History Lecture Notes

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- What does this tell us about the urban culture of Toronto?

- Indicates that the waterfront and the waterfront to certain city distances.

- Have cultural values changed in the last 150 years?

- What does this tell us about ourselves and our city?

Importance of the environment and the importance of the concept of progress.

Culture? The arts, customs, habits, beliefs, values, history, behaviour, and material habits that constitute a people’s way of life. Also, culture should be regarded as the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual, and emotional features of society or a social group, and that it encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs. → according to UNESCO

Lecture 2

Part 1

- What is a city?

- A city is a settlement with a particularly important status which differentiates it from a town

- The term is primarily used to designate an urban settlement with a large population (legal status, historical status, special admin status)

- Why study cities?

- We live in an urban culture

- To understand more about ourselves and our origins

- To anticipate the future (limitations and possibilities)

Part 2

- Mesopotamia (5000 years ago) and then end it at modern (2013)

- Agricultural revolution

- domestication of plants and livestock

- 10,000 years ago (8000 BCE)

- Surpluses – more food then was needed to feed the pop. Of human

- Where? Peru, Mexico (about 5000 years ago), Nile, Egypt, China, Pakistan, and at last, Iraq, turkey, Syrian, and etc.

- Revolutionary changes → it changed various people’s lifestyle and etc.

- Way of life

- Nomadic (chasing animal, moving around, locating crops) → Settled (planting crops at one specific location, less movement), this is human grouping

- Settlement

- Stop chasing food

- Stop searching widespread sources

- Less energy expended

- Much more predictability in the process

- Productivity level increases, individuals are able to produce more

- Plant crops

- Tend livestock

- Domestication process – increases output = surpluses

- Domestication is selective breeding

- Problem → Storage

- Storage and Security

- Storage jars: simple level of tech, for the day what a quantum leap forward

- Shelters and defensive walls

- Trade

- Settled lifestyle

- Fixed marketplace

- Now that we have human settlement and fixation, now its possible to trade for more agricultural surplus

Part 3

- Early Civilization (6000 years ago)

- City settlement → urban groupings of people, more than cultural villages, things are becoming more complicated, larger pop. Larger agricultural output

- Labour specialization → everybody were farmers and slumbers and etc. until this happened

- Concentration of surpluses → larger and larger as time goes

- Class structure → kings and priests, landowners, merchants, farmers, and etc.

- State organization → more agricultural, the need for more systematic organization of activities

- Civilization

- Monumental public works → nobility and standard

- Standardized monumental artwork → images, symbols they become standardized

- Long-distance trade

- Arithmetic, geometry, astronomy

- Writing

- Mesopotamia

- Greek name “between the rivers”

- The cradle of civilization or at least Modern (western) civilization

- Modern way Iraq

- The fertile crescent → Persian Gulf over to the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia was in between the rivers

- Now going to 2500 BC to 1700 BC

- The importance of irrigation: management and control of water resources → were used in a useful manner

- Lush agricultural land, 3 whole crops per year

- Agricultural surpluses: enabled the growth of cities (labours and farmers, free them for non-food production activities)

- Trading helps to give enough food for everyone using the surpluses, everyone’s happy

- Ur (the place) – produces water for irrigation

- The great Ziggurat of Ur (build in the 21st century BCS; rebuilt 556-547 BCE).

- Extensive region that time

- Sumerian culture: 3100-2350 BCE

- 13 independent city-states

- Intensive agriculture – irrigation canals

- Tech/eco/occu specialization