City-state

“ In the case of city states the reasons why the governments113 were unmixed, absolute, and abnormal are best seen contrasting a city state with a larger political community: for example, England in the middle ages. In that large political community it was impossible, owing to the size of the territory, the importance of the country districts, and the diverse characters of different districts, for any single person or class to engross all power and become the sole ruler. ”

“ In the modern teaching of geography, the beginning is made in school-yard or the precinct and from this centre it broadens out to cover one’s city, one’s county, one’s state or province, one’s country, until at last it embraces the round earth. ”

“ In larger villages boards of health and other boards and commissions exist to administer various forms of public service. The village may also have its minor court presided over by a justice of the peace.
CITY GOVERNMENT When villages or towns reach a certain population usually fixed by state law, they may be incorporated as cities. The change that takes place is simply one of elaborating the governing machinery and giving to it larger powers to correspond with the larger needs of city life. The complex problems of city government we shall not attempt to study in this book. ”

“ It contemplates structures of utility and of beauty. When it reaches completion the people will be well served and the Federal city will be supplied with the most beautiful and stately public buildings which adorn any capital in the world. ”

“ A city stronghold established a centre of state life and government, and villages exchanged the privileges and perils of isolation for the position of local hamlets attached to the common centre of the state, and in this new connexion developing what we may fairly call political consciousness. ”

“ Political forces operate to build up a city when it is the seat of national, state or county government, either legislative, executive or judicial, or all combined. The administration of government as a single factor has created but few cities, Alexandria furnishing an ancient example, St. ”

“ The countryside accepts city leadership including a higher wealth-power per capita ratio for the city.
Cities, with their accumulations of population and wealth, are walled or otherwise defended. When danger threatens, countrymen often move inside the walls until the danger abates.
Cities and city life increase and expand with the growth and expansion of civilization. Cities are the centers from which civilization grows and expands. Historically, a number of cities or city-states have competed for survival and supremacy. ”

“ For ten years the city had been the seat of national government, and at the close of that period had gathered a more agreeable society, fashionable, literary, and political, than could be found anywhere, except in a few capital cities of Europe. ”

“ Streets and avenues have since been laid out and completed, squares and public grounds enclosed and ornamented, until the city which bears his name, although comparatively inconsiderable in numbers and wealth, has become quite fit to be the seat of government of a great and united people. ”

“ But the thing which the town lacks, as compared with the complete city, is very different in America from what it is in England. In America it is municipal government—with mayor, aldermen, and common council—which must be added to the town in order to make it a city. ”

“ The star-shaped contour of the modern great city, thrusting out arms along every available railway line, knotted arms of which every knot marks a station, testify sufficiently to the relief of pressure thus afforded. Great Towns before this century presented rounded contours and grew as a puff-ball swells; the modern Great City looks like something that has burst an intolerable envelope and splashed. ”

“ To begin with, in studying the United States, we are no longer dealing with a single city, or with small groups of cities. The city as a political unit, in the antique sense, has never existed among us, and indeed can hardly be said now to exist anywhere. ”

“ As a national city was to be founded, which was to be the permanent seat of the government of the United States, where foreign nations would be expected to be represented, and as the site selected was on a navigable, tide-water river, inviting foreign and domestic commerce, we should naturally expect to find the city located in immediate proximity to the river, with public wharves and landings, and with a municipal ownership and control of the streets and avenues leading to and bounding on the stream. ”

“ In firing us to local patriotism by the example of provincial cities, the enthusiast does not allow sufficiently for the size of London. It swallows us all up; there are twenty provincial cities in its maw: it is not a city, but a province. ”

“ That great City is, like some of the capitals of Europe, built on a broad river, with the mass of the metropolis on the one bank, but a wide-spreading suburb on the other. As the Trastevere is to Rome, as Southwark to London, so is earth to heaven, the bit of the city on the other side the bridge. ”

“ Only recently have 167historians devoted themselves to describing the new modes of life to which the city gave rise, and the interrelations between city and country. The city has been regarded chiefly as a political unit. The name “city” was given to a settlement because it had achieved a certain degree of political autonomy from the central government, or as an honorary title conferred for service rendered to a superior political entity, or, finally, as a result of incorporation or legal enactment.
Bücher, Karl. ”

“ City and county government should be consolidated in cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Los Angeles.
182 CHAPTER X
CITY GOVERNMENT The purpose of this chapter is to explain who the city authorities are and what they do.
To be a city a place must have a charter. What is a City?—The poet Cowper once said that “God made the country and man made the town”, a remark which was not intended to flatter the cities. Nor is there any reason why life in a crowded community should particularly appeal to poets although it may have a strong fascination for more worldly-minded men. ”

“ That the city's claim will come, bid me back into my place.
How can I go forth again to the hot and restless town,
Where the stranger people pass ever careless up and down,
Where convention chills each hand from a kind and friendly hold? ”

“ Here is a town of twelve or thirteen thousand population, with electric lighted streets, and with blocks of buildings which are stately enough, and also architecturally fine enough, to command respect in any city. ”

“ The city plan, for example, establishes metes and bounds, fixes in a general way the location and character of the city's constructions, and imposes an orderly arrangement, within the city area, upon the buildings which are erected by private initiative as well as by public authority. ”

