CHAPTER 1

The City Revolution

Today, more than 50 percent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, compared to just 3 percent in 1800 and 30 percent in 1950, and that proportion is expected to increase to 66 percent by 2050 (The World Population Prospects 2015). Moreover, populations of the 20 most populated cities in the world increased by 64 percent from 1990 to 2014. Reflecting a similar trend, there were only 83 cities with populations exceeding one million in 1950, and by 2007, this number had risen to 468 (City population Retrieved 2010). In addition, more than 70 percent of the populations of North America and Europe reside in urban areas (Gibson 2007).

But what is a city? The concept of city is very difficult to define. From a social sciences perspective, the simplest and most straightforward definition of a city is a large, often densely populated human settlement that is managed by a distinct local authority that is separate from national authorities (Pile 1999). It is thus also an administrative zone defined according to legal or political boundaries. Furthermore, from architectural and civil engineering perspectives, a city is a space of physical artifacts comprising clusters of buildings, open spaces, public facilities, and infrastructure that are defined within rigid, physical boundaries. In addition, the city is a concentration of public institutions, and it offers trading, health, educational, cultural, and myriad other activities (Larice and Macdonald 2013). As such, it can also be defined as a space of services that are exchanged between a wide variety of stakeholders—namely, residents, traders, visitors, and the city authorities (Frug 1998; Miguel, Tavares, and Araújo 2012). Furthermore, a city is also an active community of continuously interacting people and organizations, and as such, it is defined by economic, social, and cultural boundaries. Finally, it is also an environmental zone that is defined by more dynamic and flexible geographic boundaries, for instance, of climate.

The Origin of Cities

What is the origin of cities, how did they come into existence, and what purposes and functions do they serve? From the dawn of humanity, people were hunter-gatherers, which dictated a nomadic way of life and a reliance on nature’s cycles and services, from food, water, and shelter, which are connected to the sowing and ripening cycles and animal migrations, to climate regulation and disease control (i.e., ecosystem services, which include provisioning, regulatory, supportive, and cultural services) (Gretchen 1997). Practiced by relatively small groups of people, this lifestyle demanded that group members function together to maintain life. To that end, hunter-gatherers conducted their lives in harmony with the natural environment, which is today defined as all the natural (vs. human-made) biotic and abiotic components (i.e., living and nonliving things) that interact in ecosystems. Thus, people of that era focused their energy mainly on maintaining their lives and ensuring the continuity of human life. Similar to humans today, hunter-gatherers had to fulfill their physiological needs for food, water, and air as well as for reproduction and their psychological needs for safety, health, and company. Maslow later defined these requirements as “basic needs” in his hierarchy or pyramid of needs (Maslow 1943).

The beginning of human settlements, attributed mainly to the Neolithic Revolution or the first Agricultural Revolution, began around 12,000 years ago with the domestication of plants and animals (Barker 2009). Insofar as it changed people’s role from solely that of food consumers to also include that of food producers, the first Neolithic Revolution facilitated three major changes in the lifestyle of humans that allowed and even required them to establish permanent settlements: (1) land possession and cultivation; (2) surplus food production, which effectively eliminated the need to wander and to forage for food, but which also required the development of mechanisms of food storage and protection as well as sales and trading services; and (3) population growth engendered by increases in the quantity and availability of food, which also led to increase in the population density in certain regions. These changes led to the establishment of villages that, due to technical limitations, contained at most only a few hundred inhabitants each (Childe 1950). Finally, in addition to driving the shift from a nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle to that based on permanent settlement, the Neolithic Revolution marked the first time not only that people assumed ownership of natural resources (e.g., ground, water, plants, and animals), but also that they interfered with natural systems (e.g., water diversion and accumulation and animal and plant domestication). Moreover, the beginning of permanent settlement also changed the social life and culture of people.

At their most basic level, settlements supplied their inhabitants with a variety of services, from housing and goods provision and storage to protection and trading. They also helped sow the seeds of the human environment, which can be defined as an artifact generated by the interactions between human social systems and ecosystems. Nevertheless, several thousand more years were needed to develop the advanced technologies and services, such as water supply and sewage removal systems and governance and cultural services, which characterize cities.

