History
Going back several millennia, in the progression of civic history, emerging towns or cities have taken different cultural courses. Certain towns or cities have deliberately attempted to put forward a presence in which culture ranged high above other achievements in military strength, or in manufacturing, or in strategic importance.
Perhaps the best example is Athens in Greece as the first widely known arts town, acting in apposition to Sparta a quintessential examplar of anti-cultural town development in that Spartan citizens were forbidden non-military pursuits and occupations.
Athens has since provided the inspiration for countless imitations in civic development. Hellenism and Hellenistic ideas have driven countless cities to imitate this city driven by arts, populated by artists, and artisans, and with a strong local, regional, and international influence on arts. Alexandria, Constantinople, and many medieval Italian city-states saw Athens as their cultural ideal, and built complex civilisations on reviving Athenian values.
With the onset of industrialism in Victorian times, a small revival of arts towns was influenced by William Morris in the UK; and by arts idealists such as Thoreau and Whitman in America, and brought into fulfillment by architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright whose influence on supporting the artisan class, their folkish arts, and their use of natural local materials, led to rural revivals of arts towns since the 1970s.
Read more about this topic: Arts Towns
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)