demographicinsight

What is a city?

Oct 25, 2018Jan 16, 2020 demographicinsight

“City” is a contested term, and like all contested terms is used differently by different people. From my perspective as a demographer I would prefer to use it for the biggest and most self-confident of our urban districts. These tend to have clear similarities in terms of their population structure, as well as the range of employment and amenities they offer. Smaller urban entities should be called towns… and there is nothing wrong with that.

Raymond Williams explored the term in Keywords (see previous post) and in his book The City and the Country. He traces back the word city to the 13th century noting its increased use in the 16th century and the growing importance of urban life. The root of the word is the Latin civitas which was a general noun related to civis – citizen. The built up area of a large town was urbis. So civitas was the body of citizens rather than buildings. in English the word developed alongside town (from old English tun and Proto-Germanic tunaz or tunan – fortified place), burgh and borough (from old English burg – dwelling within a fortified enclusure – similar to Proto-Germanic burg or old Norse borg). The unit of local government was generally the borough. City was regarded as a more dignified and prestigious label than town. Size was a factor in making this distinction, and the presence of a cathedral often considered defining, although not technically definitive.

The modern implications of city date from the 19th century, often used in special senses such as university city, or provincial city. The importance of industry in Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham justified teir designation as cities, or major ports in Liverpool, Bristol and Southampton. And then there is “The City” as the financial heart of London – roughly the square mile of Roman London, with its own laws and customs – where even the monarch is not permitted to enter without special dispensation. The City of London is England’s second smallest district in terms of resident population – about 5,000 – which increases to 500,000 by day as people come in to work in the banks and exchanges and trading houses which occupy its skyscrapers.

The sort of place I consider a city is big. A lot of people live there and there’s a lot going on there. It is diverse and multicultural and liberal. People come and go whether as international or internal migrants, business travellers or tourists. There are offices, shops, factories and warehouses. Major public institutions are based there. City centres are often thriving (town centres, often not). There is a large range of cultural opportunities, from high art to roots music and graffiti, from top sporting venues (athletics, football, rugby, cricket) to participant street sport (parkour and skateboarding). Alongside the vibrancy is often considerable poverty and disadvantage, sometimes higher levels of crime. Cities often experience higher mortality rates. The city is not the country, but neither is it the small market town.

This post is going to set out my (reasonably) objective definition of cities of different types: the first being a major English city. Here goes!

A major English city is an administrative area which is legally entitled to use the word “city” in its official title (I am not going to arbitrarily promote any area to city status)
A major English city has a council which is responsible for the majority of local government functions, including education and social care

It is not open (in England) for any old place to call itself a city. City status is a privilege granted by the monarch. In some cases this dates back to “time immemorial”, and in some, city status has been acquired relatively recently, usually as celebration of a royal jubilee or similar occasion. There are 51 places in England authorised to style themselves cities – and they are a very diverse range of places, in terms of size and other characteristics, from minute fenland Ely to mighty industrial Birmingham. I am happy to recognise that all 51 are cities, but they are not all major cities in the sense of being large urban areas, with a substantial degree of self-government, major industrial, commercial and retail centres, criminal and civil courts, universities, major sporting stadia, cultural centres like concert halls and theatres.

English local government is confusing to say the least. It can come in many tiers, and some people have the privilege of being able to vote for a parish council, a district council, a county council, and maybe some kind of sub-regional mayor, as well as a police and crime commissioner. My requirement for major English cities is that the majority of powers are held at city level – particularly town planning, highways, education and social care: in other words, a city runs its own affairs and can take its own direction. If a city is a district within a non-metropolitan county council area (or even a parish within a district within a county) it does not qualify as major for me as it will be the county council which is responsible for highways, schools and social services – the big spending departments.

