ABSTRACT
The central area of any city has an important time dimension sometimes jealously preserved and often symbolically flaunted before the visitor. An account containing ‘evolution’ in the title is bound to pay careful attention to progression through time, and this will allow the next chapter more freedom to roam around the modern city centre. The Ariadne thread in the last chapter was a concentration on the origin of the first centres, and this permitted only the most general forward survey. It was shown that throughout history many different reasons could be invoked for centre or city genesis as soon as there is a dive below the general level of the centre as an a priori idea. To realize how complicated the problem can become one has merely to turn to a brief volume of readings dealing with one country at one period. J.F. Benton (1968) attempted a review and paraded eight major theories of town origins which had been put forward for medieval England. He concluded that it would be a sterile exercise to decide which one was ‘right’. Instead each theory ought to be continually subjected to the evidence in an attempt to obtain an acceptable compromise between generality over a large number of cases and congruence with large numbers of individual segments of evidence. This proves to be useful advice if the study of centrality and the city is to be brought closer to the present day. To retain generality over a large number of cases, the focus will be held on the evolution of the central area of a city; otherwise, the great number of variables contributed by different cultures will overwhelm the discussion.
