The Evolution Of A City

Some cities seem destined to become major financial capitals, yet never do--Seville, for instance, was the centre of Spain's opulent New World Empire, but failed to become a financial metropolis. Others, like former colonial backwater Hong Kong, defy the odds by growing into major trading centres. What are the key factors distinguishing those cities that become wealthy from those that don't? Christopher Kennedy illuminates how geography, technology, and especially the infrastructure of urban economies allow cities to develop and thrive. The Evolution of Great World Cities unfolds through the tales of several urban centres--including Venice, Amsterdam, London, and New York City--at key junctures in their histories. Kennedy weaves together significant insights from urbanists such as Jane Jacobs and economists such as John Maynard Keynes, drawing striking parallels between the functioning of ecosystems and of wealthy capitals. The Evolution of Great World Cities offers an accessible introduction to urban economies that 'will change the way you think about cities.'

Why does modern planning sometimes create urban environments that are less attractive and functional than the organic urbanism of traditional cities? Cities Design and Evolution takes up the challenge of this question, investigating how cities are put together, both in the sense of how the parts are organized in relation to the whole, and how they are created or evolve over time. Cities Design and Evolution offers an engaging and original narrative that interprets planning philosophies from Modernism to New Urbanism, organic theories from Patrick Geddes to Le Corbusier, and evolutionary thinking from Charles Darwin to Richard Dawkins. The book develops a new evolutionary perspective that recognizes both the designed and organic nature of cities, and provides a rationale and impetus for fresh approaches to urban planning and design. In what is the first book to significantly apply modern evolutionary thinking to urbanism, Cities Design and Evolution promises to stimulate thought, debate and action concerning the nature of cities and future urban planning. The book should appeal to all who are interested in cities, in design and in evolution. "

The Evolution of the Ancient City is an interdisciplinary look at how cities developed from Hunter-Gatherer societies to centers of vast empires in the Fertile Crescent between 21,500 BCE and 1,200 BCE. The reader is guided through each stage of social evolution and its consequences for our understanding of modern cities. As a result, urban theory must adapt to this long-range view of the city.

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See your city through fresh eyes We are marching towards a future in which three-quarters of humans live in cities, and a large portion of the planet's landmass is urbanized. With much of the rest covered by human-shaped farms, pasture, and plantations, where can nature still go? To the cities -- is Menno Schilthuizen's answer in this remarkable book. And with more and more wildlife carving out new niches among humans, evolution takes a surprising turn. Urban animals evolve to become more cheeky and resourceful, city pigeons develop detox-plumage, and weeds growing from cracks in the pavement get a new type of seeds. City blackbirds are even on their way of becoming an entirely new species, which we could name Turdus urbanicus. Thanks to evolutionary adaptation taking place at unprecedented speeds, plants and animals are coming up with new ways of living in the seemingly hostile environments of asphalt and steel that we humans have created. We are on the verge of a new chapter in the history of life, Schilthuizen says -- a chapter in which much old biodiversity is, sadly, disappearing, but also one in which a new and exciting set of life forms is being born. Menno Schilthuizen shows us that evolution in cities can happen far more rapidly, and strangely, than Darwin had dared dream.

Why are so many of our urban environments so resistant to change? The author tackles this question in her comprehensive guide for planners, designers, and students concerned with how cities take shape. This book provides a fundamental understanding of how physical environments are created, changed, and transformed through ordinary processes over time. Most of the built environment adheres to a few physical patterns, or types, that occur over and over. Planners and architects, consciously and unconsciously, refer to building types as they work through urban design problems and regulations. Suitable for professional planners, architects, urban designers, and students, This book includes practical examples of how typology is critical to analytical, design, and regulatory situations.

City and Country: The Historical Evolution of Urban-Rural Systems begins with a simple assumption: every human requires, on average, two-thousand calories per day to stay alive. Tracing the ramifications of this insight leads to the caloric well: the caloric demand at one point in the environment. As population increases, the depth of the caloric well reflects this increased demand and requires a population to go further afield for resources, a condition called urban dependency. City and Country traces the structural ramifications of these dynamics as the population increased from the Paleolithic to today. We can understand urban dependency as the product of the caloric demands a population puts on a given environment, and when those demands outstrip the carry capacity of the environment, a caloric well develops that forces a community to look beyond its immediate area for resources. As the well deepens, the horizon from which resources are gathered is pushed further afield, often resulting in conflict with neighboring groups. Prior to settled villages, increases in population resulted in cultural (technological) innovations that allowed for greater use of existing resources: the broad-spectrum revolution circa 20 thousand years ago, the birth of agricultural villages 11 thousand years ago, and hierarchically organized systems of multiple settlements working together to produce enough food during the Ubaid period in Mesopotamia seven-thousand years ago—the first urban-rural systems. As cities developed, increasing population resulted in an ever-deepening morass of urban dependency that required expansion of urban-rural systems. These urban-rural dynamics today serve as an underlying logic upon which modern capitalism is built. The culmination of two decades of research into the nature of urban-rural dynamics, City and Country argues that at the heart of the logic of capitalism is an even deeper logic: urbanization is based on urban dependency.