The Urban analysis research

Title
What is a city???
Lewis Mumford

Under Supervision of:

Dr. Nurhan Abujidi

Muhammad Salah Eldaidamony

Research structure
Firstly
Simple meaning of a city

Secondly
City status around the world
Thirdly
The article (what is a city-Lewis Mumford)

Fourthly
Other quotes and conclusion

Fifthly
References
 Firstly
Simple meaning of a
city
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Simple meaning of a city

1- British Cambridge dictionary:
1- Any large town.
2- Any town in the UK which has a cathedral: The city of
Ely has about 10000 inhabitants.
3- A town that has received this title from the Crown
4-The people of a city collectively

London city 2nd smallest city in England Oxford city

Liverpool city
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Simple meaning of a city

2- American dictionary:
1- A center of population, commerce, and culture; a
town of significant size and importance.
2- An ancient Greek city-state.
3- An incorporated municipality, usually governed by a
mayor and a board of aldermen or councilmen.
4- A city-state.

San Jose, California – United states Dallas, Texas – United states

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Simple meaning of a city

3- Almoa”agm :
City : its plural is cities (housing city), housing complex
surrounded by vital facilities and civilized upswing buildings.
1-The city of prophet Muhammad (SAAS) “ALMADINA”
2-Jerusalem “the flower of cities”
3-Peace city “Baghdad”

َ 1 .]‫ [م د ن‬. ُ‫ َمدَ ائِن‬، ٌ"‫ ُمدُن‬:‫ ج‬- "‫َمدِي َن ٌة‬

ُ ‫ُ َّكانِيٌّ َي ِع‬4‫ س‬4‫ َت َجم ٌُّع‬: "4‫ َك َن ْال َم ِدي َن َة‬4‫"س‬.
ٍ4‫ َح َي ِويَّة‬4‫ َط َم َرا ِف َق‬4‫ َو َس‬4‫يش‬
4‫َخ َل‬ َ ‫"د‬.3 .‫ َب ْغ َدا ُد‬:"‫الَ ِم‬4‫الس‬ َّ 4‫" َم ِدي َن ُة‬.2 ."4‫ ْال َمدَا ِئ ِن‬4‫ َزهْ َر ُة‬4‫س‬ ِ ‫ القُ ْد‬4‫ " َم ِدي َن ُة‬.ٍ‫ٍ َوعُمْ َرا ِن َّية‬4‫اريَّة‬
ِ ‫ض‬َ ‫ٍ َح‬4‫َو ُم ْن َشآت‬
."‫ب‬ َ ‫ ِاسْ ُم َع َل ٍم أ ُ ْطلِ َق َع َلى َم ِدي َن ِة " َي ْث ِر‬: "ً‫الرَّ سُو ُل ْال َم ِدي َن َة َظا ِفرا‬ 

Almadina Almonawara Jerusalem Baghdad

 Secondly
City status around the world
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City status around the world

1-City status in the United Kingdom
•Is granted by the British Queen to a selected group of
communities. The status does not apply automatically on the
basis of any particular criteria.
•In England and Wales it was traditionally given to towns
with diocesan cathedrals. This association between having a
cathedral and being, so six English towns was granted them
all city status by issuing letters patent.

The smallest city in England

The smallest city in the UK of
of population of 10,500
population of 2000 inhabitants
inhabitants
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City status around the world

2-City status in the United States
In the United States (USA), the definition of cities (and town,
villages, townships, etc.) is a matter of state laws and the
definitions vary widely by state. A city may, in some places,
be run by an elected mayor and city council, while a town is
governed by people, select board (or board of trustees), or
open town meeting

Maza is the smallest city in

USA of population of 5 Washington city in USA New York city in USA
inhabitants
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City status around the world

3-City status in China
•It is an urban area that there should be at
least 100,000 non-agricultural population.
•City with 100,000-200,000 non-agricultural
population refers to a Small city, 200,000-
500,000 non-agricultural population is a
Medium city, 500,000-1,000,000 non-
agricultural population is a Large city
•Over 1,000,000 non-agricultural of
population is an Extra-large city.

Beijing city in China

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City status around the world

4-City status in Australia & New Zealand
In Australia
city refers simply to any large enough town. Narrower usage can refer to a local
government area, or colloquially to the central business district of a large urban
area.

Canberra city the capital of Australia

In New Zealand,
"A city must have a minimum population of 50,000, be predominantly urban in
character, be a distinct entity and a major centre of activity within the region.

