Week One the change in identity of an urban area

The change of the urban society, is different, and is never consistent to one area or type of change.  There are many reasons for the change in the structure and purpose of an urban center.  In the beginning, the primary reason for a city to pick its location, either had to do with protection or key location in control of an area or trade.  Those are the original reasons to why cities picked their places and developed with that in mind.  Take cities like Baghdad (Iraq) and Cape Town (South Africa), both cities grew up based on trade and due to one reason or another are no longer as important in trading as they once were.  For Baghdad, the transition from moving items across land to moving them across the oceans.  Which, then is why Cape Town became so important, as I key stop along the ocean trade rout around Africa.  This was until the Suez Cannel was built, and Cape Town became less of an important location in the trade industry.  The same concept happened in Europe, with castles being built for protection but then being abandoned later.  This was due to cannons being brought to Europe and able to destroy a wall from far away.  All these changes have one thing in common they are the adverse reaction to an advancement in science.  With advances in Science urban areas are forced to change and adapt, but due to the long process of change, most times people move to a more modern or currently important urban area instead of waiting for theirs to evolve.   Thus bringing around the migrant work force that is, common today around the world.  This is because people travel to were opportunity is, and will always continue to do so.  With this moving of people and ideas that force urban areas to change they turn away from their roots and shift into something that is not their original purpose causing some transitional problems and truly forming different and new cities all to their own. 

            Other factors can push for change in urban areas, which the last great time this was seen was after world war one, and in the great depression in the United States of America.  During this time frame agriculture forced the moving of millions.  With the collapse of the finical sector, people turned to farming.  However when a drought hit that just devastated the crops people in the hundreds of millions abandoned any sense of home and traveled around the country looking for work.   With people having no home and just moving as migrant workers cities changed and even grew out of nowhere such as tent cities.  The forcing of people to adapt to a different living status forced the urban life to go through radical changes so not only will science force changes but also agriculture and financial reasons will force changes as well.  Probably the most modern case in the United States of America would be Silicon Valley in California, as soon as tech became important and a very large financial sector millions moved there and the surrounding area to be apart of it and to alter the previous urban ideology of the area.  

Below is a link to the library of congress and an article to further explain the movement of people and what it does to an urban ideal.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/afctshtml/tsme.html