation. [138] [139] [140] [141] Cities in search of ready cash increasingly resort to the municipal bond, essentially a loan with interest and a repayment date. [142] City governments have also begun to use tax increment financing, in which a development project is financed by loans based on future tax revenues which it is expected to yield. [141] Under these circumstances, creditors and consequently city governments place a high importance on city credit ratings. [143]
Governance includes government but refers to a wider domain of social control functions implemented by many actors including non-governmental organizations. [144] The impact of globalization and the role of multinational corporations in local governments worldwide, has led to a shift in perspective on urban governance, away from the "urban regime theory" in which a coalition of local interests functionally govern, toward a theory of outside economic control, widely associated in academics with the philosophy of neoliberalism. [145] In the neoliberal model of governance, public utilities are privatized, the industry is deregulated, and corporations gain the status of governing actors—as indicated by the power they wield in public-private partnerships and over business improvement districts, and in the expectation of self-regulation through corporate social responsibility. The biggest investors and real estate developers act as the city's de facto urban planners. [146]
The related concept of good governance places more emphasis on the state, with the purpose of assessing urban governments for their suitability for development assistance. [147] The concepts of governance and good governance are especially invoked in emergent megacities, where international organizations consider existing governments inadequate for their large populations. [148]
Urban planning, the application of forethought to city design, involves optimizing land use, transportation, utilities, and other basic systems, in order to achieve certain objectives. Urban planners and scholars have proposed overlapping theories as ideals for how plans should be formed. Planning tools, beyond the original design of the city itself, include public capital investment in infrastructure and land-use controls such as zoning. The continuous process of comprehensive planning involves identifying general objectives as well as collecting data to evaluate progress and inform future decisions. [150] [151]
Government is legally the final authority on planning but in practice, the process involves both public and private elements. The legal principle of eminent domain is used by the government to divest citizens of their property in cases where its use is required for a project. [151] Planning often involves tradeoffs—decisions in which some stand to gain and some to lose—and thus is closely connected to the prevailing political situation. [152]
The history of urban planning dates to some of the earliest known cities, especially in the Indus Valley and Mesoamerican civilizations, which built their cities on grids and apparently zoned different areas for different purposes. [24] [153] The effects of planning, ubiquitous in today's world, can be seen most clearly in the layout of planned communities, fully designed prior to construction, often with consideration for interlocking physical, economic, and cultural systems.
Urban society is typically stratified. Spatially, cities are formally or informally segregated along ethnic, economic, and racial lines. People living relatively close together may live, work, and play in separate areas, and associate with different people, forming ethnic or lifestyle enclaves or, in areas of concentrated poverty, ghettoes. While in the US and elsewhere poverty became associated with the inner city, in France it has become associated with the banlieues, areas of urban development that surround the city proper. Meanwhile, across Europe and North America, the racially white majority is empirically the most segregated group. Suburbs in the West, and, increasingly, gated communities and other forms of "privatopia" around the world, allow local elites to self-segregate into secure and exclusive neighborhoods. [154]
Landless urban workers, contrasted with peasants and known as the proletariat, form a growing stratum of society in the age of urbanization. In Marxist doctrine, the proletariat will inevitably revolt against the bourgeoisie as their ranks swell with disenfranchised and disaffected people lacking all stake[ clarification needed] in the status quo. [155] The global urban proletariat of today, however, generally lacks the status of factory workers which in the nineteenth century provided access to the means of production. [156]
Historically, cities rely on rural areas for intensive farming to yield surplus crops, in exchange for which they provide money, political administration, manufactured goods, and culture. [35] [36] Urban economics tends to analyze larger agglomerations, stretching beyond city limits, in order to reach a more complete understanding of the local labor market. [157]
As hubs of trade, cities have long been home to retail commerce and consumption through the interface of shopping. In the 20th century, department stores using new techniques of advertising, public relations, decoration, and design, transformed urban shopping areas into fantasy worlds encouraging self-expression and escape through consumerism. [158] [159]
In general, the density of cities expedites commerce and facilitates knowledge spillovers, helping people and firms exchange information and generate new ideas. [160] [161] A thicker labor market allows for better skill matching between firms and individuals. Population density enables also sharing of common infrastructure and production facilities; however, in very dense cities, increased crowding and waiting times may lead to some negative effects. [162]
Although manufacturing fueled the growth of cities, many now rely on a tertiary or service economy. The services in question range from tourism, hospitality, entertainment, and housekeeping to grey-collar work in law, financial consulting, and administration. [98] [163]
According to a scientific model of cities by Professor Geoffrey West, with the doubling of a city's size, salaries per capita will generally increase by 15%. [164]