So which of the 51 qualify under my second condition of having a council responsible for the majority of local government functions? Here they are – my major English cities:

Birmingham
Bradford
Brighton and Hove
Bristol
Coventry
Derby
Kingston upon Hull
Leeds
Leicester
Liverpool
Manchester
Newcastle upon Tyne
Nottingham
Peterborough
Plymouth
Portsmouth
Salford
Sheffield
Southampton
Stoke on Trent
Sunderland
Wakefield
Wolverhampton
York

Of these eight are in the (self appointed) Core Cities Group – Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield – where they are joined by Cardiff and Glasgow. Core Cities lobbies central government for the interest of the UK’s larger cities… except that they are not strictly the largest 10 cities. Leicester (out) is bigger than Nottingham (in), for example, if defined by local authority boundaries.

The remaining cities are what I designate as heritage cities. They mostly have ancient origins. They were inportant in the middle ages and still are in many cases… but they are no longer responsible for some very important local government functions: they sit below a county council which covers several districts. These are:

Bath (a parish within Bath and North East Somerset)
Cambridge (district and county town of Cambridgeshire)
Canterbury (district within Kent)
Carlisle (district within Cumbria)
Chelmsford (district and county town of Essex)
Chester (part of Chester and West Cheshire)
Chichester (district and county town of West Sussex)
Durham (district within County Durham)
Ely (parish within Cambridgeshire)
Exeter (district within Devon)
Gloucester (district and county town of Gloucestershire)
Hereford (parish within Herefordshire)
Lancaster (district and county town of Lancashire)
Lichfield (district within Staffordshire)
Lincoln (district and county town of Lincolnshire)
Norwich (district abd county town of Norfolk)
Oxford (district and county town of Oxfordshire)
Preston (district within Lancashire)
Ripon (distict within North Yorkshire)
Salisbury (parish within Wiltshire)
St Albans (district within Hertfordshire)
Truro (parish within Cornwall)
Wells (parish within Bath and North East Somerset)
Winchester (district and county town within Hampshire)
Worcester (district and county town within Worcestershire)

There remain two cities which I treat as special cases: the cities of London and Westminster, comprising the financial and administrative centres repectively of London. The boundaries between the 32 London boroughs and the City of London are often fairly invisible on the ground – and most of the boroughs are of no great antiquity. So I treat London as one big city – defined by the boundaries of Greater London. In total this means that by my definition there are 25 major English cities.

The Centre for Cities is another lobbying group which includes many geographical entities which are not cities by my definition – and are not legally recognised as such. They do not necesarily follow local authority boundaries. These include: Aldershot, Barnsley*, Basildon, Birkenhead, Blackburn (with Darwen*), Blackpool, Bournemouth*, Burnley, Chatham (as part of Medway*), Crawley, Doncaster*, Huddersfield, Ipswich, Luton*, Mansfield, Middlesborough*, Milton Keynes*, Northampton, Reading*, Slough*, Southend*, Swindon*, Telford, Warrington*, Wigan and Worthing. The asterisked places have a unitary council, so all it would take would be for the Queen to declare them cities, and I would promote them to my major English cities category. The identification of the Centre for Cities’ “cities” was conducted quite carefully and rigorously, but in my view those that do not have the city title and/or self governing status are aspiring cities at best.

So in summary:

There are 25 major English cities by my definition – the premier league of urban areas

There are a further 25 heritage cities – often very attractive places, with some public administration functions, but smaller.

And there are a further 26 aspiring cities – with some of the characteristics of the former categories, but not quite making it yet.

Thoughts?

Books

Keywords: demography/demographics

Oct 5, 2018Jan 16, 2020 demographicinsight

I came to demography late in life. My first interest was in English – literature and language – and cultural studies. I knew that was what I wanted to study from a young age, and I was lucky enough to be offered a place at Jesus College Cambridge. One of my teachers there was Professor Raymond Williams. He was the son of a railwayman, grew up in the Welsh borders, had a strong affinity for working class life and values, studied at Cambridge, taught for Oxford university’s ‘delegation for extra-mural studies’ closely associated with the Workers’ Educational Association, before having an academic career in Cambridge. He managed to bridge the gap between traditional Cambridge literary criticism, Marxist approaches, and some of the modern theories emanating from continental Europe. He was also, in my experience, a very good teacher, approachable and supportive.

