Physical Development of Cities
There have been various ways describing the development of cities. The Mapping of the physical development of urban areas has quite some history starting in the United States in the 30ies with studies like The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities by Homer Hoyt of 1939 in which the author analyzes the Form of City Growth in various American Cities.
A very new example of comparing the physical expansion of different cities in a uniform manner is The Age of Megacities project by ESRI the leading producer of Geographic Information Systems (ArcGIS). So far the ESRI StoryMaps Team has mapped the expansion of most of the major cities in the world from 1900 to present days in 5 intervals, e.g. for Paris:
Paris 1900 – 1928 – 1955 – 1979 © https://www.arcgis.com
For individual cities mapping their physical expansion can be found in different formats from various sources, e.g. for Barcelona, Beijing,London, New York, Paris, Rome and Tokyo.
20 years ago we produced a series of maps showing Munich’s expansion over the last centuries:
1300 1650 1858 2000
You find more information on the physical expansion of cities on this site.
These studies yield very useful data and information on the physical development of cities – most of them in a schematic form, using unified timespans – and show phases of acceleration and stagnation and allow comparison of different city shapes. They are however not very helpful to show distinct phases of urban development, unless further explanation is added. I will come back to these studies further down.
Urban Typology in History
Lewis Mumford’s book The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, of 1968 is still the most thorough and informative source of information on the major stages of urban development in the US and in Europe. He describes the development of cites from earliest group habitats to medieval towns to the modern centers of commerce by exploring the respective factors which shape the urban form. It is however interesting that Mumford does not exemplify his descriptions with maps of respective cities except for Amsterdam’s record of organic planning.
Ben Wilson in his book METROPOLIS – A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention of 2020 takes us on a grand tour of thousands of years and more than two dozen cities examining their rise and fall. Wilson sees the city as an organism that shapes the creatures living inside. He is „more interested in the connective tissue of cities that binds the organism together“. Taking individual cities as representatives of specific urban typology regarding city shape and city live he describes groups and networks of metropolises shaping the different historical epochs. Being a classical historian Wilson abstains from using maps in his narrative.
Timelines of Urban Development
Another approach tries to describe urban development and town planning in a timeline starting from ancient urban centers to cities of modern times. A concise example is the Global History of Urban Design (Zeitstrahl-Geschichte-des-Städtebaus) by Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich.
Wikipedia suggests that the history of the city runs parallel to the history of urban planning as planning is in evidence at some of the earliest known urban sites. Both Wikipedia sites are therefore helpful in tracing the history of towns and cities across the globe.