Cities are typically hubs for education and the arts, supporting universities, museums, temples, and other cultural institutions. [25] They feature impressive displays of architecture ranging from small to enormous and ornate to brutal; skyscrapers, providing thousands of offices or homes within a small footprint, and visible from miles away, have become iconic urban features. [166] Cultural elites tend to live in cities, bound together by shared cultural capital, and themselves play some role in governance. [167] By virtue of their status as centers of culture and literacy, cities can be described as the locus of civilization, human history, and social change. [168] [169]
Density makes for effective mass communication and transmission of news, through heralds, printed proclamations, newspapers, and digital media. These communication networks, though still using cities as hubs, penetrate extensively into all populated areas. In the age of rapid communication and transportation, commentators have described urban culture as nearly ubiquitous [22] [170] [171] or as no longer meaningful. [172]
Today, a city's promotion of its cultural activities dovetails with place branding and city marketing, public diplomacy techniques used to inform development strategy; attract businesses, investors, residents, and tourists; and to create shared identity and sense of place within the metropolitan area. [173] [174] [175] [176] Physical inscriptions, plaques, and monuments on display physically transmit a historical context for urban places. [177] Some cities, such as Jerusalem, Mecca, and Rome have indelible religious status and for hundreds of years have attracted pilgrims. Patriotic tourists visit Agra to see the Taj Mahal, or New York City to visit the World Trade Center. Elvis lovers visit Memphis to pay their respects at Graceland. [178] Place brands (which include place satisfaction and place loyalty) have great economic value (comparable to the value of commodity brands) because of their influence on the decision-making process of people thinking about doing business in—"purchasing" (the brand of)—a city. [176]
Bread and circuses among other forms of cultural appeal, attract and entertain the masses. [110] [179] Sports also play a major role in city branding and local identity formation. [180] Cities go to considerable lengths in competing to host the Olympic Games, which bring global attention and tourism. [181] Paris, a city known for its cultural history, is the site of the next Olympics in the summer of 2024. [182]
Cities play a crucial strategic role in warfare due to their economic, demographic, symbolic, and political centrality. For the same reasons, they are targets in asymmetric warfare. Many cities throughout history were founded under military auspices, a great many have incorporated fortifications, and military principles continue to influence urban design. [183] Indeed, war may have served as the social rationale and economic basis for the very earliest cities. [60] [61]
Powers engaged in geopolitical conflict have established fortified settlements as part of military strategies, as in the case of garrison towns, America's Strategic Hamlet Program during the Vietnam War, and Israeli settlements in Palestine. [184] While occupying the Philippines, the US Army ordered local people to concentrate in cities and towns, in order to isolate committed insurgents and battle freely against them in the countryside. [185] [186]
During World War II, national governments on occasion declared certain cities open, effectively surrendering them to an advancing enemy in order to avoid damage and bloodshed. Urban warfare proved decisive, however, in the Battle of Stalingrad, where Soviet forces repulsed German occupiers, with extreme casualties and destruction. In an era of low-intensity conflict and rapid urbanization, cities have become sites of long-term conflict waged both by foreign occupiers and by local governments against insurgency. [156] [187] Such warfare, known as counterinsurgency, involves techniques of surveillance and psychological warfare as well as close combat, [188] and functionally extends modern urban crime prevention, which already uses concepts such as defensible space. [189]
Although capture is the more common objective, warfare has in some cases spelled complete destruction for a city. Mesopotamian tablets and ruins attest to such destruction, [190] as does the Latin motto Carthago delenda est. [191] [192] Since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and throughout the Cold War, nuclear strategists continued to contemplate the use of " counter-value" targeting: crippling an enemy by annihilating its valuable cities, rather than aiming primarily at its military forces. [193] [194]
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Because of the high density and effects like the urban heat island affect, weather changes due to climate change are likely to greatly effect cities, [206] exacerbating existing problems, such as air pollution, water scarcity, [207] and heat illness in the metropolitan areas. Moreover, because most cities have been built on rivers or coastal areas, cities are frequently vulnerable to the subsequent effects of sea level rise, which cause flooding [206] and erosion, and those effects are deeply connected with other urban environmental problems, like subsidence and aquifer depletion.
A report by the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group described consumption based emissions as having significantly more impact than production-based emissions within cities. The report estimates that 85% of the emissions associated with goods within a city is generated outside of that city. [208] Climate change adaptation and mitigation investments in cities will be important in reducing the impacts of some of the largest contributors of greenhouse gas emissions: for example, increased density allows for redistribution of land use for agriculture and reforestation, improving transportation efficiencies, and greening construction ( largely due to cement's outsized role in climate change and improvements in sustainable construction practices and weatherization).
