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The Creativity of Cities: A Review Article

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Sylvia L. Thrupp
Sylvia L. Thrupp
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

Cities have led high civilization for so long that one can scarcely imagine one without the other. Yet it is not easy to delimit their place in the creation of values and the organizing power to implement them that constitute a developing civilization. They can be described in innumerable ways, for as is true also of small towns and villages each city has a unique personality. The existing literature leans either to extreme particularity of detail or to an unconvincing generality. The two articles that follow are the first of a series in which common general questions will be brought to bear on the rise of different types of city in different societies and on the conditions under which they play particular creative and organizing roles. Since three recent books have attempted large-scale comparison along these lines our own series had best open with an attempt to review their contributions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , November 1961 , pp. 53 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1961

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References

1 On the variant uses of the term “civilization” see de Dampierre, E., “Note sur ‘Culture’ et ‘Civilisation’”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, III (April, 1961), pp. 328–340.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 The City in History, its Origins, its Transformations, and its Prospects (Harcourt Brace, New York, 1961), xi, 657 pp.

3 City Invincible. A Symposium on Urbanization and Cultural Development in the Ancient Near East. Edited by Carl H. Kraeling and Robert M. Adams (Chicago, 1960), xiv, 448 pp.

4 See Charanis, Peter, ‘The Transfer of Population as a Policy in the Byzantine Empire’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, III (January, 1961), pp. 140–154. A sequel by Ömar Barkan will deal with this subject in the Ottoman Empire.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 The Preindustrial City, Past and Present (Glencoe, Illinois, 1960), xii, 353 pp.

6 See Frederic C. Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma, “Introduction to Arthur Spiethoff” and Arthur Spiethoff, “Pure Theory and. Economic Gestalt Theory; Ideal Types and Real Types”, translated by Fritz Redlich, in Enterprise and Secular Change, ed. Frederic C. Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma (Homewood, Illinois, 1953) pp. 431–63.

7 Gideon Sjoberg, op. cit., pp. 81–2, 138–9. For further discussion of the matters raised see Dibble, Vernon K. and Ping-ti Ho, “The Comparative Study of Social Mobility”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, III (April, 1961), pp.315–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Gideon Sjoberg, op. cit., p. 215, cites a range of 20 to 40 %, whereas business rates were from 5 to 10 % at the time. See Sapori, A., Studi di Storia Economica, 3rd ed. (Firenze, 1955), I, pp. 223–43.Google Scholar

9 For applications see Milton Singer in City Invincible, pp. 260–7.