ancient cities

Levy, John M. 2003. Contemporary Urban Planning. 6th
ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
“A Vision and Strategy for Rebuilding New Orleans.”
Testimony of Paul Farmer speaking for the
American Planning Association before the House
Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittees on
Water Resources and Environment, and Economic
Development, Public Buildings and Emergency
Management, October 18, 2005. Retrieved April 20,
2009 (http://www.planning.org/katrina/pdf/
farmerwrittentestimony.pdf).
Ci t y us E r s
City user is a fancy label applied to an analytically
based concept, elaborated for two reasons:
(1) The inadequacy of the traditional urban analysis,
largely based on resident populations, to
cope with the accrued mobility of urban areas,
and (2) the increased difficulty in explaining
urban dynamics based on concepts requiring
strong assumptions of collective rationality like
all class-based analyses. Thus in 1993 I proposed
to reintroduce the concept of populations in
urban analysis.
Populations and Collective Rationality
Urban structures, in which we walk or ride every
day, are already deeply different from the urban
images we have in our mind and in our hearts.
Thus there is urgency for a profound reconceptualization
of the intellectual and empirical tools we
need for the study of urban social facts and processes.
It would be naive to pretend to lay down a
new theory of urban development, and I do not
propose to offer one. But I would like to suggest an
effort to analyze urban change, evading the straightjacket
of strict social ecological thinking and class
analysis, based on the simple concept of population—namely,
an aggregate of individuals defined
by one or more simple traits—without any strong
assumption about their rational collective behavior.
This is contrary to the kind of theoretical
assumptions we need in order to analyze classes,
movements, groups, or organizations. To give an
example of both the simplicity of definition and
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empirical power of the concept of population, it is
sufficient to look at current patterns of urban
migration from the third worlds to the developed
ones. Migration flows are composed of individuals
and households responding to personal circumstance;
the effects of these aggregate decisions are
far reaching precisely because they are a loose sum
of individual actions.
Four Urban Populations
Based on these cursory considerations I propose to
represent schematically various types of urban morphologies
by using a simple combination of four
populations differentiating out in successive phases;
measurement of these variables is conceptually
neat, and labels are needed only for discursive
purposes.
Live Work Consume
A. Inhabitants Y Y/N Y
B. Commuters N Y (Y)
C. City users N N Y
D. Metropolitan
business persons N Y Y
From the Traditional City to the
First-Generation Metropolis
In the traditional town, on which all the current
thinking about urban life is still largely molded,
the inhabitants, or the population living in the city,
coincided with the population working in the city.
The Industrial Revolution did not greatly affect
this situation, because production of goods in the
secondary sector requires mostly the shifting of
raw materials, manufactured goods, and financial
assets, while workers and entrepreneurs remain
largely concentrated in urban areas.
The early metropolitan development that took
place in the United States from the 1920s, and
after World War II in Europe, can be essentially
seen as a growing differentiation of two populations:
the inhabitants and the workers. One can
think of this early metropolitan development as
two circles progressively separating one from the