In the most recent past, increasing urbanization has also been proposed as a phenomenon that has a reducing effect on the global rate of carbon emission primarily because with urbanization comes technical prowess which can help drive sustainability. [209] Lists of high impact climate change solutions tend to include city-focused solutions; for example, Project Drawdown recommends several major urban investments, including improved bicycle infrastructure, [210] building retrofitting, [211] district heating, [212] public transit, [213] and walkable cities as important solutions. [214]
Because of this, the international community has formed coalitions of cities (such as the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and ICLEI) and policy goals, such as Sustainable Development Goal 11 ("sustainable cities and communities"), to activate and focus attention on these solutions. Currently, in 2022, there is a deterioration in the progress of the goal. There is limited progress on making cities and human settlements more appropriate to live in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and the Pacific Island countries. There is fair progress in Central and Southern Asia and Eastern and South-Eastern Asian. However, it has been achieved in Developed countries. [215]
Urban infrastructure involves various physical networks and spaces necessary for transportation, water use, energy, recreation, and public functions. [216] Infrastructure carries a high initial cost in fixed capital but lower marginal costs and thus positive economies of scale. [217] Because of the higher barriers to entry, these networks have been classified as natural monopolies, meaning that economic logic favors control of each network by a single organization, public or private. [127] [218]
Infrastructure in general plays a vital role in a city's capacity for economic activity and expansion, underpinning the very survival of the city's inhabitants, as well as technological, commercial, industrial, and social activities. [216] [217] Structurally, many infrastructure systems take the form of networks with redundant links and multiple pathways, so that the system as a whole continue to operate even if parts of it fail. [218] The particulars of a city's infrastructure systems have historical path dependence because new development must build from what exists already. [217]
Megaprojects such as the construction of airports, power plants, and railways require large upfront investments and thus tend to require funding from the national government or the private sector. [219] [218] Privatization may also extend to all levels of infrastructure construction and maintenance. [220]
Urban infrastructure ideally serves all residents equally but in practice may prove uneven—with, in some cities, clear first-class and second-class alternatives. [134] [221] [127]
Public utilities (literally, useful things with general availability) include basic and essential infrastructure networks, chiefly concerned with the supply of water, electricity, and telecommunications capability to the populace. [222]
Sanitation, necessary for good health in crowded conditions, requires water supply and waste management as well as individual hygiene. Urban water systems include principally a water supply network and a network ( sewerage system) for sewage and stormwater. Historically, either local governments or private companies have administered urban water supply, with a tendency toward government water supply in the 20th century and a tendency toward private operation at the turn of the twenty-first. [127] [b] The market for private water services is dominated by two French companies, Veolia Water (formerly Vivendi) and Engie (formerly Suez), said to hold 70% of all water contracts worldwide. [127] [224]
Modern urban life relies heavily on the energy transmitted through electricity for the operation of electric machines (from household appliances to industrial machines to now-ubiquitous electronic systems used in communications, business, and government) and for traffic lights, street lights, and indoor lighting. Cities rely to a lesser extent on hydrocarbon fuels such as gasoline and natural gas for transportation, heating, and cooking. Telecommunications infrastructure such as telephone lines and coaxial cables also traverse cities, forming dense networks for mass and point-to-point communications. [225]
Because cities rely on specialization and an economic system based on wage labor, their inhabitants must have the ability to regularly travel between home, work, commerce, and entertainment. [226] City dwellers travel by foot or by wheel on roads and walkways, or use special rapid transit systems based on underground, overground, and elevated rail. Cities also rely on long-distance transportation (truck, rail, and airplane) for economic connections with other cities and rural areas. [227]
City streets historically were the domain of horses and their riders and pedestrians, who only sometimes had sidewalks and special walking areas reserved for them. [228] In the West, bicycles or ( velocipedes), efficient human-powered machines for short- and medium-distance travel, [229] enjoyed a period of popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century before the rise of automobiles. [230] Soon after, they gained a more lasting foothold in Asian and African cities under European influence. [231] In Western cities, industrializing, expanding, and electrifying public transit systems, and especially streetcars enabled urban expansion as new residential neighborhoods sprung up along transit lines and workers rode to and from work downtown. [227] [232]
Since the mid-20th century, cities have relied heavily on motor vehicle transportation, with major implications for their layout, environment, and aesthetics. [233] (This transformation occurred most dramatically in the US—where corporate and governmental policies favored automobile transport systems—and to a lesser extent in Europe.) [227] [232] The rise of personal cars accompanied the expansion of urban economic areas into much larger metropolises, subsequently creating ubiquitous traffic issues with the accompanying construction of new highways, wider streets, and alternative walkways for pedestrians. [234] [235] [236] [174] However, severe traffic jams still occur regularly in cities around the world, as private car ownership and urbanization continue to increase, overwhelming existing urban street networks. [137]
The urban bus system, the world's most common form of public transport, uses a network of scheduled routes to move people through the city, alongside cars, on the roads. [237] The economic function itself also became more decentralized as concentration became impractical and employers relocated to more car-friendly locations (including edge cities). [227] Some cities have introduced bus rapid transit systems which include exclusive bus lanes and other methods for prioritizing bus traffic over private cars. [137] [238] Many big American cities still operate conventional public transit by rail, as exemplified by the ever-popular New York City Subway system. Rapid transit is widely used in Europe and has increased in Latin America and Asia. [137]
Walking and cycling ("non-motorized transport") enjoy increasing favor (more pedestrian zones and bike lanes) in American and Asian urban transportation planning, under the influence of such trends as the Healthy Cities movement, the drive for sustainable development, and the idea of a carfree city. [137] [239] [240] Techniques such as road space rationing and road use charges have been introduced to limit urban car traffic. [137]
The housing of residents presents one of the major challenges every city must face. Adequate housing entails not only physical shelters but also the physical systems necessary to sustain life and economic activity. [241]
Homeownership represents status and a modicum of economic security, compared to renting which may consume much of the income of low-wage urban workers. Homelessness, or lack of housing, is a challenge currently faced by millions of people in countries rich and poor. [242] Because cities generally have higher population densities than rural areas, city dwellers are more likely to reside in apartments and less likely to live in a single-family home.
