New map and video show that urbanization is not as modern a concept as you might think. When talking about Science and the City, I’m often asked about the earliest days of urbanization – when and where did we build the first ‘proper’ city? But when it comes to looking further back, there are really only two names that are mentioned – Tertius Chandler and George Modelski. The project built on Chandler and Modelski’s research, and involved digitizing, transcribing, and geocoding historical, archaeological, and census-based urban population data from almost six thousand years of history…. Modelski split it into eras; for example, he saw an ‘ancient city’ (3500 BC to 1000 BC) as being anything ≥10,000 inhabitants.

Source: Forbes January 29, 2017 05:43 UTC