Among the oldest cities on Earth, which—Babylon or Jericho, Athens or Sidon—can be identified as the first official city? Answering this question requires that clearly defined and agreed upon criteria be used to distinguish between a small settlement, a village, and a city. Gordon Childe, who coined the term Urban Revolution in 1930, used concepts and theories from the social sciences to interpret archaeological finds. From that perspective, he presented 10 points that characterize the urban revolution and that can be used to define cities (Childe 1936 and 1950).

On the basis of the characteristics stated above, the first cities that conformed to the definition of a “city” were in the region of Mesopotamia, between 4500 and 3100 BCE. Thus the city of Uruk, first settled in circa 4500 BCE, is today considered to have been the first city in the world, followed by Eridu, which was founded in circa 5000 BCE but had grown into a city by circa 2900 BCE.

Evolution of the City

Throughout history, cities have been founded near rivers in fertile areas that were often situated at the intersections of transportation and trade routes, and they served as centers of storage, trade, and manufacturing. Evolutionary analyses of cities distinguish between two main models of city development: (1) cities that grew “naturally” from aggregations of villages and (2) cities that were planned from scratch. In addition, in terms of their physical structure, all cities contained three main elements: (1) buildings, from private housing to municipal structures; (2) networks, such as streets and water supply and sewage systems; and (3) open spaces, some for public activities (e.g., markets) and others merely situated between residential houses and other city facilities to promote the welfare of the citizens (Tertius 1987). Furthermore, for several thousand years, most planned cities adopted a similar plan that comprised a surrounding wall, streets arranged in a grid pattern, and, situated in the city center, a citadel—a structure that, in addition to providing the city’s residents with an added level of protection against external threats, was used for a variety of other city functions.

From their origin, cities also supplied many services that can be characterized as nonphysical values or systems; for example, marketplaces, tax systems, and other governance services. Cities also supplied physical security, social order, and continuity (e.g., defense and protection for citizens). Another important aspect of ancient cities comprised the religion services they provided and especially the corresponding establishment of temples. Furthermore, although throughout history cities rose and fell in parallel with empires, their social and economic roles as shelters and administrative zones did not change for hundreds of years.

The populations of ancient cities varied from several thousand at the dawn of cities to 10,000 and even up to 100,000 or more at their pinnacle. In contrast to villages, cities comprised a combination of infrastructures that satisfied their citizens’ basic needs, including food and security, services (e.g., trade, health, entertainment), and a community that shared in the social life and culture. These activities correspond to higher levels on Maslow’s pyramid (i.e., belonging that is based on friendship and society). In addition, all these needs and functions have constantly shaped and designed the human environment that cities offered, an environment that was constructed mainly from synthetic materials, which effectively erected a barrier between people and nature. In distancing people from nature, this synthetic barrier even effected a disconnection between the two. Eventually, the human environment created by cities and the intensive levels of human activities that took place in and around the cities also altered the natural environment on both local and global scales through unbalanced natural resource utilization and the discharge of human-made materials.

With the start of the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 18th century (Lucas 2002), cities grew and changed tremendously. The emergence of new technologies at that time partially replaced tedious hand labor with machine-based employment, enabling agricultural areas to prosper with fewer workers and leading to the establishment of industry in nonagricultural areas. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, factories were situated outside the cities, mainly near water sources that were required for the factory machinery. The development of steam power, however, allowed these manufacturing processes to be moved closer to the city centers, in the process spawning massive migrations of people from rural areas to cities. As a result, the bulk of economic, cultural, and governmental systems and facilities became concentrated in cities. Moreover, city architectural design was also revised, and factories, warehouses, and offices were added alongside houses and municipal buildings. In addition, technological innovations that emerged with the Industrial Revolution, from automobile and rail transportation to electricity and telecommunication, changed not only the city landscape but also the lifestyle of people in the cities and the way that cities were operated. Finally, the Industrial Revolution also witnessed the creation of new social classes (e.g., the proletariat, or working class, and the bourgeoisie).