Urban ecosystems, influenced as they are by the density of human buildings and activities, differ considerably from those of their rural surroundings. Anthropogenic buildings and waste, as well as cultivation in gardens, create physical and chemical environments which have no equivalents in the wilderness, in some cases enabling exceptional biodiversity. They provide homes not only for immigrant humans but also for immigrant plants, bringing about interactions between species that never previously encountered each other. They introduce frequent disturbances (construction, walking) to plant and animal habitats, creating opportunities for recolonization and thus favoring young ecosystems with r-selected species dominant. On the whole, urban ecosystems are less complex and productive than others, due to the diminished absolute amount of biological interactions. [243] [244] [245] [246]
Typical urban fauna includes insects (especially ants), rodents ( mice, rats), and birds, as well as cats and dogs ( domesticated and feral). Large predators are scarce. [245] However, in North America, large predators such as coyotes and other large animals like white-tailed deer persist. [247]
Cities generate considerable ecological footprints, locally and at longer distances, due to concentrated populations and technological activities. From one perspective, cities are not ecologically sustainable due to their resource needs. From another, proper management may be able to ameliorate a city's ill effects. [248] [249] Air pollution arises from various forms of combustion, [250] including fireplaces, wood or coal-burning stoves, other heating systems, [251] and internal combustion engines. Industrialized cities, and today third-world megacities, are notorious for veils of smog (industrial haze) that envelop them, posing a chronic threat to the health of their millions of inhabitants. [252] Urban soil contains higher concentrations of heavy metals (especially lead, copper, and nickel) and has lower pH than soil in the comparable wilderness. [245]
Modern cities are known for creating their own microclimates, due to concrete, asphalt, and other artificial surfaces, which heat up in sunlight and channel rainwater into underground ducts. The temperature in New York City exceeds nearby rural temperatures by an average of 2–3 °C and at times 5–10 °C differences have been recorded. This effect varies nonlinearly with population changes (independently of the city's physical size). [245] [253] Aerial particulates increase rainfall by 5–10%. Thus, urban areas experience unique climates, with earlier flowering and later leaf dropping than in nearby countries. [245]
Poor and working-class people face disproportionate exposure to environmental risks (known as environmental racism when intersecting also with racial segregation). For example, within the urban microclimate, less-vegetated poor neighborhoods bear more of the heat (but have fewer means of coping with it). [254]
One of the main methods of improving the urban ecology is including in the cities more urban green spaces: parks, gardens, lawns, and trees. [255] [256] These areas improve the health and well-being of the human, animal, and plant populations of the cities. [257] Well-maintained urban trees can provide many social, ecological, and physical benefits to the residents of the city. [258]
A study published in Nature's Scientific Reports journal in 2019 found that people who spent at least two hours per week in nature were 23 percent more likely to be satisfied with their life and were 59 percent more likely to be in good health than those who had zero exposure. The study used data from almost 20,000 people in the UK. Benefits increased for up to 300 minutes of exposure. The benefits are applied to men and women of all ages, as well as across different ethnicities, socioeconomic statuses, and even those with long-term illnesses and disabilities. People who did not get at least two hours – even if they surpassed an hour per week – did not get the benefits. The study is the latest addition to a compelling body of evidence for the health benefits of nature. Many doctors already give nature prescriptions to their patients. The study didn't count time spent in a person's own yard or garden as time in nature, but the majority of nature visits in the study took place within two miles of home. "Even visiting local urban green spaces seems to be a good thing," Dr. White said in a press release. "Two hours a week is hopefully a realistic target for many people, especially given that it can be spread over an entire week to get the benefit." [259] [260]
As the world becomes more closely linked through economics, politics, technology, and culture (a process called globalization), cities have come to play a leading role in transnational affairs, exceeding the limitations of international relations conducted by national governments. [261] [262] [263] This phenomenon, resurgent today, can be traced back to the Silk Road, Phoenicia, and the Greek city-states, through the Hanseatic League and other alliances of cities. [264] [161] [265] Today the information economy based on high-speed internet infrastructure enables instantaneous telecommunication around the world, effectively eliminating the distance between cities for the purposes of the international markets and other high-level elements of the world economy, as well as personal communications and mass media. [266]
A global city, also known as a world city, is a prominent centre of trade, banking, finance, innovation, and markets. [267] [268] Saskia Sassen used the term "global city" in her 1991 work, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo to refer to a city's power, status, and cosmopolitanism, rather than to its size. [269] Following this view of cities, it is possible to rank the world's cities hierarchically. [270] Global cities form the capstone of the global hierarchy, exerting command and control through their economic and political influence. Global cities may have reached their status due to early transition to post-industrialism [271] or through inertia which has enabled them to maintain their dominance from the industrial era. [272] This type of ranking exemplifies an emerging discourse in which cities, considered variations on the same ideal type, must compete with each other globally to achieve prosperity. [181] [174]
Critics of the notion point to the different realms of power and interchange. The term "global city" is heavily influenced by economic factors and, thus, may not account for places that are otherwise significant. Paul James, for example argues that the term is "reductive and skewed" in its focus on financial systems. [273]
Multinational corporations and banks make their headquarters in global cities and conduct much of their business within this context. [274] American firms dominate the international markets for law and engineering and maintain branches in the biggest foreign global cities. [275]
