ABSTRACT
Beneath such a bold title, a text must run some risks, and so it will be. The centres in question are those that flourished and grew into great urban places. So here is that basic subject ‘the origin of cities’ which has been the concern of many eminent students; and it would be agreeable to report some degree of consensus, but at first sight this hardly seems to be the case. Fortunately, the difference between some suggested explanations are more apparent than real, more relative than absolute. Instead of being daunted by the confusion, it is better to rejoice in the fact that many thinkers of very varied backgrounds have pondered the problem. There are perhaps two very great attractions in the subject. Much of the human world, now and throughout history, has been mediated via a hierarchy of cities – an idea neatly encapsulated in the one word ‘civilization’. A study of city origins throws a great searchlight on the march forward of human society. Second, there is a fundamental attraction in genetic explanation of any phenomenon under study. Space navigation is a pure form of genetic deduction: ‘We know where we are because we know how we got here.’ M. Eliade (1961, 83-91) goes further and believes that to know the origin of something (that is to say its raison d’être in the religious sense) is to gain power from it, and power emanates from a centre (see also idem, 1964, 27-38). This pithy view, with its ‘centre’ allusion, neatly anticipates some of the detailed subject-matter that follows. Discussion of how cities can originate (and the manner in which their centres arose, and these must have come first), and how growth occurs, gives a useful hindsight through which to see problems of present-day city centres. This chapter will certainly survey causes of city formation over a long span of time, but emphasis will be given to those studies dealing with the earliest city origins. These were the first attempts to build notable focal centres of some permanence on the surface of the earth, and this was how the plane of thought first significantly intersected the plane of the earth's surface, which was of course thought to be a plane in the first instance (cf. Y.-F. Tuan, 1971, 18 ff).
