ABSTRACT
The city is not merely an aggregate of economic functions. Throughout history it has been above all else a seat of institutions in the service of the people of the countryside. In the words of Lewis Mumford, ‘it is art, culture, and political purposes, not numbers, that define a city’. 1 These activities—economic, cultural, and political —are segregated at fixed points in space to serve the society that calls them into being. This is the most essential phenomenon of the growth and structure of the urban community, upon which all other generalizations or hypotheses must be based.
