background of urbanisation
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Explanation:
Urbanization is the process by which rural communities grow to form cities, or urban centers, and, by extension, the growth and expansion of those cities. Urbanization began in ancient Mesopotamia in the Uruk Period (4300-3100 BCE) for reasons scholars have not yet agreed on. It is speculated, however, that a particularly prosperous and efficient village attracted the attention of other, less prosperous, tribes who then attached themselves to the successful settlement.
Answer:
HUMAN HISTORY AND URBANISATION
History offers many lessons relevant to sustainability by exhibiting how humans and their
societies have recognized and responded to challenges and opportunities of their natural
environment (Redman 1999; Diamond 2005, Costanza et al. 2007; Sinclair et al. 2010). Three of the basic approaches to problem solving in antiquity were: 1) mobility of people to available
resources, 2) ecosystem management to secure enhanced local growth of produce, and 3)
increasing social complexity encoded in formal institutions that guided an expanding range of
activities. These solution pathways were fundamental to the rise of early civilizations and are
instrumental for integration in the design of sustainable cities in the future (Redman 2011).
2.1.1 Three approaches to human problem solving and the emergence of cities
The first approach, mobility of people to available resources, has been the dominant way of
securing adequate subsistence for the vast majority of the human enterprise. Until 10,000 years
ago (and more recently in many regions) virtually all people had to move among several
locations each year to take advantage of the seasonality of ripening resources and variation in water availability. The dominance of this pattern was only broken by the introduction of
agriculture that allowed the establishment of year-round settlements in many regions of the
world. Agriculture is thus an example of the second approach to problem solving, ecosystem
management for enhanced productivity. This has proven to be an astonishingly successful
solution to feeding an ever-increasing global population and to enabling virtually all people to
live in permanent settlements (for an overview of human and agricultural development and links
to other events through human history, see Figure 2.1). In fact, the implementation of agriculture
and the infrastructural improvements made to enhance productivity were strong incentives for
the spread and growth of sedentary communities. A highly effective human-nature relationship
emerged from millennia of experimentation—i.e. the village farming community—and became
the dominant settlement form across the globe. Small settlement sizes, flexibility in the sources
of subsistence, and a balance between extraction from and the regeneration of the local
ecosystem made this the most enduring and widespread community type. Although it existed as
early as nine or even ten thousand years ago in the Near East, the concept spread or was
reinvented, and similar farming communities housed over half the world’s population as recently
as the middle of the 20th century.
The village farming community proved to be a highly resilient socio-economic unit, yet some of
these communities expanded on their approach to ecosystem management to the point where
larger aggregations of population were necessary to supply the required labor..
Explanation: