Amazing cities

Each city has its own characteristics, history, architecture and interesting places, so it is very difficult to select the best of them. But still some of them tourists note more often than others in their reviews. Thus, we managed to compile a rating of the most beautiful cities in the world, with which we invite you to familiarize yourself.

City Status in the United Kingdom - the right granted by the British monarch to selected municipalities in Great Britain.

This status does not give the municipal community any additional rights, except prestige and the right to call itself a “city”. Currently, the status is granted according to the results of the competition, and is not automatically granted according to some specific criteria, although traditionally (until 1888) it was granted to cities that have a cathedral on its territory. The relationship between the presence of the cathedral and the name "city" was established by Henry VIII in the 1540s. He founded dioceses-dioceses (each of which had its own cathedral) in six cities in England and additionally awarded them the title of "city", having granted a special diploma.

The city status in Ireland received much fewer cities than in England or Wales. Of those that received status before the beginning of the 19th century, only two cities are located in Northern Ireland. There were no city cities in Scotland until the end of the 19th century. At that time, the practice of granting City status was revived, first in England, where it was associated with the establishment of new cathedrals, and only later in Scotland and Ireland.

In the twentieth century, the status of a city in England and Wales was no longer associated with the presence of a cathedral, and is granted to municipalities according to various criteria, including the number of people.

Some old cities were deprived of the status of "city" in connection with the abolition of the municipalities in which they belonged. Later, new letters were issued renewing the status of most of these cities, with the exception of three - Rochester, Perth and Elgin. Perth again received the status of "city" in the spring of 2012.

St. Davids, with a population of less than 2,000, is the smallest community with city status.

The city, being an ancient and at the same time the most modern form of resettlement of people, is the subject of close attention of a wide range of people of various professions. Historically, there has been a constant process of increasing the role of cities in the development of human society. This process is ongoing, as evidenced by the mere fact that at present more than half of the total population of highly developed countries live in them. However, not every settlement can be considered a city.

The word “city” comes from the words “fence”, “enclose”, since in ancient Russia, settlements were called cities with perimeter defenses. However, on the world stage, the first mention of cities dates back to the 4th-3rd millennium BC - to the period of transition from a nomadic to a settled way of life, from the primitive communal system to a slave-owning one, the period of the first major division of labor in human society into agricultural and handicraft labor. The division of labor led to the emergence of product exchanges and the development of trade. Therefore, the first cities most often appeared at the crossroads of trade routes. If in ancient times cities were a small phenomenon, then at the moment there are more than 2.6 million settlements with the status of a city on the planet (the difficulty of accurate counting is connected with different criteria when giving cities the status of settlements). 

Considering the criteria of the Russian Federation, in our country there are 1108 cities. Most of them are concentrated in the Central Federal District, least of all - in the Far East.

Just as there are no general criteria for granting settlements city status, there is no single definition of the concept of “amazing cities”. Representatives of different scientific fields give different definitions:

- Urban sociologists put the following meaning in the concept of “city”: a city is a relatively large densely and constantly populated settlement, the inhabitants of which are socially heterogeneous; a city is a certain socio-spatial (homogeneity) integrity of the system in which the process of continuous interaction, social, artificial and natural environment takes place;

- In the educational literature on urban planning, the concept of a city is reduced to the following definition: a city is a complex set of residential and public buildings, industrial enterprises, public utilities, streets and squares, transportation devices, recreation places, green spaces and water spaces;

- In an economic sense, a city, an urban settlement is, first of all, a settlement that is not connected, according to the predominant occupation of residents, with agriculture.

- In the dictionary of general geographical terms, the city is defined as a compact settlement with a predominance of non-agricultural functions, in which a community of people is formed, leading a peculiar way of life in conditions that differ from the surrounding countryside with a certain type of anthropogenic transformation in the form of building up with large buildings and other characteristic structures.

The definition of the city is based on the opposition of its rural areas, the definition of the minimum population of the city, its administrative functions and other signs. So, in Iceland, a city will be considered any settlement in which only 200 people live, and in Japan such a status can be given to a village with a population of at least 50,000 inhabitants. In Russia, the cities include centers with a population of at least 12 thousand people, 85% or more of the population not related to agriculture.

City classification

The Town Planning Code of the Russian Federation classifies cities by population into the following categories:

- small (up to 50 thousand people);

- medium (50 - 100 thousand people);

- large (100 - 250 thousand people);

- large (250 thousand - 1 million people);

- the largest (more than 1 million people).

As a rule, a city, crossing the line of 100 thousand inhabitants, begins to acquire new qualities, a different look, to grow in cities and satellite towns. The milestone of 1 million people is usually marked by the deployment of the city in the largest metropolitan area. An interesting fact is that in the USSR, when the city reached the number of 1,000,000 people, the construction of the subway was allowed.

Classification of cities by function

Functions - this is a kind of profession in the city, which determines the structure of employment in cities, as well as the profile of production activities of city-forming enterprises. The underlying employment criterion was first used in 1943 by the American scientist C. Harris, who developed a classification for 377 American cities. Based on it, 9 categories of cities were identified:

- industrial cities,

- cities with relatively few industrial functions,

- cities of mining industry,

- retail cities,

- cities of wholesale trade,

- communication cities,

- university cities,

- resort towns,

- multifunctional cities.

In Russia, according to the functional attribute, one can distinguish:

- Administrative centers of territories (Tomsk, Irkutsk);

- Industrial (Naberezhnye Chelny, Novokuznetsk);

- Resource-mining cities (Magnitogorsk, Norilsk);

- Agro-industrial cities (cities in the Central Black Earth zone, in the North Caucasus);

- Transport hubs and ports (Vladivostok, Novosibirsk);

- Resort cities (Sochi, Anapa);

- Science cities (Korolev, Michurinsk);

-Closed administrative-territorial entities (Zelenogorsk, Novouralsk);

- Multifunctional (Rostov-on-Don, Samara).

The above cities, for the most part, are monofunctional, i.e. one function is dominant, while others are of secondary importance. Multifunctional cities are cities in which a combination of administrative, political, cultural and economic functions of city-forming significance takes place with developed industry and transport. These are mainly large cities, which are important district-forming centers with wide and diverse connections.

Cities can also be classified by degree of participation in the territorial division of labor, by origin and by EGP.

Classification of cities by degree of participation in the territorial division of labor.

In this classification, the cities participating mainly:

- in local relations;

- in the intra-regional division of labor;

- in the interdistrict division of labor;

- in the international division of labor.

These differences reflect the magnitude of the city-forming functions (activities of the city aimed at servicing out-of-town relations - economic, cultural, scientific, administrative) performed by the city.

Classification of cities by origin.

In the genetic classification of cities, their separation occurs according to time and causes, and also takes into account the degree of preservation of various historical features in the modern layout and appearance of the city.

For example, classification by time may look like:

- Cities of the Ancient World (antiquity);

- Cities of the Middle Ages;

- Cities of New Time;

- Cities of the Latest Time (Modernity).