“ Each province shall have a metropolis, which shall be so placed as a centre almost in a circumference, and the rest at equal distances, some 12 Italian miles asunder, or thereabout, and in them shall be sold all things necessary for the use of man; statis horis et diebus, no market towns, markets or fairs, for they do but beggar cities (no village shall stand above 6, 7, or 8 miles from a city) except those emporiums which are by the sea side, general staples, marts, as Antwerp, Venice, Bergen of old, London, &c. ”

“ All cities are built up from these two influences, which vary in quantity, intensity and quality, the resulting districts overlapping, interpenetrating, neutralizing and harmonizing as the pressure of the city's growth bring them in contact with each other. ”

“ As far now as the eye can reach the picturesque outline of one of the finest cities that exist is discovered; steeples and pinnacles rise above the verdure of the trees lining the avenues within the unaltered frame supplied by the blue hills of Maryland and Virginia.
The will of Congress, the choice made by the great man whose name the city was to bear, the talents of a French officer, caused this change. ”

“ Much of what we ordinarily regard as the city—its charters, formal organization, buildings, street railways, and so forth—is, or seems to be, mere artifact. However, it is only when and in so far as these things, through use and wont, connect themselves, like a tool in the hand of a man, with the vital forces resident in individuals and in the community that they assume the institutional form. As the whole the city is a growth. It is the undesigned product of the labors of successive generations of men. ”

“ Saturday, 25th, 1839.—I went early this morning to the Imperial Cabinet; remained there until two, when the rooms are closed. After dinner I explored about the city until sunset; saw many of the public buildings, the gardens, etc. I understand the localities of the town proper very well. The city itself is not large; the strong walls that inclose it are still kept up, and immediately outside of this there is a large open space, planted with trees and laid out into roads and walks. Beyond this are the faubourgs or suburbs, larger many times than the city itself ”

“ In the paper read on Monday at a meeting of the Sociological Society by Professor GEDDES—an abstract of which we print—are contained ideas of practical value to be recommended to the study of ambitious municipalities. This is the age of cities, and all the world is city-building. Almost everywhere is a flow from the country town-ward. ”

“ When we reach a period in which the city stands out as an object of study in itself, and when we do not have to trace its history only by learning that of other institutions which included and overshadowed it, then the practical life of the people within its walls becomes of the greatest importance, even to the smallest detail of civic law or city custom ”

“ And this principle of growth—this principle of always preserving a belt of country round our cities would be ever kept in mind till, in course of time, we should have a cluster of cities, not of course arranged in the precise geometrical form of my diagram, but so grouped around a Central City that each inhabitant of the whole group, though in one sense living in a town of small size, would be in reality living in, and would enjoy all the advantages of, a great and most beautiful city ”

“ In each city the sections built up by the different factors may be clearly distinguished, these flourishing or decaying according to the prosperity or decline of their special factors. Thus the railroads, docks and warehouses evidence the city's commerce; the factories its industrial energies; the retail shops the consuming power of the population; the residence sections the wealth, social grades and numbers of the citizens; and the buildings of public and semi-public utility the standard of civilization and civic pride of the city. ”

“ Cities, under favoring conditions for local expansion, which reach a certain amount of population and wealth, grow by a kind of natural increment, the law of attraction, very well known in human nature, which draws a person to an active city of two hundred thousand rather than to a stagnant city of one hundred thousand. And it is a fortunate thing for civilization that this attraction is almost as strong to men of letters as it is to men of affairs. ”

“ Even amongst the cities there is a great difference in the degree of importance, because there are many cities which are extremely small, inasmuch as a town having a population over twenty-five thousand could as a rule be incorporated as a city. ”

“ I have not, in this paper, attempted to describe the actual condition of any particular municipality, or even presented a picture which could represent the material existence of the cities as a whole. Such a picture would only be a necessary part of a study of institutions when the city itself was the unit to be investigated, and not of one whose chief object is to prove that the city as such had no constitutional existence, but simply formed a part of another institutional unit. ”

“ Born at an epoch when his country was just awakening to the modern struggle,—born out of the provincial life, which is always the best preparation for city life, because it is more serious, more profound, and more far-reaching in its thought than that of a metropolis, as it is more introspective ”

“ Never did he tire when his theme was of that City “whose inhabitants no census has numbered; through whose streets rush no tides of business; that city without grief or graves—sins or sorrows; whose walls are salvation, and whose gates are praise.” ”

“ Certain we are that in America, one hundred years ago, less than one-thirtieth of the population was in cities; now, about one-third is in city communities; and European cities are outgrowing American cities. ”

“ For four centuries a free city, defending herself virgin-like against all comers, for two centuries more the happy capital of the loveliest of French provinces, she has borne for forty years the chain of the conqueror and bowed her head beneath the lash. ”

“ The place is a little market town, the total of whose population in the census records sounds absurdly small; yet it is a complete world in itself; a capital city, with its kingdom and its ruler, for the territory is practically the property of a single family. ”

“ Countless, indeed, are the forms of cities; even limiting our field of observation to those that have grown up in the last century they are numerous enough. Their differences and analogies would doubtless repay analysis, always supposing that we are clear how far the modern town, as contrasted with the mediaeval or Graeco-Roman city, can usefully be treated as "an integrate." ”

“ The town--a town of brick and tin--stands at the apparent edge of a vast plain of withered grass, from whose inhospitable aspect it turns and nestles, as if for protection, round the scrub-covered hills to northward. From among the crowd of one-storied dwelling-houses, more imposing structures, the seats of Government and commerce, rise prominently to catch the eye and impress the mind with the pleasing prospect of wealthier civilisation. ”