One of his books was Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society (1976), which explored, explained, deconstructed important words in the field of cultural studies. Words such as culture, class, industry, intellectual, society featured, starting with their derivation, whether from latin, greek, or old norse. The layers of meaning, sometimes contested, sometimes contradictory, were revealed. The effect of the whole book was to understand the vocabulary of Williams’ intellectual model, and (from the perspective of a nineteen year old undergraduate) to acquire instant erudition.

My copy of ‘Keywords’ purchased 1977 as a first year undergraduate

So what of “demography”? I start as Williams did with the Oxford English Dictionary, which states that the origin of the word was a borrowing from Greek with an English element. Its primary definition is given as: “the study of human populations, especially the study of statistics, such as numbers of births and deaths, the incidence of disease, or rates of migration, which illustrate the changing size or composition of populations over time.”

δεμοσ [demos] + GRAPHY an abstract noun of action or function, the first cited example of its use was as a conscious neologism from the Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association in 1834, “were it desirable to invent a new name, perhaps Medical Demography would be more appropriate, when applied to a thickly-peopled district”. The next example from the Library of Universal Knowledge in 1880 also focuses on the medical dimension: “the statistics of health and disease”. These early examples, and the definition they support continue to describe accurately a core meaning of demography – its focus on births, deaths, migration, population size and composition, its close relationship with statistics, etc..

A second definition is given as “the composition of a particular human population”. First example from the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1837, “These inscriptions throw light on the Demography of Attica”. Second example, from Norway: Official publication for the Paris Exhibition in 1900, “good and abundant material for the study of the demography of our country.”

These two definitions, closely linked, echo two distinct meanings of statistics (a scientific methodology for the analysis of data, and the data itself). So “demography” is a scientific discipline with its own methods and devices, such as life tables, population pyramids, and agreed formulae for calculating key summary measures. It is also used to describe the population itself – “Germany has an ageing population.” “Fertility rates in sub-Saharan Africa remain high.” “University cities have high in- and out- migration of young people.”

A further definition extends the meaning of demography to the analysis of plant and animal populations – somewhat in contradition of the Greek demos – however the methodologies are clearly transferable to any population where members come into existence, move about, and ultimately die.

Let us move to “demographic”… it clearly shares the same origin, and is often used as the adjective associated with “demography” – as in “demographic methods”, but it also has a somewhat distinct meaning in relation to the description of sub-populations. The OED locates this latter meaning originating in the USA as a noun – “a particular section of a population, typically defined in terms of factors such as age, income, ethnic origin, etc., especially regarded as a target audience for broadcasting, advertising, or marketing.” An example of this use is cited from Billboard in 1972 “in trying to project a younger demographic, they wind up playing the Osmonds, the Partridge Family. What you see at that point is a mass exodus of listeners.” Or in Vancouver in 1992: “The new Chinese demographic: wealthy, sophisticated middle class expats who still insist on the quality they enjoyed in Hong Kong.”

So there are two broad groups of meanings “demography” as a science, focussing on fertility, mortality and migration – with various detailed methodologies, often close to national or international statistical agencies, supporting development activities, measuring the success of health interventions, etc. and “demographics” as a noun – a marketing concept intended to subset a population into groups who can be sold differend goods and services, advertised through different media.

My personal observation is that “demography” – as a science – is not well understood by non-specialists, even well educated ones; but “marketing demographics” is quite a familiar concept to many people. Perhaps those of us who are more affiliated to “demography” need to do more to promulgate our science and its headline findings?

Views and comments would be welcome.

The work of Raymond Williams on “keywords” is celebrated and preserved on the Keywords website, jointly maintained by Jesus College Cambridge and the University of Pittsburgh: https://keywords.pitt.edu/williams_keywords.html

demography

Why demography?

Jul 29, 2018Jul 29, 2018 demographicinsight

I am an educationalist by background. An English degree from Cambridge, a post-graduate certificate in education in English and Drama from Newcastle, led me into a teaching career in inner city secondary schools, finishing as a head of music to everyone’s surprise including my own. So how did I discover demography in my mid-fifties?

