Industrial-Modern Cities

Abstract

In order to understand the transformations that occurred with the onset of the industrial city, it will first be necessary to look at the origin of cities and the growth of the pre-industrial city. The definition of the city by Davis (1973:1), used in Chapter 1, sees the city as ‘concentrations of many people located close together for residential and productive purposes’. This sensitises us to two shifts that were important in the transformation that created the earliest cities. The most significant was probably the shift in the productive base of a society. The occupants of the cities were no longer engaged in agricultural activity and were not self-sufficient. Rather, they supplied services and commodities to the rural population and in exchange they gained their food and other requirements. In order for this new arrangement to occur, productivity had to increase to such an extent that the farmers were producing more than they and their families could consume. This required settled agriculture rather than nomadic hunting and gathering. This is one of the reasons for the earliest cities emerging in the places where they did. These regions had a benign climate and soil and water conditions conducive to agriculture — the growing of wheat and barley. Thus, we see the first cities emerging around 3500 bp in the fertile crescent area of Mesopotamia (Sjoberg 1973).