ancient cities

882 Urban History
conurbation, and megalopolis have been introduced.
Urban agglomerations inhabited by 10
million people or more have been titled megacities
and megaurban regions.
The term metropolis is often used as a designation
for a great city in general and in contrast to
small cities. The original meaning of metropolis
seems to have been a greater city surrounded by a
net of urban sites more or less dependent of the
main city.
Metropolitan area, as well as urban region and
city region, refers to a rather wide geographical area
of continuous urban settlements surrounded by
smaller places more or less dependent on the center.
No coherent norms exist among urban historians
for deciding when a city turns into a metropolis or
how to functionally delimit a metropolitan area.
For urban historians the delineation of an urban
region (or equivalent) is strongly dependent on how
travel patterns (such as commuting) and other relevant
variables have been estimated and recorded.
Metropolitan area is sometimes used even as an
administrative concept and is assigned with formal
boundaries like a city.
Conurbation has been defined as a wider area of
continuous settlements. It is characterized by previously
being divided into several urban sites of varying
size, which successively have grown together
and constituted one urban area. The concentration
has often taken place through the construction of
sweeps of buildings along the main roads.
The concept of megalopolis has been used to
describe huge areas of continuous urban settlements
of varying size, from large metropolises to
small suburbs and interspersed with rural landscapes.
In Europe, the German Ruhr area, the
Dutch Randstad and the Milan region in northern
Italy, are good examples. Urban change can sometimes
be very rapid in the zones immediately outside
the administrative city or the official
metropolitan area, as for example in present-day
East Asia.
In modern and contemporary urban history it is
often necessary to include not only the administrative
cities and towns but also the wider agglomerations
consisting of a number of cities and urban
sites of various size, function, and administrative
status. Inevitably, urban regions change their
shapes over time and have to be redelimited from
one occasion to another.
Urban Biography
Urban biography is the history of one particular
city or town. It is a form of synthesis, or total history,
with the wider object to explain and understand
the historical development of the particular
city, how the city has became what it is today.
This long-term perspective is central to an urban
biography. Many aspects of local development—
such as municipal government, local politics, housing,
planning, physical expansion, demographic
development, economic development, infrastructures,
and voluntary organizations—may be
included in an urban biography. The city is given
a distinct character and becomes more than just a
site for historical research. It is seen as an independent
variable of research in its own right. Urban
biographies might include a comparative perspective,
which relates the city to other cities as well as
to regional and national development.
Urban biographies may not always include every
single aspect of a city’s history. It can instead be
given a thematic outline focusing on a restricted
number of facets considered as crucial for understanding
the historical development of the particular
city. Such key features will normally not be constant
over time; in the long run considerable variations are
to be expected. This approach to urban history can
be labeled urban biography as long as the particular
city remains an object of research in its own right
and is not used as a means for the study of some
kind of general process or phenomenon.
The professional writing of urban biographies
or town histories has been a vigorous academic
branch. In some countries a substantial share of all
urban history publications has belonged to this
category, and periodically urban history has almost
been equal to urban biographies.
Closely connected to urban biography is local
history, which embraces the study of the history
of one particular local community, urban or
rural. It is like urban biography: a sort of total
history with the ambition to include most aspects
of the local development of a single community.
Local history has developed as a leisure activity
for people born in or living in the community
under study, as well as an academic discipline.
Some local historians have argued that a local
community should be studied on its own premises
irrespective of changes in the wider region or