Wellington city the capital of New Zealand

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City status around the world

5-City status in Germany
The German word for both "town" and "city" is Stadt, while a
town with more than 100,000 inhabitants is called a major
city, which is the most adequate equivalence for city

Berlin city the capital of Germany

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City status around the world

6-City status in Egypt
•It is an urban area that there should be more than 50 % of its labor
force a non-agricultural workers.
•Also it can be distinguished by its civilized, modern and
concentration of services.

Cairo city the capital of Egypt Zagazig city Elsharkeya Governorate

 Thirdly

The article

what is a city ?
Lewis Mumford
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What is a city?
Definition:
•“The people are the city”. Shakespeare & some urbanists.
•“In turning to the people of the cities themselves we move to a
consideration of the subtle and ever-shifting interaction between
society, community, and culture. This section addresses how urban
society affects urban culture and how urban culture affects the daily
lives and the life prospects of city inhabitants”.
•“Finally, it analyzes what community is in an urban context and
speculates about what it could be”. Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall, and Lain
Borden (London and New York : Rout ledge, 2004)

Society urban society Daily life

Community urban culture

Culture
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What is a city?
Definition:
•“Cities are expressions of the human spirit, and cities exist
to contribute to the ever evolving human personality.
•“Defining a city in terms of population size, or density, or
attributes of the built environment is inadequate”. Lewis
Mumford

Population size

Attributes city Density

Not enough
+ Human spirit
Lewis Mumford
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What is a city?
Definition: (as a historian)
1- Mumford definition of a city:

•A theater of social action and everything else art, politics, education,

commerce – only serve to make the “social drama more richly
significant , as a stage-set. Well-designed, intensifies and emphasizes
the motions of the actors and the action of the play”
•“above all things a theater" and that an urban civilization that has
lost its sense of dramatic dialogue “is bound to have a fatal last act.”
Lewis Mumford

social drama
arts commerce others
social action Politics education
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What is a city?
Definition:
•Urge planners to fulfill human needs for “fantasy and
exoticism." The city has always been a place of excitement ;
it is a theater , a stage upon which citizens can display
themselves and be seen by others.” Allan Jacobs and Donald
Appleyard.
•Mumford’s emphasis on community value and the city’s
role in enlarging the potential of the human personality
connects him with a long line of urban theorists that includes
Louis Wirth and many others.
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What is a city?
•Most of our housing and city planning has been
handicapped because those who have undertaken the work
have had no clear notion of the social functions of the city.
•They sought to derive these functions from a quick survey
of the activities and interests of the modern urban scene.
• And they did not apparently, imagine that there might be
unpleasant deficiencies, misdirected efforts, mistaken
payments here that would not be set straight by merely
building sanitary apartments or straightening out and
widening irregular streets.
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What is a city?
Definition (city as a social institution)
2- Urban sociological definition of a city:
Is a related collection of primary groups and purposive associations:
the first, likely family and neighborhood, are common to all
communities, while the second are especially characteristic of city
life. These varied groups support themselves through economic
organizations that are likewise of a more or less corporate, or at least
publicity regulated, character and they all housed in permanent
structures, within a relatively limited area.

family City life

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What is a city ?
The essential physical means of the city existence:
1. The fixed site
2. The durable shelter
3. The permanent facilities for gathering, inter-change, and
storage
The essential social means of the city existence:
1. The social division of labor, which serves not only the
economic life but the cultural processes
2. The complete sense of the city
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What is a city ?
“The city fosters art and is art:; the city creates the theater
and is a theater, that man’s more purposive activities are
focused, and work out, through conflicting and cooperating
personalities, events, groups, into more significant
culminations”.
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What is a city ?
Definition (city in a social form)
3- Social definition of a city:
A special framework directed toward the creation of differentiated
opportunities for a common life and a significant collective drama. As
indirect forms of association, with the aid of signs and symbols and
specialized organizations.
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What is a city ?
Personal disintegration possibilities :
The personalities of the citizens themselves become many-faceted:
they reflect their specialized interests, their more intensively trained
aptitudes, their finer discriminations and selections : in which the
personality no longer presents a more or less a complete traditional
face to reality as a whole.
Personal reintegration possibilities :
Through wider participation in a concrete and visible collective whole.
What men cannot imagine as a vague formless society. They can live
through and experience as citizens in a city. Their unified plans and
buildings become a symbol of their social relatedness; and when the
physical environment itself becomes disordered and incoherent, the
social functions that it harbors become more difficult to express.

