What is it about a city that makes it....a city?

I was being a bit of a nuisance on Saturday! It was just before 1:30pm, and I was in Norwich, waiting for my bus to take me to Sprowston. Despite the fact I'm trying to get myself kitted out for a 6 month study in Alaska next year, the chilling weather did get the better of me and I decided to spend the fifteen minutes I had left wandering around Chapelfield.

Unfortunately, I never realised that the journey through this shopping mall was to be just as uncomfortable as standing in Bus Shelter 'i' on St Stephen's Street; not because of the temperature necessarily-though it was possibly 5 degrees warmer than I would have liked it to have been- but because of the numbers who had also decided to take shelter here. Literally, I found myself weaving through the hundreds who made their way towards me, as if I was hoisted on the end of a large-scale knitting needle. Chapelfield doesn't operate a 'British Traffic Flow System' and why should it? After all, the centre hasn't seen such a surge in the past 11 months. However, hacing said this, it was the fifteen minutes 'obstacle course' that I suffered on Saturday that makes me wonder whether Chapelfield really should have pedestrian traffic lights, lanes, and roundabouts. (You can tell I don't shop much, can't you?)

It made me think about what actually makes a city...a city.  Structually, a city's architecture differs by quite a large extent to a suburban village settlement's design, but is it just the buildings that make the two contrast. Could it be the actual people that live, work and travel in the city that make it characteristic, and in a way unique from any other city? It used to be the fact large towns became cities when they had a cathedral; more recently, a city has to have "considerable diversity of function". 'Peak Land Value Intersection' is yet another way of classifying where the urban fringe is placed. Use any model you fancy, but at the end of the day, the basic and fundamental aspects of a city -even the cathedral- is the result of the people who use it.

With the newspapers today detailing the extent to which people online shopped this weekend, and my congested experience on Saturday, it could be suggested that today's cities have not got the 'carrying capacity' to support the people who want to use it. But despite the drawbacks of being shoved out of the way by eager consumers, I think that the city comes most to life at times when it is choc-full of people and the difference between the suburb and the CBD is most clear during the run up to Christmas.

As you go between shop to shop,as Aled Jones' 'Walking in the Air' fades into Kylie's 'Santa Baby', as young girls try out the powders and the creams they have just bought, and as two young men jokingly run up a downward running escalator, you really do appreciate, not just the power of Christmas, but the power of the city. Indeed, as Desmond Morris put it, "the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo".