ancient cities

a phenomenon of central importance for the whole
society and that urbanization represented one of
the most essential processes in the development of
the modern and contemporary world. To some
extent there was a shift of focus in urban history
from the Middle Ages and the early modern period
to the study of the modern and industrial city.
The study of urban history has often been more
rich and advanced in countries where urbanization
started at a rather early stage and has generated
large cities and marked urbanization tendencies. In
the United States, for example, the origins of urban
history can be dated back to the 1930s. The
American Urban History Group was founded in
the early 1950s and published a newsletter, but
this organization proved unable to contain the
divergent strands of the field and faded away. A
renewal of urban history in the United States followed
in the 1960s and the 1970s. One of the bestknown
trends from that period adopted the label
“The New Urban History” and emphasized
research on social mobility in urban settings. Even
if this approach was short-lived, and its claims to
be “urban” questionable, it had a significant influence
on the future course of urban history.
The relationship between urban history research
and the level of urbanization is not as direct as it
might appear at first sight. In the Netherlands, for
centuries a highly urbanized country, the study of
urban history was weakly developed until the final
decades of the twentieth century. In Sweden, on
the other hand, a small and by that time agrarian
European country without large cities, the Institute
for Urban History was set up in Stockholm as
early as 1919, and it is still in operation.
The field of urban history can be divided into
subfields: urbanization, urban biographies, and
thematic urban history. Another important area is
the writing of comprehensive generalizations and
syntheses, which have to integrate aspects and
results from all the major subfields and relate them
to the development of society in general in a longterm
perspective. The writing of syntheses has a
long tradition in urban history, going back to at
least the 1930s.
Urbanization
The concept of urbanization refers to the shift
from a rural to an urban society. The urban world
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increases at the expense of the rural world.
Urbanization is generally seen as a process that can
be defined in at least three ways: demographic
urbanization, structural urbanization, and behavioral
urbanization.
Demographic urbanization is about the processes
of population concentration. It refers to a
rise of the proportion of the population living in
towns, cities, or any other urban site. This can be
done either by a multiplication of urban points or
by a faster population growth in urban settings
than in rural districts. Structural urbanization has
its focus on the concentration of economic activities
to certain places, irrespective of population
development. Structural urbanization is often but
not always correlated to demographic urbanization,
and the city is imagined as an economic
organization.
Urban behaviors are not place bound, and they
can be observed in sparsely as well as densely
populated areas. Behavioral urbanization refers to
the process where behaviors, cultural norms, attitudes,
belief, thoughts, and other customs that are
supposed to characterize the lifestyles of urban
people are spread to an even larger proportion of
the total population of a nation or a region. The
city is seen as a social system—people acting
within a coherent domain of social norms—and
not primarily as an economic organization.
During periods of strong population growth
(e.g., during industrialization), cities will sooner or
later grow outside their administrative borders and
suburbs will emerge. Suburbanization and urban
sprawl are concepts used to describe and analyze
the spread of urban settlements over rural land at
the outskirts of an urban area. Together a city and
its suburbs make up an urban region or a metropolitan
area.
A net of places more or less strongly dependent
on the principal center surrounds modern
cities. Sets of zones with diminishing dependence
on growing distances can be identified. These
zones have been given different labels, for example,
inner suburbs, outer suburbs, inner fringe
area, and outer fringe area. The steadily ongoing
urbanization process and the growth of urban
populations has, thus, resulted in the rise of
more complex urban settlements than a single
city, and new concepts such as metropolis,
metropolitan area, urban region, city region,