Social facts are primary, and the physical organization of a city, its
industries and its markets, its lines of communication and traffic,
must be subservient to its social needs.
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What is a city ?
What is the desirable size of a city?:
Sizing the city: but if the city is a theater of social activity, and if its
needs are defined by the opportunities it offers to differentiated
social groups, acting through a specific nucleus of civic institutes and
associations, definite limitations on size follow from this fact.
Le Corbusier’s ideal city
He chose three million as the
number to be accommodated:
the number was roughly the size
of the urban aggregate of Paris.
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What is a city ?
A-The absolute factors to identify the city size: size
Limitations on : size, density, and area
are absolutely necessary to effective social intercourse;
and they are therefore the most important instruments
of rational economic and civic planning.
Density area
At the past there was 2 factors
1.The assumption that all upward changes in magnitude were signs of
progress and automatically “good for business”
2.The belief that such limitations were essentially arbitrary, in that they
proposed to “decrease economic opportunity”.
Limitations on height (are common in America), drastic limitations on
density (are the rule in all municipal housing estates in England)
Such limitations do not limit the population itself: they merely give the
planner and the administrator the opportunity to multiply the number of
centers in which the population is housed, instead of permitting a few
existing centers to increase themselves on a monopolistic pattern.
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What is a city ?
These limitations are necessary to breakup the functionless of
urban masses of the past.
So far, the planner proposes to replace the “mono-nucleated city”
with a new type of “poly-nucleated city ” in which a cluster of
communities, adequately spaced and bounded, shall do duty for the
badly organized mass city. Professor Warren Thompson

B- New factors to identify the city

Mark the changes that is in process today.
1.The emerging sources of power,
2.transport,
3.communication do not follow the old
highway network at all.
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What is a city ?
New planning type:
Messrs : it is a town in which the various functional parts of the
structure are isolated topographically as urban islands, appropriately
designed for their specific use with no effort to provide a uniform
plan of the same general pattern for the industrial, the commercial,
the familiar, and the civic parts.
New planning characteristics and the principles of the poly-nucleated city have
been well established. (by Radburn)
The main relationships are clear:
1. The differentiation of foot traffic from wheeled traffic in independent systems
2. The insulation of residence quarters from through roads
3. The discontinuous street pattern
4. The polarization of social life in specially spotted civic nuclei
5. To begin in the neighborhood with the school and the playground and the
swimming pool.
This type of planning was carried a logical conclusion in perhaps the most
functional and most socially intelligent of all Le Corbusier’s many urban plans
 Fourthly
Other quotes and conclusion
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Other quotes defining a City

“It is the largest urban center in terms of population or built
area or diversity of its functions”. (El Wakil Shafak, 2006)

“A spatial concentration of economic activity. Accordingly,

urbanization covers description of the spatial pattern of
economic activity over space, and explanation of that pattern
as well as of the evolution of it”. Urban economists.

“The city is a living organism”. (Le Corbusier)

“The city is a town that enjoys a measure of leadership among

towns ”. (Robert E. Dickinson)

“The city occurs when the density is more than 10000 persons
per mile square”. (Mark Jefferson)
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Conclusion:
Each city is a unique phenomenon that can not be repeated, and
therefore it is difficult to determine the characteristics of cities, as
every city interpreted by its historical incidents and factors of
growth.
The city is an urban center in which different economic, social,
political, and cultural functions took place sequentially
City Urbanization properties:
1. Size
2. Density
3. Homogeneity
In which those elements are linked closely together, leading to a
gathering of people which characterized by huge size and high
density and homogeneity.
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Characteristics of cities:

1. Function : specified in social and economic functions

2. Cultural manifestations
3. Human Urban rights
4. Legislations
5. Expanding of city borders to exteriorly

Ranking cities:
1. By size (town, city or metropolitan)
2. By population
3. By its historical development
4. By its social and cultural factors
5. By its economical variables
6. By its degree of progress and developing
7. By its performed work (political city, social city, cultural city,…)
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References
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References
Websites:
1. www.wikipedia.org
2. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/city
3. http://dictionary.cambridge.org/results.asp?searchword=city
4. http://lexicons.ajeeb.com/openme.asp?fileurl=/html/3077282.html
5. http://en.wikipedia.org
6. http://www.redtilesbarn.co.uk/attractions.php
7. http://www.beautifulbritain.co.uk/htm/outandabout/record_breakers.htm
8. http://www2.mdbc.gov.au/education/encyclopedia/tourism/tourism.htm
Books and other sources:
1. The city culture reader, second edition edited by Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall, and Lain
Borden (London and New York : Rout ledge, 2004)
2. Urban culture and society, Lewis Mumford
3. City And Region: a geographical interpretation By Robert E. Dickinson
4. Urbanism As a Way of Life by Louis Wirth
5. Department of urban planning and environment, faculty of architecture, Damascus
university, Arch. Hiba F.Kabbani
Thank you

Muhammad Eldaidamony