Music so about six minutes after so we will go ahead and get started today's lecture is what I call Constitution and representation and I think it proceeds from a question that we might ask at the very beginning as most books do on this topic on this subject what is a city it is a surprisingly difficult thing to actually define considering that we all know what a city is we all know when we are in one but it is surprisingly difficult to actually define so we will begin with that recognizing that no definition including my own is totally satisfactory to begin I think it's important to see what others have said in your readings today by spero kostov a great architectural historian architecture and the urban historian no longer with us unfortunately he taught for many years at the University of California Berkeley and unfortunately passed away at an early age actually from lung cancer his definition he offers in today's reading nine points nine points of of what a city is and I don't he goes into greater detail and we will go in here today and you can read these when you download this but they're a couple that I think are worth mentioning one is cities are places where a certain energized crowding of people takes place there's always some discussion of density and crowding and so forth but I find that to be terribly unsatisfactory when I go to a Braves game there seems to be a lot of energy there's a lot of crowding and it's certainly a lot of people but Turner field is not a city cities do come in clusters there's always a kind of hierarchy and these things distribute themselves in space if you look at that medieval maps for sample of cities in China or even today it's Georgia for example the southeastern United States you will see larger cities like Atlanta and Charlotte and Birmingham and so forth and there's a associated with it kind of been arraigned our smaller cities like Macon and Augusta and Columbus and so forth and then between let's say Macon and Columbus there are still smaller cities and so forth each of those cities whether it's Macon or Columbus or Atlanta is sort of an economic Center for a lot of activity of people that are somehow associated with that place and these come in a kind of hierarchy and that is true interestingly enough when we go all the way back into the ancient world in some cases as in ancient Rome these are actually sort of set into a kind of law that has to do with the physical agricultural territory that was attached to a particular city cities are places that have some physical circumscription well in the Middle Ages in Europe you would have a wall right a wall around the city it was pretty clear you were either inside the wall or you were outside the wall you were either in from mural or extra mural from the Latin Miura meaning wall mural painter all intramural athletics means that different clubs and groups at Georgia Tech played one another extra mural means that we play Clemson or we play Wake Forest or something on a Saturday outside the wall but in the complexity of the contemporary city the city like Atlanta it is very difficult to sort of stay where Atlanta begins and ends when you come down Interstate 85 in a car there's a little sign on the side of the road lost amongst many other signs on the side of the road that says city of Atlanta otherwise there's no clue that you are in or not in the city of Atlanta so it's a little more ambiguous today than it was historically cities are places favored by a source of income they are really engine of their economic engines in other words income trade intensive agriculture the possibility of surplus food physical resource you know surplus food you don't think about it you go to Whole Foods if you go to Publix and you buy your groceries you don't go out and chase the chicken around in the yard like my grandmother used to do number six I think is absolutely critical that is that cities are places that must rely on written records writing is a fairly recent human invention in its current forms going back to about 4000 BC at the earliest and they actually are have to do really probably as we'll see with the need to record trade to record surplus food lists of things a census for example how many people how do we provide people in case of attack right who is eligible to serve in the army that sort of thing written records become really critical and I think we don't see written records outside of cities this is actually in the ancient world that I'm talking about cities are places that are intimately engaged with their countryside I've already mentioned that there's agricultural territory normally associated with a city and the days before airplanes and trains and boats like we have today most produce was like milk right you're not gonna ship milk in you might ship strawberries or tomatoes in let's say from Peru but you're not gonna ship milk right because it goes bad too soon and so the agricultural products that are associated with the territory close to the city suggest that prior to the modern world there was always an agricultural territory that was attached to the city and really in a sense they were sort of inextricably linked economically cities are places that are distinguished by some kind of monumental definition now by monument and will in a moment by Monument what we're really talking about here is Memorial memories we are unique among the animals as far as I can tell it's true that salmon go