The technological advances that allowed manufacturing processes to be moved within the boundaries of cities were hailed as an advance for civilization, but little thought was devoted to considering the consequences of bringing industrial development closer to the city center. The heavy industrialization that occurred in the cities caused high emissions of pollution, from the release of harmful and toxic gases into the air to the discharge of effluents and solid wastes to the city environment. The reliance on combustion processes in industrial areas in the proximity of city residents eventually created a significant burden on public health. Mainly the result of the air pollution associated with the smoke emanating from factory exhaust pipes, it led to calls for the design of new standards and laws regarding industrial processes.

Several events in the history of industrialization are cited as milestones of the lack of human foresight. In 1952, London was assaulted by the Great Smog event, so named for the heavy smog that smothered the city for four days and eventually caused the deaths of about 4,000 people and injured about 100,000 others. An important datum point in the struggle to significantly reduce London’s dangerous air pollution, the Great Smog event spurred similar reactions in other cities around the world. Unfortunately, however, London’s Great Smog event has since been followed by environmental catastrophes in other cities. Chief among these are the explosion of chemical facilities in Bhopal, India, in 1984, during which half a million people were exposed to methyl cyanide, a gas whose dissipation killed about 2,500 people, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, where the final total of premature deaths associated with the disaster is estimated at 4,000. In addition to motivating calls for the implementation of more stringent regulations and for the adoption of safety upgrades, these horrific events also highlighted the necessity to remove heavy industry from cities.

The growing city populations spawned the development of social classes that, together with the emerging public transportation systems, resulted in the establishment of suburbs for workers and even neighborhoods in the countryside for the upper classes. Pollution emissions from manufacturing processes also pushed the population from the city center to the suburbs. These residential areas were either part of the city or separate settlements (e.g., villages or small cities) within commuting distance of a city, which allowed people to combine the advantages of city life with the high quality of life, beauty, and tranquility offered by rural areas.

These developments and changes led eventually to the city form with which we are familiar today: a city center that contains business districts and administration buildings paired with a residential suburban area. Despite the many commonalities cities in the world share in terms of their structures and the services they supply, the character and identity of each city is unique due to inherent differences in how it was established and in its developmental path—natural distinctions that arose due to each city’s geographic location, climate, wildlife population, and societal characteristics. Likewise, the evolution of each city is inextricably linked with its historical heritage and cultural traditions. For example, while most European cities are very old, many American cities were built virtually from scratch, a process that allowed for their intentional design with the goal of producing more efficient and better cities. Europe is also characterized by a more polycentric and less concentrated urban structure compared with that of the United States. For instance, only 7 percent of the EU population lives in cities of over five million inhabitants, compared with 25 percent in the United States (European Union 2011). In addition, 56 percent of the European urban population lives in small and medium-sized cities and towns of between 5,000 and 100,000 inhabitants. Finally, over the years different types of cities were defined and distinguished, such as the Capital City, which is politically important and which usually hosts the government and supreme court of a country, state, or region; the Mega City or Megacity, a metropolitan area with over 10 million people (initially 8 million); and the Global City or World City, a city that plays an important role in the global economic system.

The processes of city evolution described above can be illustrated by following the development of New York City, the present-day area of which was already inhabited by Native American tribes in the pre-Columbian era (i.e., the time before Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to America in 1492) (Jackson 1995; Homberger and Hudson 2005). The subsequent onset of colonial conquest brought a variety of European voyages to the harbor of New York, and eventually a permanent Dutch settlement named New Amsterdam was established in the 17th century. During the 19th century, New York City was bolstered by waves of European immigration, and it became a trading center. However, the modern city of New York was formed with the consolidation of several cities and counties, such as Brooklyn, the Bronx, Richmond, and Queens in 1898, and by the early 1920s, it became the most populous urbanized area in the world. Moreover, the metropolitan area of the city became the first megacity in human history in the early 1930s (when megacities were still defined as cities with over eight million people). Indeed, from its humble beginnings with a population of about 5,000 in 1689 (Rosenwaike 1972), New York City grew to 60,000 people in 1800 and to 8,550,405 people in 2015 (United States Census Bureau 2016).