Large cities have a great divide between populations of both ends of the financial spectrum. [276] Regulations on immigration promote the exploitation of low- and high-skilled immigrant workers from poor areas. [277] [278] [279] During employment, migrant workers may be subject to unfair working conditions, including working overtime, low wages, and lack of safety in workplaces. [280]
Cities increasingly participate in world political activities independently of their enclosing nation-states. Early examples of this phenomenon are the sister city relationship and the promotion of multi-level governance within the European Union as a technique for European integration. [262] [281] [282] Cities including Hamburg, Prague, Amsterdam, The Hague, and City of London maintain their own embassies to the European Union at Brussels. [283] [284] [285]
New urban dwellers are increasingly transmigrants, keeping one foot each (through telecommunications if not travel) in their old and their new homes. [286]
Cities participate in global governance by various means including membership in global networks which transmit norms and regulations. At the general, global level, United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) is a significant umbrella organization for cities; regionally and nationally, Eurocities, Asian Network of Major Cities 21, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities the National League of Cities, and the United States Conference of Mayors play similar roles. [287] [288] UCLG took responsibility for creating Agenda 21 for culture, a program for cultural policies promoting sustainable development, and has organized various conferences and reports for its furtherance. [289]
Networks have become especially prevalent in the arena of environmentalism and specifically climate change following the adoption of Agenda 21. Environmental city networks include the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, the United Nations Global Compact Cities Programme, the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance (CNCA), the Covenant of Mayors and the Compact of Mayors, [290] ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, and the Transition Towns network. [287] [288]
Cities with world political status as meeting places for advocacy groups, non-governmental organizations, lobbyists, educational institutions, intelligence agencies, military contractors, information technology firms, and other groups with a stake in world policymaking. They are consequently also sites for symbolic protest. [161] [c] South Africa has one of the highest rate of protests in the world. Pretoria, a city in South Africa had a rally where 5 thousand people took part in order to advocate for increasing wages to afford living costs. [291]
The United Nations System has been involved in a series of events and declarations dealing with the development of cities during this period of rapid urbanization.
UN-Habitat coordinates the U.N. urban agenda, working with the UN Environmental Programme, the UN Development Programme, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank. [293]
The World Bank, a U.N. specialized agency, has been a primary force in promoting the Habitat conferences, and since the first Habitat conference has used their declarations as a framework for issuing loans for urban infrastructure. [295] The bank's structural adjustment programs contributed to urbanization in the Third World by creating incentives to move to cities. [298] [299] The World Bank and UN-Habitat in 1999 jointly established the Cities Alliance (based at the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C.) to guide policymaking, knowledge sharing, and grant distribution around the issue of urban poverty. [300] (UN-Habitat plays an advisory role in evaluating the quality of a locality's governance.) [147] The Bank's policies have tended to focus on bolstering real estate markets through credit and technical assistance. [301]
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO has increasingly focused on cities as key sites for influencing cultural governance. It has developed various city networks including the International Coalition of Cities against Racism and the Creative Cities Network. UNESCO's capacity to select World Heritage Sites gives the organization significant influence over cultural capital, tourism, and historic preservation funding. [289]
Cities figure prominently in traditional Western culture, appearing in the Bible in both evil and holy forms, symbolized by Babylon and Jerusalem. [302] Cain and Nimrod are the first city builders in the Book of Genesis. In Sumerian mythology Gilgamesh built the walls of Uruk.
Cities can be perceived in terms of extremes or opposites: at once liberating and oppressive, wealthy and poor, organized and chaotic. [303] The name anti-urbanism refers to various types of ideological opposition to cities, whether because of their culture or their political relationship with the country. Such opposition may result from identification of cities with oppression and the ruling elite. [304] This and other political ideologies strongly influence narratives and themes in discourse about cities. [19] In turn, cities symbolize their home societies. [305]
Writers, painters, and filmmakers have produced innumerable works of art concerning the urban experience. Classical and medieval literature includes a genre of descriptiones which treat of city features and history. Modern authors such as Charles Dickens and James Joyce are famous for evocative descriptions of their home cities. [306] Fritz Lang conceived the idea for his influential 1927 film Metropolis while visiting Times Square and marveling at the nighttime neon lighting. [307] Other early cinematic representations of cities in the twentieth century generally depicted them as technologically efficient spaces with smoothly functioning systems of automobile transport. By the 1960s, however, traffic congestion began to appear in such films as The Fast Lady (1962) and Playtime (1967). [233]
Literature, film, and other forms of popular culture have supplied visions of future cities both utopian and dystopian. The prospect of expanding, communicating, and increasingly interdependent world cities has given rise to images such as Nylonkong (New York, London, Hong Kong) [308] and visions of a single world-encompassing ecumenopolis. [309]
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Southern Mesopotamia was a land of cities. It became one precociously, before the end of the fourth millennium B.C. Urban traditions remained strong and virtually continuous through the vicissitudes of conquest, internal upheaval accompanied by widespread economic breakdown, and massive linguistic and population replacement. The symbolic and material content of civilization obviously changed, but its cultural ambience remained tied to cities.
