STUDY QUESTIONS

Spiro Kostof, "What is a City?" in The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History (Boston, 1991)

1) Of the various features Kostof lists as characteristics of the city, which do you consider the most important and why?

2) Does the occupational differentiation upon which cities depend always entail social and economic inequality? Is a completely egalitarian, urban society impossible?

4) What contributes most to the identity and thus continued existence of a particular city? Why might some cities disappear and others endure, despite in some cases near total physical annihilation (e.g., Carthage, Dresden)?

5) Which factor(s) contribute most to concord, or conversely, to strife, in crowded urban environments?

Terms, Concepts, Names, and Dates:

metro(polis)

"Confucian view" of governance

ab ovo

agrarian republicanism

Ferdinand Braudel

Lewis Mumford

L. Wirth