In the settlement space, cities are the keystones of road networks, the topological durability of which confirms their shaping under the influence of the drive to minimize transport costs. The basic road backbone of a city is a reflection of the course of main out-of-town routes. In the city’s layout, it determines the basic directions, range, and areas of urban development, and the transport means and technologies used delimit the logistical penetration of one’s environment by humans.
The city in cultural and economic retrospect
The city is a product of civilizational transformations in settlement, resulting from political and economic premises that respect the progressing social division of labor. From the very beginning, cities were settlements with a population employed exclusively or predominantly in non-agricultural professions. The organizational, spatial, and economic structures of cities are generally a faithful reflection of the era in which they were created and functioned.
Every city is subject to a process of continuous change. It changes as a whole, its elements and the relationships between them undergo changes. A city is born, develops, goes through periods of crisis and regression, and sometimes even dies. The development of a city is therefore a continuous process. There is no target state that the city would strive for. Every state achieved is a transitional state, forming the basis for the next stage of development.
Every city also has a tendency to expand. For a long time and almost exclusively, cities grew spontaneously, in an anarchic way, that is, as it was more convenient for the residents and according to their economic possibilities and available transport technologies. Two main ways of this growth are distinguished:
– agglutination, i.e., attaching a continuation of the city to an already existing part, leading to the formation of a star-shaped urban layout, developed along important transport routes with gradual development of inter-route areas and leading as a result to the recreation of the original city plan on a larger spatial scale
– polycentric development, which is the opposite of agglutination, consisting of the formation of an urban layout through the creation of a new city next to the old one, the establishment of a commercial district at a railway station located outside the city, or an often adjacently developed industrial district with a transport-favorable location relative to the existing city and the gradual merging of these units with that city.
– agglutination, i.e., attaching a continuation of the city to an already existing part, leading to the formation of a star-shaped urban layout, developed along important transport routes with gradual development of inter-route areas and leading as a result to the recreation of the original city plan on a larger spatial scale
– polycentric development, which is the opposite of agglutination, consisting of the formation of an urban layout through the creation of a new city next to the old one, the establishment of a commercial district at a railway station located outside the city, or an often adjacently developed industrial district with a transport-favorable location relative to the existing city and the gradual merging of these units with that city.
The industrialization of the economy, initiated in the 18th century, dynamizes urbanization, which is a social and cultural process expressed generally in the development of urban settlement, in the increase in the number of cities, the expansion of urban areas, the increase in the share of the urban population in the total population of a given region, and in the economic plane.
The directive of the city’s function
The urban directive of the cultural and economic function of the city, synthetically formulated in the Athens Charter – a document of the IV International Congress of Modern Architecture in Athens in 1933, reads:
city = housing + work + recreation + municipal services + communication, where ‘communication’ understood infrastructurally and logistically determines the realization of all other functions of the city, both in the system of internal ties and external ties with the environment.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2/2004.