Municipal Services

Besides entailing the construction of physical structures, the creation of a city also demanded that city authorities develop the corresponding services the city will need to effectively serve its residents. Initially, these included new municipal services, such as garbage collection, education, and health care systems, but they have since been joined by myriad other services deemed essential to proper functioning of the city. Although differences exist between cities in how they design and offer their respective services, the principal municipal activities offered by most cities today are summarized in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Main municipal services

City Models

The planning, design, and construction sector has a major impact on daily life in the city. In general, the built environment of any urban area is divided into private, commercial, and public areas, all of which include buildings, infrastructure, and open spaces. The bulk of the city area comprises buildings, private and public, and infrastructures. Besides its dominant role in determining the outward appearance of the city, the city’s built environment is also responsible for most of the city’s resource consumption and waste discharge, from energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions to water use, wastewater release, and waste generation. Thus, in an attempt to repair the damage of the past and reduce the environmental footprint imposed by the built area of the city, a new construction industry, termed green building, has developed in recent years. Green building is based on the incorporation of environmental aspects during the planning and execution of construction. It also promotes resource conservation and strives to exploit local and recycled materials while considering the region’s natural characteristics (e.g., climate and topography). In addition to emphasizing more environmentally friendly building construction, current city development processes stress the creation of urban open spaces such as gardens, parks, green spaces between buildings, ecological corridors, and “urban nature” sites. With their protected biological systems, habitats, and ecosystems, the open spaces in the city play a vital role since they maintain the continuity of the natural systems that benefit biodiversity and that provide services such as rainwater absorption, soil amelioration, and cooling “heat islands,” built-up areas that are hotter than nearby rural areas. Moreover, they are social areas that attract people for everything from recreation to leisure to education. At last, in recent years it was also understood that the city should take stringent steps and lead a significant change in the lifestyle of its citizens and visitors, a process that will result in the more rational use of resources within the confines of the city. This will also decrease the ecological footprint of the city (a measure that accounts for the extent to which we exploit natural resources to fulfill our needs and desires, from production of food and clothing to the discharge of wastewater and garbage to leisure time activities, and converts it into equivalent land) and its negative effects on local and global social and natural environments.

Over the years, a variety of new urban models and concepts have been designed and proposed as viable means to reestablish the bond between the human and the natural environments, to increase the quality of life within cities, and to reduce the impacts that cities have on the environment. Some of these models are listed here.

Many recent studies in the broad field of city science focus on two main visions and action plans: the Smart City (Caragliu, Del Bo and Nijkamp 2011; Townsend 2013) and the Sustainable City (Satterthwaite 1997; Lehmann 2010; Newman and Jennings 2012). The notion of the smart city refers to the integration of solutions based on information and communication technology (ICT) and the Internet of Things (IoT) to manage city resources, services, and assets. Born of the Information Revolution, the smart city model tremendously changed the way people manage cities, and as such, it affects all of us on a daily basis. The smart city envisions connecting people, services, and infrastructures via ICT and its applications to promote better utilization of data and improve organizational performance, thereby facilitating more efficient decision-making processes. The smart city action plan is divided into six major areas (Wolfson 2016): (1) smart governance through democracy, transparency, and public sharing; (2) smart economy based on the local economy, green growth (i.e., economic growth that also ensures overall civilian well-being together with environmental equity and benefits), and increased competitiveness; (3) smart mobility through the use of sophisticated transport systems and traffic management; (4) smart environment through environmental monitoring, conservation of resources, and reduction of the city’s environmental footprint; (5) smart living through implementation of health systems, social services, and smart homes; and (6) smart people by developing extensive education and training resources that answer the needs of all citizens.

The sustainable city was conceptualized as an integration of quality of life and environmental concerns with social justice and local and agglomeration economies. It aims to ensure the rich and fair existence of its citizens, to provide them with a wide range of benefits, and to promote the overall prosperity of the city while using physical and nonphysical resources rationally and equitably and assuming responsibility at the local and global levels over the short and the long term. In practice, it refers to how the city’s resources are used and how environmental damage is minimized while imposing certain limits on social and economic activities. The sustainable city incorporates and promotes the following general qualities: (1) well-being—ensure physical, mental, social, economic, and environmental quality of life for individuals and groups; (2) diversity—promote equal rights and an inclusive atmosphere that encourages different communities to settle in the city; (3) equity—ensure equal rights and opportunities and the fair division of the city’s resources; (4) rational use of resources—from reductions in the use of city resources to the design of methods to promote renewability; and (5) cooperation—cooperation and collaboration between all city stakeholders that encourages their active involvement and that cultivates in them a sense of responsibility.

The smart city and sustainable city models have much in common, as the smart city aims to promote sustainable development and the sustainable city exploits smart solutions. In addition, both models strive to develop and implement plans for saving resources, to design efficient physical and nonphysical systems to improve urban development, and to manage and increase civic engagement and public participation in the city. However, while technology that reshapes and advances city services is at the core of the smart city, the sustainable city is more about the integration of responsible and shared economic, social, and environmental values that, in turn, will generate better city services. Moreover, the smart city employs physical infrastructures that benefit the community whereas the sustainable city refers to the people and their community that use the infrastructure for their common good. Furthermore, while the smart city model is currently applied mainly in the design and implementation of solutions in existing cities without altering the present forms of these cities, sustainable city solutions deal more with the redesign and development of cities to obtain the desired results. Yet the main difference between the two models is that “smart” relates to increased efficiency while “sustainability” relates to wisdom and to increased effectiveness (Ackoff 1989).

The City of Tomorrow

What will tomorrow’s cities look like? Notwithstanding the difficulties associated with forecasting the future and envisioning how cities will develop and change in the coming decades, volumes of research have been devoted to the future of cities and the cities of the future (Etezadzadeh 2015; Jenks and Jones 2009; Flint and Raco 2012; Nam and Pardo 2011; Axhausen et al. 2012; Khodabakhsh, Fathi and Mashayekhi 2016; Ratti and Claudel 2016; European Union 2011).

Today, cities are agglomerations of the world’s main economic, social, and cultural activities. Yet the modern city is not merely a collection of buildings, roads, parks, and public institutions and a corresponding set of services, but a dynamic space of people, infrastructure, and services that are interconnected and jointly creating the active, living entity of the city (Wolfson 2016). Collectively, modern cities play a major role in national and global processes, such as economic growth, and they lead civil and environmental revolutions in the world; for example, promote the solar energy revolution. Of course, the city of the future can be envisioned in myriad ways, and as such, it is vitally important that each city be planned and developed based on the needs of its inhabitants and its other stakeholders while considering its local resources and its legacy. Yet various global processes such as global warming should be considered when building future cities from scratch and in the redesign of current cities to ensure that they will be able to effectively meet the anticipated challenges of the future, including but not limited to (1) increased consumption levels that could negatively affect the availability of natural resources and the health of the environment; (2) advances in technology, particularly the development of the digital world; (3) changes in the work environment (e.g., working remotely) and in the labor market, including the shift from markets based on agriculture and manufacturing to services-based markets and the increased use of machines and robots in place of people; (4) changes in the balance between the time we spend in private versus public spaces and how we use those spaces; (5) emergence of the share economy (also termed shareconomy), in which the ownership of resources, assets, goods, and services is replaced by access; and (6) emergence of service dominant logic (SDL), a paradigm that views service provision rather than product exchange as being at the core of each exchange and that promotes the joint cocreation of value by a provider and a customer.

To ensure that tomorrow’s cities will be equipped to cope with these challenges, future city design approaches should be based on exploiting the inherent values of the city’s fundamental building blocks—its people, infrastructures, and services—and on revising, vis-à-vis city functions, their respective roles and the connections between them. A good city design process will not only be driven by a broad, long-term vision of what kind of city its planners envision—more importantly, it will require the active involvement of its residents in all decision making relevant to city planning, and it will encourage its residents to assume responsibility for the space in which they live. In this respect, the community as a whole is a much more powerful agent for the implementation and maintenance of change than are the city’s individual citizens. Another important issue in the design and development of future cities is decoupling of economic and social growth from the qualities of life and environment.