TIF is an increasingly popular local redevelopment policy that allows municipalities to designate a 'blighted' area for redevelopment and use the expected increase in property (and occasionally sales) taxes there to pay for initial and ongoing redevelopment expenditures, such as land acquisition, demolition, construction, and project financing. Because developers require cash up-front, cities transform promises of future tax revenues into securities that far-flung buyers and sellers exchange through local markets.
A city's credit rating not only influences its ability to sell bonds, but has become a general signal of fiscal health. Detroit's partial recovery in the early 1990s, for example, was reversed when Moody's downgraded the rating of the city's general obligation bonds, precipitating new rounds of capital flight (Hackworth, 2007). The need to maintain a high credit rating constrains municipal actors by making it difficult to finance discretionary projects in traditional ways.
Beneath state-to-state dealings, a flurry of activity occurs, with interpersonal networks forming policy communities involving embassies, think tanks, academic institutions, lobbying firms, politicians, congressional staff, research centers, NGOs, and intelligence agencies. This interaction at the level of 'technostructure'—heavily oriented toward information gathering and incremental policy modification—is too complex and voluminous to be monitored by top leadership, yet nevertheless often has important implications for policy.
As noted above, nuclear weapons designed for countervalue or city-killing purposes tend to be of the strategic class, with known yields of deployed warheads averaging somewhere between two and three times and 1500 times the firepower of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Against those writers who, by emphasizing the importance of financial exchange systems, distinguish a few special cities as 'global cities'—commonly London, Paris, New York and Tokyo—we recognize the uneven global dimensions of all the cities that we study. Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood, is a globalizing city, though perhaps more significantly in cultural than economic terms. And so is Dili globalizing, the small and 'insignificant' capital of Timor Leste—except this time it is predominantly in political terms...
And not withstanding some major world cities that do not have comparatively high levels of immigration, like Tokyo, it may in fact be the presence of such large-scale immigrant economic 'communities' (with their attendant global financial remittances and their ability to incubate small business growth, rather than their complementarity to producer services employment) which partially distinguishes mega-cities from other more nationally oriented urban centres.
These apparently rather different takes on London's 'global city' status are of course not so far removed from one another as they may first appear. Holding them together is the figure of the migrant worker. The reliance of London's financial institutions and business services industries on the continuing flow of highly skilled labour from overseas is now well known (Beaverstock and Smith 1996). Less well known is the extent to which London's economy as a whole is now dependent upon the labour power of low-paid workers from across the world.
Garnered by its interest in the urban poor the Bank, along with other international donors, became an active and influential participant in the Habitat deliberations, confirming both Habitat I and Habitat II's focus on 'development in cities' instead of the role of 'cities in development'.
A country is a distinct part of the world, such as a state, nation, or other political entity. When referring to a specific polity, the term "country" may refer to a sovereign state, states with limited recognition, constituent country, or a dependent territory. [1] [2] [3] [4] Most sovereign states, but not all countries, are members of the United Nations. [5] There is no universal agreement on the number of "countries" in the world since several states have disputed sovereignty status, limited recognition and a number of non-sovereign entities are commonly called countries. [6] [5]
The definition and usage of the word "country" are flexible and has changed over time. The Economist wrote in 2010 that "any attempt to find a clear definition of a country soon runs into a thicket of exceptions and anomalies." [7]
Areas much smaller than a political entity may be referred to as a "country", such as the West Country in England, "big sky country" (used in various contexts of the American West), "coal country" (used to describe coal-mining regions), or simply "the country" (used to describe a rural area). [8] [9] The term "country" is also used as a qualifier descriptively, such as country music or country living. [10]
The word country comes from Old French contrée, which derives from Vulgar Latin (terra) contrata ("(land) lying opposite"; "(land) spread before"), derived from contra ("against, opposite"). It most likely entered the English language after the Franco-Norman invasion during the 11th century. [11][ better source needed]
In English the word has increasingly become associated with political divisions, so that one sense, associated with the indefinite article – "a country" – is now frequently applied as a synonym for a state or a former sovereign state. It may also be used as a synonym for "nation". Taking as examples Canada, Sri Lanka, and Yugoslavia, cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in 1997 that "it is clear that the relationships between 'country' and 'nation' are so different from one [place] to the next as to be impossible to fold into a dichotomous opposition as they are into a promiscuous fusion." [12]
Areas much smaller than a political state may be referred to as countries, such as the West Country in England, "big sky country" (used in various contexts of the American West), "coal country" (used to describe coal-mining regions in several sovereign states) and many other terms. [8] The word "country" is also used for the sense of native sovereign territory, such as the widespread use of Indian country in the United States. [13] The term "country" in English may also be wielded to describe rural areas, or used in the form "countryside." Raymond Williams, a Welsh scholar, wrote in 1975: [14]
'Country' and 'city' are very powerful words, and this is not surprising when we remember how much they seem to stand for in the experience of human communities. In English, 'country' is both a nation and a part of a 'land'; 'the country' can be the whole society or its rural area. In the long history of human settlements, this connection between the land from which directly or indirectly we all get our living and the achievements of human society has been deeply known.
