ancient cities

well as in the use of top cultural amenities, such as
concerts, exhibitions, museums, but also saunas
and gyms. Increasingly business and top-level tourism
go together. Both the city users and the metropolitan
businesspersons are a product of the service
industry; whereas secondary-type industries shift
goods, services in large part require the shifting of
people.
Positing of these four populations does not
imply that more traditional class relations and
conflicts have disappeared, but there is little doubt
that they are undergoing deep transformations
that undermine some of the classical socioecological
factors of urban class conflict. The strength
of the industrial urban proletariat was to a large
degree, as it has been noted repeatedly since Marx,
a function of its territorial organization. Workingclass
districts reinforced and projected on the
urban plane, so to speak, the class solidarity created
in the factory, while the organization of traditional
working-class parties and movements relied
heavily on the urban ecological niches in which
subcultural factors created an extraordinary synergy
of economic, social, and political interactions.
Much of the lore about industrial cities and early
metropolitan areas is centered on these essential
components of the urban landscape that tend to
wane in the present-day metropolis. In purely
numerical terms, the inhabitants are probably the
most disfavored of the four populations by the
overall dynamic. All in all, then, the traditional
class cleavages and solidarities, while by all means
still existing and perceivable, give way to new
cleavages and group realignments. This analysis
receives additional insights in the frame of Anthony
Giddens’s concept of disembedding as a trait constituent
of what he calls “radical modernity.” One
of the leads suggested by the concept of disembedding
points to the analysis of the social consequences
of the information and communication
technologies.
See also Shopping; Tourism
Further Readings
Guido Martinotti
Giddens, A. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Colonial City
165
Martinotti, G. 1993. Metropoli la nuova morfologia
sociale delle città. Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino.
———. 2005. Social Morphology and Governance in the
New Metropolis. In Cities of Europe: Changing
Contexts, Local Arrangements, and the Challenge to
Urban Cohesion, edited by Y. Kazepov. Oxford, UK:
Blackwell.
Co l o n i a l Ci t y
The human appropriation of resources—whether
they be land, raw materials, or labor—is by nature a
colonial act and, in this respect, urban settlement
may be considered inherently colonial. However,
here, the colonial city is defined by two parameters:
the city as a nucleus of human settlement
dependent on, yet separated from, the agricultural
hinterland; and the colonial, which is the domination
of a minority population over indigenous
peoples (who are usually ethnically, racially, or
religiously distinct from their colonizers). Whereas
many colonial cities were products of nineteenthcentury
European domination over non-Western
lands, the phenomenon of colonial urbanism has
a longer trajectory.
Definitions and Features
The words colony and culture share a common
Latin stem—colere—that is, to cultivate. Colonia
was the term used to indicate a public settlement
of Roman citizens in a hostile or newly conquered
country where settlers, while retaining their Roman
citizenship, received land and acted as a garrison
for the Roman Empire. The words colony and
plantation were sometimes used interchangeably.
Indeed, the Colonial Office of the British Empire
was originally called the Board of Plantations. In
its early usage in the sixteenth century, the word
plantation simply referred to settling people; however,
it later came to denote a New World mode of
production based on the exploitation of slave
labor for the production of agricultural staples for
a metropolitan market. The cities that grew out of
colonization were based on social segregation and
political dominance. Colonial cities served as
physical expressions of dominance in which the
relationships between the dominator and the