ABSTRACT
This chapter explores why the city has become such a dominant force in modern societies—why so much of what goes on in the world happens there, and why societies like the United States have undergone an abrupt transition from rural societies to urban societies. Large-scale urbanization is a recent phenomenon. Urbanization can be defined as the process by which an increasing share of a population lives in cities. Most of the earliest cities around the world would be almost unrecognizable to anyone living in a modern city. Certain features appeared independently in the earliest cities in Mesopotamia, China, and Central America, and, with minor variations, these features characterized most preindustrial cities throughout history. This rapid urbanization was the result of both technological and social innovations. When inventions such as the steam engine, the spinning jenny, and the automatic weaving machine made mass production possible, the place of work shifted from the home to the factory.
