elements of demographic, socio-cultural and historical evolution of human settlements
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From a grain of wheat: the birth of the urban idea Most of the modern research in urban and building science, developed after Weber’s considerations on the city, focuses on sociological, economic and demographic matters, as well as on structural and functional ones. The foundations of modern urbanism are laid on these approaches, even if the ‘demographic’ definition of a city is perhaps the one that prevails in contemporary urbanism. This approach emerges essentially from Louis Wirth’s 1938 article, Urbanism as a way of life, in which he summarises his vision of urban systems: […] for sociological purposes, a city may be defined as a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals6.
According to this sociological view, on the one hand, cities are places where greater or smaller concentrations of population live in well-defined and not too extended areas, endowed with institutions characterised by considerable complexity, with clear subdivisions into ‘classes’, substantially linked to their respective socioeconomic functions. On the other hand, the functional approach tends not to put much emphasis on the social and cultural nature of the urban population, focusing more on infrastructures and buildings, i.e. assessing the role that the urban settlement per se plays in a specific territorial context.
Wirth L. 1938, Urbanism as a way of life, «The American Journal of Sociology», vol. 44, n. 1, pp. 1-24.
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