Well, it is intrinsically interesting of course. Birth, death and migration are important topics, and all of us think about them from time to time. I knew about Malthus, partly because he was one of the famous alumni of Jesus College… where I did my first degree, and his portrait hung in the hall alongside those of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and miscellaneous bishops.

Demography, however, shaped my teaching career. My first job was in a new and rapidly growing school on the outskirts of town, built to serve a huge new housing estate still under construction. My second job was in a small and shrinking secondary school on a 1920s council estate earmarked for closure. My third job was in a new school formed by amalgamating the second school with a near neighbour. The rise and fall of pupil numbers was of more than academic interest: they affected the very existence of the schools I worked in. I got used to studying forecasts, reverse engineering them to work out how they had been put together. As an officer of a teachers’ association I got to know the staff at county hall who managed schools at local authority level, negotiating the best way forward for staff. pupils and their families. Eventually I decided on a career change and went into local authority management myself.

I didn’t just do school place planning… admissions, capital projects, catering, data, early years, finance, governor services, human resources, information technology, school crossing patrols all fell within my remit. But pupil numbers remained central to what I did. For most of my years working in two urban authorities in the south east the theme remained falling rolls. It seemed that remorselessly, year after year, the number of reception children declined, and schools suffered the impact of surplus places. Our job seemed to be to manage this decline. Often in the primary phase this was achieved by amalgamating infant (4-6) and junior (7-10) schools to form all through primary schools (4-10). In the secondary phase we would remove mobile classrooms which had been provided in earlier times… or manage just the sort of amalgamation that I experienced in my own teaching career. This just seemed the way it was, until about 2008/9 when…

Jim, an esteemed colleague, came into my office clutching a sheaf of papers. “Andrew, I think you had better have a look at these.” He looked worried. “We’re going to have to add twelve new forms of entry in our primary schools in the next three to four years.” What?!? That was the equivalent of six typical schools. How could that be? I studied the papers and it seemed to be true, the tide had turned. Reception years were starting to get bigger, rather than smaller, and as they worked their way through schools would have to be enlarged. It soon became apparent that we were not alone…. many authorities were facing the same situation, particularly urban authorities. Looking back people say “but that was obvious wasn’t it?” Well, perhaps it should have been, but it really wasn’t, either in the professional community or amongst the wider public. A bit like a reversal in stock values or the housing market it’s only obvious in hindsight. Despite the shock, it was good news in many ways: expanding schools is a much more satisfying assignment than shrinking them or closing them. As this was before the beginning of the age of austerity, there were sufficient resources not only to add the required capacity, but to improve the condition and suitability of some of our schools at the same time.

Some year later I had the opportunity to retire early. Too good to miss! This gave me time to pursue my other interests: first and foremost sailing. But my professional interest in school place planning didn’t go away, and it wasn’t long before I was wondering if we couldn’t plan further ahead. I knew that the University of Southampton offered an MSc course in demography, and wondered if it would be appropriate for me. I had finished an MBA at the same university in 2010, and it was a year later that I tentatively made contact. “Come along… sit in some lectures… see how you like it…” said the head of department. I did. My fellow students were a diverse bunch… mostly mid twenties, from all over the world, and one or two mature students (but not as mature as me). From sitting in, it soon became apparent that it was assumed by everyone that I was on the course. I paid my fee, had my credentials checked and swipe card issued, and suddenly I was a student in was quite a challenging discipline for and English graduate, ex-music teacher and local government officer. But it suited me very well. Yes, it was intrinsically interesting. It was also very relevant to all those school place planning experiences that had shaped my earlier career. I’ve always liked numbers, and playing with computers, although I’m no mathematician or computer scientist. I enjoyed the course, came out with a good degree. Now I do long term interim management for local authorities, generally involving school place planning, and occasional shorter pieces of consultancy work. And after swearing I never would, I embarked on a PhD a couple of years ago… of which more another time.

I plan to update this blog at least once a month, maybe more often. It will cover my academic interest in demography, particularly local populations in the United Kingdom, and also related topics such as urban and rural development, planning and public policy, local government, and indeed anything else – because everything is connected.