卓模拟器:急需一篇有关 城市 的英语文章

A city is an urban area that is differentiated from a town, village, or hamlet by size, population density, importance, or legal status.

In most parts of the world, cities are generally substantial and nearly always have an urban core, but in the United States many incorporated areas which have a very modest population, or a suburban or even mostly rural character, are designated as cities. City can also be a synonym for "downtown" or a "city centre".

A city usually consists of residential, industrial and business areas together with administrative functions which may relate to a wider geographical area. A large share of a city's area is primarily taken up by housing, which is then supported by infrastructure such as roads, streets and often public transport routes such as a subway or a metro rail system. Lakes and rivers may be the only undeveloped areas within the city. The study of cities is covered extensively in human geography.

"The city is a human habitat that allows people to form relations with others at various levels of intimacy while remaining entirely anonymous." (This definition was the subject of an exhibition at the Israeli pavilion at the 2000 Venice Biennale of architecture)

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The difference between towns and cities
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The difference between towns and cities is differently understood in different parts of the English speaking world. There is no one standard international definition of a city: the term may be used either for a town possessing city status; for an urban locality exceeding an arbitrary population size; for a town dominating other towns with particular regional economic or administrative significance. Although city can refer to an agglomeration including suburban and satellite areas, the term is not appropriate for a conurbation (cluster) of distinct urban places, nor for a wider metropolitan area including more than one city, each acting as a focus for parts of the area.

In the United Kingdom, a city is a town which has been known as a city since time immemorial, or which has received city status by letters patent — which is normally granted on the basis of size, importance or royal connection (traditional pointers have been whether the town has a cathedral or a university). Some cathedral cities, for example St. David's in Wales, are quite small, and may not be known as cities in common parlance. (See the City status in the United Kingdom.) Preston became England's newest city in the year 2002 to mark the Queen's jubilee.

A similar system existed in the medieval Low Countries where a landlord would grant settlements certain privileges (city rights) that settlements without city rights didn't have. This include the privilege to put up city walls, hold markets or set up a judicial court.

In Australia and New Zealand, city is used to refer both to units of local government, and as a synonym for urban area. For instance the City of South Perth is part of the urban area known as Perth, commonly described as a city. On the other hand, Gisborne in New Zealand is known as the first city to see the sun, despite being administered by a district council, not a city council.

An interesting phenomenon in American English is the generalisation of the term city to all settlements. Britons may be bemused by forms with fields headed, not Town and Postal code, but City and ZIP, even though the person needing to fill it in could be living in a city, a town without city status, or even a village or hamlet.

In turn, many Americans often talk of "City Halls" when referring to town halls in quite small European towns and villages.

Strangely, even though Americans are well aware that "village" means something smaller than a town, the word has often been co-opted by enterprising developers to make their projects sound welcoming and friendly. The result are so-called villages with 20 and 30-story high-rises, like Westwood Village in Los Angeles.
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Geography
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The geographies of cities, both physical and human, are diverse. Often cities will either be coastal and have a harbour or be situated near a river giving economic advantage. Water transports on rivers and oceans were (and in most cases still are) cheaper and more efficient than road transport over long distances.

Older European cities often have historically intact central areas where the streets are jumbled together, seemingly without a structural plan. This quality is a legacy of earlier unplanned or organic development, and is often perceived by today's tourists to be picturesque. In contrast, planned cities founded after the advent of the automobile tend to have expansive boulevards impractical to navigate on foot.

Modern city planning has seen many different schemes for how a city should look. The most commonly seen pattern is the grid, almost a rule in parts of the United States, and used for thousands of years in China. Derry was the first ever planned city in Ireland, begun in 1613, with the walls being completed 5 years later in 1618. The central diamond within a walled city with four gates was thought to be a good design for defence. The grid pattern chosen was widely copied in the colonies of British North America [1]. However, the grid has been used for a long time in history. The Greeks often gave their colonies around the Mediterranean a grid. One of the best examples around is the city of Priene. This city even had its different districts, much like modern city planning today. Also in Medieval times we see a preference for linear planning. Good examples are the cities established in the south of France by various rulers and city expansions in old Dutch and Flemish cities.

