Abstract
Cities first arose in the Fertile Crescent a few thousand years after the discovery of agriculture. Yet the history of urbanization is not one of steady progress. Pre-industrial urbanization rose with technological advances in agriculture and transportation which fostered population growth and trade, but fell with famine and disease. Just as important, cities rose and fell with the military fortunes of city states, territorial empires and nation states. With the Industrial Revolution, urbanization rose dramatically. As population shifted out of agriculture into manufacturing and services, cities became the dominant landscape of human civilization.
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Kim, S. (2018). Urbanization. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2066
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2066
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