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city

From The Dictionary of Human Geography
The etymological roots of the term lie in the Latin civitas ; it is related to the Greek polis , the Latin urbs , the French la cite , la ville , the Italian la città and the German die Stadt . Today, a more generic usage of the term refers to an urban demographic, economic and above all political and jurisdictional unit, usually bigger than a town. In the USA, cities are considered to have self-government granted by the states. In Canada, where municipal autonomy is more restricted, cities are under the constitutional jurisdiction of provinces. In the UK, reference is to a large town that has received title from the Crown. Cities are usually trading centres and marketplaces. Their emergence is linked to the historical separation of non-agricultural work from the land (see urban origins ). Ancient cities in the Indus valley, in Mesopotamia, Egypt and China were based on a hydrological agricultural economy, and were the seats of religious and military power , and the state . The built…
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Full text Article Cities

From World of Sociology, Gale
As suburbs sprawl and commutes lengthen, some...
Cities are a fairly recent human invention, first developing about ten thousand years ago, as previously nomadic human populations increased and began to create permanent settlements. This new way of life allowed a more complex division of labor to develop; people had more specialized jobs and a…
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Full text Article city

From Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology
Given the dramatic increase in urbanization in the nineteenth century and the claim of much social theory and sociology to be an analysis of contemporary societies, it is surprising that the nature of contemporary cities was not deemed worthy of wider study. F. Engels 's 1844 study of the urban…
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Full text Article city

From Word Origins
The Latin word for ‘city’ was urbs (whence English urban ), but a ‘citizen’ was cīvis . From this was derived the noun cīvitās , which originally had the abstract sense ‘citizenship’. Gradually it acquired more concrete connotations, eventually coming to be used as a synonym of urbs . It passed into…
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Full text Article city

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
densely populated urban center, larger than a village or a town, whose inhabitants are engaged primarily in commerce and industry. In the United States a city is legally an incorporated municipality (see also city government ; local government ). Cities have appeared in diverse cultures, e.g., among…
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Full text Article The City

From Key Concepts in Urban Studies
A city is a bounded space that is densely settled and has a relatively large, culturally heterogeneous population. The history of cities dates back to the Neolithic period. The oldest known city is Catal Höyük (7500-5700 BC) in present-day Turkey, while Erbil (founded 6000 BC) in Iraq is the oldest…
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Full text Article Cities

From Encyclopedia of World Trade: From Ancient Times to the Present Full text Article A-Z Entries
Concentrated areas of people and dwellings, and centers of commercial trade. Sometime around 3000 B.C.E. , the so-called urban revolution occurred in the Middle East. At this time, both writing and the city arose. These two concurrent developments were important for trade, as writing allowed for the…
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Full text Article City, The

From The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory Full text Article Cultural Theory
Much recent work in cultural studies has focused on cultural life in specific cities, as well as on abstract considerations of how urban life as such has its own particular history; how the city sets up imagined social relations between individuals and communities; and how urban life produces…
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Full text Article cities

From Encyclopedia of Society and Culture in the Medieval World
Jade figure of an eagle warrior (Aztec culture,...
Cities in the medieval period had many purposes; they were centers of governance, trade, culture, the exchange of ideas, and the sharing of natural resources. Many of the cities established in the ancient world were still being used in the medieval period, but a sizable number had declined, some…
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Full text Article CITIES

From Collins Dictionary of Quotations
Match me such marvel save in Eastern clime,A rose-red city ‘half as old as Time’! BURGON, John William ‘ Petra ’ (1845). He so beautified the city that he justly boasted that he found it brick and left it marble. In Suetonius Lives of the Caesars . …
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Full text Article CITIES

From The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment
“The town,” wrote the Scottish thinker David Hume in My Own Life , is “the true scene for a man of letters.” Like Edinburgh and Glasgow, American cities became creative Enlightenment outposts, casting envious glances at London and its intellectual climate. After the American Revolution, these cities…
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