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AH110 - The Ancient City

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Excerpts from William Flanagan, "From Ancient Cities to an Urban World," Urban Sociology: Images and Structures (New York: Roman & Littlefield, 2010), 33-67. In order to appreciate the way cities shape social life, we must begin by tracing the advent and development of the urban form—to study the origins of cities and how they have changed over time. In this chapter, we begin with what we think were the first cities—located in the Middle East—and also look at the earliest cities in other regions of the world—China and Mesoamerica. We then turn to the urbanization of Europe and assess the impact of the Industrial Revolution. In both the ancient period and the period of rapid industrialization, there are three distinguishable categories of social change: the increase in the scale of human settlements and its consequences for social organization, specifically social stratification; the impact of the city on culture and experience; and the process of political and economic centralization.

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