The unclear definition of "country" in modern English was further commented upon by philosopher Simon Keller: [15]
Often, a country is presumed to be identical with a collection of citizens. Sometimes, people say that a country is a project, or an idea, or an ideal. Occasionally, philosophers entertain more metaphysically ambitious pictures, suggesting that a country is an organic entity with its own independent life and character, or that a country is an autonomous agent, just like you or me. Such claims are rarely explained or defended, however, and it is not clear how they should be assessed. We attribute so many different kinds of properties to countries, speaking as though a country can feature wheat fields waving or be girt by sea, can have a founding date and be democratic and free, can be English speaking, culturally diverse, war torn or Islamic.
— New Waves In Political Philosophy, "Making Nonsense of Loyalty to Country", page 96
Melissa Lucashenko, an Aboriginal Australian writer, expressed the difficulty of defining "country" in a 2005 essay, "Unsettlement": [16]
...What is this thing country? What does country mean? ... I spoke with others who said country meant Home, but who added the caveat that Home resided in people rather than places – a kind of portable Country... I tried to tease out some ways in which non-Indigenous people have understood country. I made categories: Country as Economy. Country as Geography. Country as Society. Country as Myth. Country as History. For all that I walked, slept, breathed and dreamed Country, the language still would not come.
When referring to a specific polity, the term "country" may refer to a sovereign state, states with limited recognition, constituent country, or a dependent territory. [1] [2] [3] A sovereign state is a political entity that has supreme legitimate authority over a part of the world. [17] There is no universal agreement on the number of "countries" in the world since several states have disputed sovereignty status, and a number of non-sovereign entities are commonly called countries. [5] [6] No definition is binding on all the members of the community of nations on the criteria for statehood. [18] [6] State practice relating to the recognition of a country typically falls somewhere between the declaratory and constitutive approaches. [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] International law defines sovereign states as having a permanent population, defined territory, a government not under another, and the capacity to interact with other states. [24]
The declarative theory outlined in the 1933 Montevideo Convention describes a state in Article 1 as: [25] [26]
The Montevideo Convention in Article 3 implies that a sovereign state can still be a sovereign state even if no other countries recognise that it exists. [25] [27] As a restatement of customary international law, the Montevideo Convention merely codified existing legal norms and its principles, [28] and therefore does not apply merely to the signatories of international organizations (such as the United Nations), [6] [29] [26] but to all subjects of international law as a whole. [30] [31] A similar opinion has been expressed by the European Economic Community, [32] reiterated by the European Union, in the principal statement of its Badinter Committee, [33] and by Judge Challis Professor, James Crawford. [29]
According to the constitutive theory a state is a legal entity of international law if, and only if, it is recognised as sovereign by at least one other country. [34] Because of this, new states could not immediately become part of the international community or be bound by international law, and recognised nations did not have to respect international law in their dealings with them. [35] In 1912, L. F. L. Oppenheim said the following, regarding constitutive theory:
International Law does not say that a State is not in existence as long as it is not recognised, but it takes no notice of it before its recognition. Through recognition only and exclusively a State becomes an International Person and a subject of International Law. [36]
In 1976 the Organisation of African Unity define state recognition as: [37]
..the recognition of an independent and sovereign state is an act of sovereignty pertaining each member of the international community, an act to be taken individually, and it is, therefore, up to member states and each OAU power [to decide] whether to recognise or not the newly independent state.
