Abstract
From antiquity to late modernity the ‘city’ has often formed the central geospatial entity of history’s many civilizational projects. Although the first cities are often thought to have appeared around 5,500 years ago, evidence is emerging that city formations may have appeared twice that many years ago—11,000 years—on the plains of central Turkey, pre-dating the earliest known villages (Rundle 2015). Traditional cities supported relatively tiny populations of urban dwellers whereas the overwhelming majority of humans lived in small communities (Giddens 2009, pp. 217–9). Indeed, the Athens and Rome of antiquity were small in comparison to the heaving metropolises of modernity. The arrival of the industrial revolution and industrial capitalism ushered in the modern era and gave rise to a number of huge social transformations: urbanisation, rationalisation, secularisation, individualisation, consumption and globalisation; and dramatically altered the social world.
The figures of ‘the city’ and ‘Utopia’ have long been intertwined.
David Harvey (2000, p. 156).
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Notes
- 1.
Register’s definition of ‘urban ecology’ is distinct from the strand of sociological scholarship pioneered by theorists from the University of Chicago, which sought to analyse and understand the city as an eco-system (see Park et al. 1967).
- 2.
A detailed discussion of the HEP can be found in Downton (2009, pp. 228–252).
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Cooper, L., Baer, H.A. (2019). Chasing Ecopolis: Positioning the City as an Engine for Survival. In: Urban Eco-Communities in Australia. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1168-0_4
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