Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This short book is about cities. Specifically, we are concerned with the overall process of making cities (in other words ) and within this broad theme we focus on the practices of people in cities and their experiences of in cities. Of course, cities are about much more than jobs and shelter but these two topics provide the basis for understanding how and why people come to cities and live there.

This short book is about cities. Specifically, we are concerned with the overall process of making cities (in other words ) and within this broad theme we focus on the practices of people in cities and their experiences of in cities. Of course, cities are about much more than jobs and shelter but these two topics provide the basis for understanding how and why people come to cities and live there.

Cities are distinguished from other human settlements by two key features: they constitute dense and large clusters of people living and working together, and they are the focus of myriad internal and external flows. This is what makes cities uniquely active and vibrant places that are always more cosmopolitan than culturally uniform. Historically these features are expressed in different ways over millennial time as new modes of working and living in cities are generated and diffused. In this chapter these changes are sketched out from the earliest beginnings of urbanization to cities in contemporary globalization.

As we saw in the previous chapter, the history of urbanization all around the world is long and multifaceted. Thus far we have considered this history without paying much attention to the internal dynamics of cities. In this chapter, we set out to describe some of the production and employment features of cities. These features are not only of critical importance in their own right, but also shape urban patterns and urban growth trends as a whole. In turn, cities constitute major foundations of the growth and prosperity of modern economies. The discussion that follows focuses mainly, but not exclusively, on cities in the modern era.

The expansion of urban economies has been accompanied by constant migration of people to cities in search of opportunities for work and livelihood, as discussed in the previous chapter. There are other reasons for living in cities such as seeking refuge from conflict, or being forced to move there when livelihood elsewhere is threatened. Urban dwellers’ children add to the numbers as well, so underlying high or low natural birth and death rates can set a baseline of rapid urban growth or generate a tendency for settlements to decline.

In this short book we have presented an overview of some of the most urgent issues and questions facing city dwellers, planners and scholars about the development and social significance of cities. We have examined how cities first appeared and evolved through historical time; we have considered the basic logic of cities in terms of work and livelihood, employment and production; and we have looked intently at the phenomena of housing, shelter, and residential development and their effects on urban life. Clearly, from all that has gone before, cities are extraordinarily complex and problematical places that generate a continually shifting groundwork of predicaments and opportunities. What, we might ask, are the prospects for cities in the 21st century, and what future changes are likely to come into view?