ancient cities

838 Urban Agglomeration
Lewis Mumford argued that the city represented
the greatest achievement of humankind; not only
did it contain the highest achievements in art and
architecture, but it provided spaces and opportunities
for social interaction and involvement not
found elsewhere. In this sense, to be urban is to be
cultured—to have knowledge about and to have
experienced the city. This also is the meaning of
cosmopolitan—to have knowledge about and experience
of the broader world around us. To be urban
is to be cosmopolitan, and from this is derived yet
another meaning and referent for urban: urbane.
Ray Hutchison
See also Mumford, Lewis; Urban Crisis; Urban Life;
Urbanism; Urbanization
Further Readings
Girouard, Mark. 1987. City and People: A Social and
Architectural City. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Melville, Herman. 1849. Redburn: His First Voyage,
Being the Sailor Boy Confessions and Reminiscences
of the Son-of-a-Gentleman in the Merchant Navy.
New York: Harper & Brothers.
United Nations. 2005. Demographic Yearbook. New
York: United Nations.
Ur b a n ag g l o m e r a t i o n
The United Nations defines an urban agglomeration
as “a contiguous territory inhabited at urban
levels of residential density, without regard to
administrative boundaries.” Included in this definition
is the idea that urban agglomerations contain
a variety of places ranging from large cities to
small villages with much lower density, even rural,
areas interspersed among them. Commonly, one
central place anchors this continuous built-up
area; the other places are functionally related to it
and to each other.
On average, an urban agglomeration has population
concentrations that exceed rural levels and
which can be classified as urban densities. Second,
it contains one or more large cities and a number
of smaller cities and towns; it is polycentric or
multinucleated. Third, the various places within
the urban agglomeration are connected to each
other such that the agglomeration as a whole
forms a functional urban region, one which provides
a full range of goods and services consummate
with the level of development of the country
in which it is located. These functional relations
involve trade, commuting, internal migration, and
communication (e.g., television, newspapers) linkages.
To this extent, an urban agglomeration is an
elaborate version of a single city and its hinterland,
the surrounding area that supplies the city with
food, products for export, and raw materials for
manufacture. Lastly, to the extent that an urban
agglomeration contains rural areas in the interstices
of dense concentrations, it might or might
not have viable agricultural or resource extraction
activities.
Using a baseline of 5 million inhabitants, there
were 39 urban agglomerations in the world in the
year 2000. They included such places as Paris,
Istanbul, and Moscow. The six largest were Tokyo,
Mexico City, Mumbai (previously Bombay), São
Paulo, New York City, and Lagos, in that order.
Tokyo’s population was approximately 35 million,
followed by Mexico City at 19 million and
Mumbai at 17 million. Just over one-half of these
urban agglomerations were located in Asia (the
most populous region of the world), and the rest
were split between Latin America and Africa on
the one hand and North America and Europe on
the other.
The UN projects that by 2015 the number of
urban agglomerations will grow to 59, with most
of that growth concentrated in Asia. Of particular
note is China, which is expected to add two more
urban agglomerations (Chongqing and Shenyang)
to the four (Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, and Wuhan)
that it already has. In addition, almost all of the
expansion of urban agglomerations is projected to
occur in middle-income and low-income countries
rather than in high-income countries. From the
high-income countries, only London and Toronto
are slated to join the ranks of the world’s largest
urban areas.
Identifying the world’s urban agglomerations is
not a simple task; more difficult yet is ranking
them definitively from the largest to the smallest.
To begin, definitions of what constitutes an urban
area are a major challenge. What is considered