Some countries, such as Taiwan, Sahrawi Republic and Kosovo have disputed sovereignty and/or limited recognition among some countries. [38] [39] Some sovereign states are unions of separate polities, each of which may also be considered a country in its own right, called constituent countries. The Danish Realm consists of Denmark proper, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland. [40] The Kingdom of the Netherlands consists of the Netherlands proper, Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten. [41] The United Kingdom consists of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. [42]
Dependent territories are the territories of a sovereign state that are outside of its proper territory. These include the overseas territories of New Zealand, the dependencies of Norway, the British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies, the territories of the United States, the external territories of Australia, the special administrative regions of China, the autonomous regions of the Danish Realm, Åland, Overseas France, and the Caribbean Netherlands. Some dependent territories are treated as a separate " country of origin" in international trade, [43] [44] such as Hong Kong, [45] [46] [47] Greenland, [48] and Macau. [49]
Symbols of a country may incorporate cultural, religious or political symbols of any nation that the country includes. Many categories of symbols can be seen in flags, coats of arms, or seals. [50]
Most countries have a long name and a short name. [51] The long name is typically used in formal contexts and often describes the country's form of government. The short name is the country's common name by which it is typically identified. [52] [53] [54] [55] The International Organization for Standardization maintains a list of country codes as part of ISO 3166 to designate each country with a two-letter country code. [56] The name of a country can hold cultural and diplomatic significance. Upper Volta changed its name to Burkina Faso to reflect the end of French colonization, and the name of North Macedonia was disputed for years due to a conflict with the similarly named Macedonia region in Greece. [57] The ISO 3166-1 standard currently comprises 249 countries, 193 of which are sovereign states that are members of the United Nations. [58]
Originally, flags representing a country would generally be the personal flag of its rulers; however, over time, the practice of using personal banners as flags of places was abandoned in favor of flags that had some significance to the nation, often its patron saint. Early examples of these were the maritime republics such as Genoa which could be said to have a national flag as early as the 12th century. [59] However, these were still mostly used in the context of marine identification. [60]
Although some flags date back earlier, widespread use of flags outside of military or naval context begins only with the rise of the idea of the nation state at the end of the 18th century and particularly are a product of the Age of Revolution. Revolutions such as those in France and America called for people to begin thinking of themselves as citizens as opposed to subjects under a king, and thus necessitated flags that represented the collective citizenry, not just the power and right of a ruling family. [61] [62] With nationalism becoming common across Europe in the 19th century, national flags came to represent most of the states of Europe. [61] Flags also began fostering a sense of unity between different peoples, such as the Union Jack representing a union between England and Scotland, or began to represent unity between nations in a perceived shared struggle, for example, the Pan-Slavic colors or later Pan-Arab colors. [63]
As Europeans colonized significant portions of the world, they exported ideas of nationhood and national symbols, including flags, with the adoption of a flag becoming seen as integral to the nation-building process. [64] Political change, social reform, and revolutions combined with a growing sense of nationhood among ordinary people in the 19th and 20th centuries led to the birth of new nations and flags around the globe. [65] With so many flags being created, interest in these designs began to develop and the study of flags, vexillology, at both professional and amateur levels, emerged. After World War II, Western vexillology went through a phase of rapid development, with many research facilities and publications being established. [66]
A national anthem is a patriotic musical composition symbolizing and evoking eulogies of the history and traditions of a country or nation. [68] Though the custom of an officially adopted national anthem became popular only in the 19th century, some national anthems predate this period, often existing as patriotic songs long before designation as national anthem.[ citation needed] Several countries remain without an official national anthem. In these cases, there are established de facto anthems played at sporting events or diplomatic receptions. These include the United Kingdom (" God Save the King") and Sweden ( Du gamla, Du fria). Some sovereign states that are made up of multiple countries or constituencies have associated musical compositions for each of them (such as with the United Kingdom, Russia, and the Soviet Union). These are sometimes referred to as national anthems even though they are not sovereign states (for example, " Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau" is used for Wales, part of the United Kingdom). [69]
A positive emotional connection to a country a person belongs to is called patriotism. Patriotism is a sense of love for, devotion to, and sense of attachment to one's country. This attachment can be a combination of many different feelings, and language relating to one's homeland, including ethnic, cultural, political, or historical aspects. It encompasses a set of concepts closely related to nationalism, mostly civic nationalism and sometimes cultural nationalism. [70] [71]
Several organizations seek to identify trends to produce economy country classifications. Countries are often distinguished as developing countries or developed countries. [72]
The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs annually produces the World Economic Situation and Prospects Report classifies states as developed countries, economies in transition, or developing countries. The report classifies country development based on per capita gross national income (GNI). [73] The UN identifies subgroups within broad categories based on geographical location or ad hoc criteria. The UN outlines the geographical regions for developing economies like Africa, East Asia, South Asia, Western Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The 2019 report recognizes only developed countries in North America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. The majority of economies in transition and developing countries are found in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. [74]
The World Bank also classifies countries based on GNI per capita. The World Bank Atlas method classifies countries as low-income economies, lower-middle-income economies, upper-middle-income economies, or high-income economies. For the 2020 fiscal year, the World Bank defines low-income economies as countries with a GNI per capita of $1,025 or less in 2018; lower-middle-income economies as countries with a GNI per capita between $1,026 and $3,995; upper-middle-income economies as countries with a GNI per capita between $3,996 and $12,375; high-income economies as countries with a GNI per capita of $12,376 or more.. [75]
It also identifies regional trends. The World Bank defines its regions as East Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, North America, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Lastly, the World Bank distinguishes countries based on its operational policies. The three categories include International Development Association (IDA) countries, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) countries, and Blend countries. [75]
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