ABSTRACT
The city in cultural context is truly a seminal theme. Our word city is derived from the same Latin root which also yields our word civilization. Even in casual speech, we often equate ‘civilization’ with urban culture and its overtones. Since the origins of what we call civilization, perhaps as long ago as the fifth or sixth millennium BC, with the appearance of the first cities, each successive culture has built cities which reflect, symbolize, and affirm its character, its values, and its distinctive set of solutions, or nonsolutions, to common human problems. The city is thus both a convenient and a revealing key to culture, the clearest, most concentrated, most significant imprint which a culture produces on the geographic landscape, and on the diverse record of the human experience as a whole. It is, of course, a key which works both ways: one may read a culture through the cities it builds, and one may also read a city through the lens of the culture which builds it. It is a key which greatly enhances the study of both regional and temporal variations in culture, as might be illustrated by the significance of the many-sided differences between a cathedral town of medieval Europe and the very different cities of, say, southern California. Spatial form, architecture, street patterns, interaction patterns, iconography, and function, among a host of other urban characteristics, are all revealingly different in each of these cases, and speak eloquently, to the attuned observer, of the different cultures which produced each distinctive urban expression.
