Cities of the World Educational Posters & Prints
for social studies classrooms, home schoolers, theme decor for office and studio.

A city is defined as “an urban area of high population density with some degree of self-government”, differentiated from towns, villages, and hamlets by size, importance or legal status. The word ‘urban’ originally described the view of life from Rome - smooth, literate and non-barbaric. The opposite of the Latin urbanus is rusticus, or rural.

“World Cities” or “Global Cities” are those cities that are/were considered to be significant “node” points in global economic, political, population concentration, transportation, communication, arts, music, cultural, education, and sports activities.

The earliest communities evolved organically, usually along rivers, as people gathered for the advantages of protection and help in tasks associated with the development of agriculture. The new profession of urban planning, the discipline of integrating social and built environments with the natural ecology of place, has roots evident from archeological excavations of the earliest cities, like Harappa, in the Indus Valley.

Greeks used a grid pattern for planning cities, and Romans laid their cities out in a street grid pattern overlaid with two diagonal crossing streets meeting at a forum in the center and surrounding defensive walls. Middle Ages politics saw the growth of cities based on fortifications taking the high ground and the streets circling the castle or abbey like a topographical map. The French word bourgeoisie describes the social class of people whose status and power was from being merchants living within the walls of a city.

• “A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.” ~ Aristotle
• “Every city is a living body.” ~ St. Augustine, City of God
• “A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members - among them the need to need one another. The answer to the present alignment of political power with wealth is the restoration of the identity of community and economy.” ~ Wendell Berry
• “Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.” ~ Rupert Brooke
• “A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.” ~ Aldous Huxley
• “The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.” ~ Jane Jacobs
• “You can't rely on bringing people downtown; you have to put them there.” ~ Jane Jacobs
• “We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.” ~ John F. Kennedy
• “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
• “I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.” ~ Michelangelo
• “All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.” ~ Christopher Morley
• “The city is not a concrete jungle. It is a human zoo.” ~ Desmond Morris
• “The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.” ~ Lewis Mumford
• “The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.” ~ Lewis Mumford
• “New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.” ~ Lewis Mumford
• “Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.” ~ Lewis Mumford
• “There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.” ~ Kathleen Norris
• “Any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.” ~ Plato
• “All great art is born of the metropolis.” ~ Ezra Pound
• “Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connexion with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Worpswede, 1903
• “An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.” ~ John Ruskin
• “City life is millions of people being lonesome together.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
• “A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.” ~ Arnold J. Toynbee
• “A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.” ~ Derek Walcott
• “A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.” ~ Walt Whitman
• “From the moment a New Yorker is confronted with almost any large city of Europe, it is impossible for him to pretend to himself that his own city is anything other than an unscrupulous real-estate speculation.” ~ Edmund Wilson
• “To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.” ~ Frank Lloyd Wright