Managing Refugees and Asylum-Seekers in the Modern World Since the recent economic recession reduced housing prices, researchers have been waiting to see what happens to urban migration patterns in response. Today, the primary influence on cities’ growth is economic forces.
For example, serfs were tied to the land, and transportation was limited and inefficient.
The factors limiting the size of ancient cities included lack of adequate sewage control, limited food supply, and immigration restrictions. Most early cities were small by today’s standards, and the largest was most likely Rome, with about 650,000 inhabitants (Chandler and Fox 1974). Most scholars agree that the first cities were developed somewhere in ancient Mesopotamia, though there are disagreements about exactly where. The Growth of CitiesĪccording to sociologist Gideon Sjoberg (1965), there are three prerequisites for the development of a city: First, good environment with fresh water and a favorable climate second, advanced technology, which will produce a food surplus to support nonfarmers and third, strong social organization to ensure social stability and a stable economy. However, once a geographically concentrated population has reached approximately 100,000 people, it typically behaves like a city regardless of what its designation might be. There is no strict dividing line between rural and urban rather, there is a continuum where one bleeds into the other. In some ways, cities can be microcosms of universal human behavior, while in others they provide a unique environment that yields its own brand of human behavior. Urbanization is the study of the social, political, and economic relationships in cities, and someone specializing in urban sociology studies those relationships. Figure 20.9 The lights of New York City are an iconic image of city life.
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