City, History of

A primary focus of urban anthropology and the archaeology of complex societies is the history of the concept of a city. Scholars generally cite the first city as emerging in 3500BC in Mesopotamia. Discussions of the city have emerged in anthropological literature in association with that considered urban, both as process and spatial locus. Useful distinctions, first drawn by Kemper within this context, are between anthropology in cities versus anthropology ofcities. Equally important are those distinctions between the preindustrial, modern, and postmodern exemplifications of the city. Understanding the process, growth, or history of the city includes consideration of the public and private use and organization of space, architecture, and the economic and sociopolitical life of the inhabitants.

Scholarship focusing on the city began with sociologists locating “society” as being indicative of changes collective humans underwent that ultimately became the city. Early urban sociologists included F. Tonnies (1887), who established the difference between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society); E. Durkheim (1897), who introduced the concepts of mechanical and organic society; M. Weber (1904), who considered the social structure of a city; L. Wirth (1938), who developed a theory of the characteristic influences of urban life on social organization and attitudes; and R. Redfield (1947), who built on Wirth's ideas to introduce the folk-urban continuum concept. It was in the 1920s that the Chicago School of Urban Ecology (with R. Park at the University of Chicago) began to focus on issues such as demography, census information, interviews, and historical data, with an emphasis on the social problems within cities, as opposed to the theory of processes of urbanization.