Other forms may include a radial structure in which main roads converge on a central point, often the effect of successive growth over long time with concentric traces of town walls and citadels - recently supplemented by ring-roads that take traffic around the edge of a town. Many Dutch cities are structured that way: a central square surrounded by a concentric canals. Every city expansion would imply a new circle (canals + town walls). In cities like Amsterdam and Haarlem this pattern is still clearly visible.

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History of cities
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Towns and cities have a long history, although opinions vary on whether any particular ancient settlement can be considered to be a city. The first true towns are sometimes considered to be large settlements where the inhabitants were no longer simply farmers of the surrounding area, but began to take on specialized occupations, and where trade, food storage and power was centralized. Societies that live in cities are often called civilizations.

By this definition, the first towns we know of were located in Mesopotamia, such as Ur, and along the Nile, the Indus Valley Civilization and China. Before this time it was rare for settlements to reach significant size, although there were exceptions such as Jericho, Çatalhöyük and Mehrgarh. Harappa and Mohenjo-daro (in the Indus Valley Civilization) were the largest of these early cities, with a combined population of up to 150,000.

The growth of ancient and medieval empires led to ever greater capital cities and seats of provincial administration, with Pataliputra (in India), Changan (in China), ancient Rome, its eastern successor Constantinople (later Istanbul), and successive Chinese, Islamic, and Indian capitals approaching or exceeding the half-million population level. It is estimated that ancient Rome had a population of around 1 million people by the end of the last century BCE, which is widely considered the only city to reach that number until the Industrial Revolution. Alexandria's population was also close to Rome's population at around the same time (in a census dated from 32 CE, Alexandria had 180,000 adult male citizens). Similar large administrative, commercial, industrial and ceremonial centres emerged in other areas. Most notably Baghdad, which second to some estimates became the first city to exceed a population of one million instead of Rome.

During the European Middle Ages, a town was as much a political entity as a collection of houses. City residence brought freedom from customary rural obligations to lord and community: "Stadtluft macht frei" ("City air makes you free") was a saying in Germany. In Continental Europe cities with a legislature of their own weren't unheard of, the laws for towns as a rule other than for the countryside, the lord of a town often being another than for surrounding land. In the Holy Roman Empire (i.e. medieval Germany and Italy) some cities had no other lord than the emperor.

In exceptional cases like Venice, Genoa or Lübeck, cities themselves became powerful states, sometimes taking surrounding areas under their control or establishing extensive maritime empires. Similar phenomena existed elsewhere, as in the case of Sakai, which enjoyed a considerable autonomy in late medieval Japan.

Most towns remained far smaller places, so that in 1500 only some two dozen places in the world contained more than 100,000 inhabitants: as late as 1700 there were fewer than forty, a figure which would rise thereafter to 300 in 1900. A small city of the early modern period might contain as few as 10,000 inhabitants, a town far fewer still.

While the city-states, or poleis, of the Mediterranean and Baltic Sea languished from the 16th century, Europe's larger capitals benefited from the growth of commerce following the emergence of an Atlantic economy fuelled by the silver of Peru. By the late 18th century, London had become the largest city in the world with a population of nearly 1 million, while Paris rivalled the well-developed regionally-traditional capital cities of Baghdad, Beijing, Istanbul and Kyoto.

The growth of modern industry from the late 18th century onward led to massive urbanization and the rise of new great cities, first in Europe and then in other regions, as new opportunities brought huge numbers of migrants from rural communities into urban areas. In the Great Depression of the 1930s cities were hard hit by unemployment, especially those with a base in heavy industry. Today the world's population is about half urban, with millions still streaming annually into the growing cities of Asia, Africa and Latin America.