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A city is defined as “an urban area of high population density with some degree of self-government”, differentiated from towns, villages, and hamlets by size, importance or legal status. The word ‘urban’ originally described the view of life from Rome - smooth, literate and non-barbaric. The opposite of the Latin urbanus is rusticus, or rural.
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French = cité
German = stadt
Italian = città
Spanish = ciudad
Latin = civis
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The word “city” is from the Latin: civis, which is also the root of the word civilization.“World Cities” or “Global Cities” are those cities that are/were considered to be significant “node” points in global economic, political, population concentration, transportation, communication, arts, music, cultural, education, and sports activities.
The earliest communities evolved organically, usually along rivers, as people gathered for the advantages of protection and help in tasks associated with the development of agriculture. The new profession of urban planning, the discipline of integrating social and built environments with the natural ecology of place, has roots evident from archeological excavations of the earliest cities, like Harappa, in the Indus Valley.
Greeks used a grid pattern for planning cities, and Romans laid their cities out in a street grid pattern overlaid with two diagonal crossing streets meeting at a forum in the center and surrounding defensive walls. Middle Ages politics saw the growth of cities based on fortifications taking the high ground and the streets circling the castle or abbey like a topographical map. The French word bourgeoisie describes the social class of people whose status and power was from being merchants living within the walls of a city.
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• “All cities are mad: but the madness s gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.” Christopher Morley
• “There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.” Kathleen Norris
• “An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.” John Ruskin
• “A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.” Derek Walcott
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