title: US Open (tennis)

text: This tournament, from 1971 to 2021, employed standard tiebreakers (first to 7, win by 2) in every set of a singles match. Since 2022, when a match that reaches 6–all in the last possible set (the third for women and the fifth for men) an extended tiebreaker to 10 points is played. Should the tiebreaker be tied at 9-all, whoever scores two straight points wins it.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: The tournament was first held in August 1881 on grass courts at the Newport Casino in Newport, Rhode Island, which is now home to the International Tennis Hall of Fame. That year, only clubs that were members of the United States National Lawn Tennis Association (USNLTA) were permitted to enter. Richard Sears won the men's singles at this tournament, which was the first of his seven consecutive singles titles. From 1884 through 1911, the tournament used a challenge system whereby the defending champion automatically qualified for the next year's final, where he would play the winner of the all-comers tournament.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: In the first years of the U.S. National Championship, only men competed and the tournament was known as the U.S. National Singles Championships for Men. In September 1887, six years after the men's nationals were first held, the first U.S. Women's National Singles Championship was held at the Philadelphia Cricket Club. The winner was 17-year-old Philadelphian Ellen Hansell. In that same year, the men's doubles event was played at the Orange Lawn Tennis Club in South Orange, New Jersey.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: The women's tournament used a challenge system from 1888 through 1918, except in 1917. Between 1890 and 1906, sectional tournaments were held in the east and the west of the country to determine the best two doubles teams, which competed in a play-off for the right to compete against the defending champions in the challenge round.<section end=GrandSlamArticle/>


title: US Open (tennis)

text: The 1888 and the 1889 men's doubles events were played at the Staten Island Cricket Club in Livingston, Staten Island, New York.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: In the 1893 Championship, the men's doubles event was played at the St. George Cricket Club in Chicago. In 1892, the US Mixed Doubles Championship was introduced and in 1899 the US Women's National Doubles Championship.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: In 1915, the national championship was relocated to the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, New York City. The effort to relocate it to New York City began as early as 1911 when a group of tennis players, headed by New Yorker Karl Behr, started working on it.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: In early 1915, a group of about 100 tennis players signed a petition in favor of moving the tournament. They argued that most tennis clubs, players, and fans were located in the New York City area and that it would therefore be beneficial for the development of the sport to host the national championship there. This view was opposed by another group of players that included eight former national singles champions. This contentious issue was brought to a vote at the annual USNLTA meeting on February 5, 1915, with 128 votes in favor of and 119 against relocation. In August 1915, the men's singles tournament was held in the West Side Tennis Club, Forest Hills in New York City for the first time while the women's tournament was held in Philadelphia Cricket Club in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia (the women's singles event was not moved until 1921). From 1917 to 1933, the men's doubles event was held in Longwood Cricket Club in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. In 1934, both men's and women's doubles events were held in Longwood Cricket Club.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: From 1921 through 1923, the men's singles tournament was played at the Germantown Cricket Club in Philadelphia. It returned to the West Side Tennis Club in 1924 following completion of the 14,000-seat Forest Hills Stadium.</noinclude>


title: US Open (tennis)

text: Although many already regarded it as a major championship, the International Lawn Tennis Federation officially designated it as one of the world's major tournaments commencing in 1924. At the 1922 U.S. National Championships, the draw seeded players for the first time to prevent the leading players from playing each other in the early rounds. From 1935 to 1941 and from 1946 to 1967, the men's and women's doubles were held at the Longwood Cricket Club.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: The open era began in 1968 when professional tennis players were allowed to compete for the first time at the Grand Slam tournament held at the West Side Tennis Club. The previous U.S. National Championships had been limited to amateur players. Except for mixed doubles, all events at the 1968 national tournament were open to professionals. That year, 96 men and 63 women entered, and prize money totaled $100,000. In 1970, the US Open became the first Grand Slam tournament to use a tiebreaker to decide a set that reached a 6–6 score in games. From 1970 through 1974, the US Open used a best-of-nine-point sudden-death tiebreaker before moving to the International Tennis Federation's (ITF) best-of-twelve points system. In 1973, the US Open became the first Grand Slam tournament to award equal prize money to men and women, with that year's singles champions, John Newcombe and Margaret Court, receiving $25,000 each. From 1975, following complaints about the surface and its impact on the ball's bounce, the tournament played on clay courts instead of grass. This was also an experiment to make it more "TV friendly". The addition of floodlights allowed matches to be played at night.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: In 1978, the tournament moved from the West Side Tennis Club to the larger and newly constructed USTA National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, Queens, to the north. The tournament's court surface also switched from clay to hard. Jimmy Connors is the only individual to have won US Open singles titles on three surfaces (grass, clay, and hard), while Chris Evert is the only woman to win US Open singles titles on two surfaces (clay and hard).


title: US Open (tennis)

text: During the 2006 US Open, the complex was renamed to "USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center" in honor of Billie Jean King, a four-time US Open singles champion and women's tennis pioneer.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: From 1984 through 2015, the US Open deviated from traditional scheduling practices for tennis tournaments with a concept that came to be known as "Super Saturday": the women's and men's finals were played on the final Saturday and Sunday of the tournament respectively, and their respective semifinals were held one day prior. The women's final was originally held in between the two men's semifinal matches; in 2001, the women's final was moved to the evening so it could be played on primetime television, citing a major growth in popularity for women's tennis among viewers. This scheduling pattern helped to encourage television viewership, but proved divisive among players because it only gave them less than a day's rest between their semifinals and championship match.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: For five consecutive tournaments between 2008 through 2012, the men's final was postponed to Monday due to weather. In 2013 and 2014, the USTA intentionally scheduled the men's final on a Monday—a move praised for allowing the men's players an extra day's rest following the semifinals, but drew the ire of the ATP for further deviating from the structure of the other Grand Slams. In 2015, the Super Saturday concept was dropped, and the US Open returned to a format similar to the other Grand Slams, with women's and men's finals on Saturday and Sunday. However, weather delays forced both sets of semifinals to be held on Friday that year.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: In 2018, the tournament was the first Grand Slam tournament that introduced the shot clock to keep a check on the time consumed by players between points. The reason for this change was to increase the pace of play. The clock is placed in a position visible to players, the chair umpire and fans. Since 2020, all Grand Slams, ATP, and WTA tournaments apply this technology.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: In 2020, the event was held without spectators due to the COVID-19 pandemic. An announcement that the wheelchair tennis competition would not be held caused controversy because USTA did not consult with the disabled athletes prior to it, as it had consulted with the players' organizations for the non-disabled competitions. After accusations of discrimination, USTA was forced to backtrack, admitting that it should have discussed the decision with the disabled competitors and offering them either $150,000 to be split between them (compared with $3.3m to be split between the players affected by the cancellation of each of the men's and women's qualifying competition and reductions in the mixed-doubles pool), a competition as part of the Open with 95% of the 2019 prize fund, or a competition to be held at the USTA base in Florida.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: The grounds of the US Open have 22 outdoor courts (plus 12 practice courts just outside the East Gate) consisting of four "show courts" (Arthur Ashe Stadium, Louis Armstrong Stadium, the Grandstand, and Court 17), 13 field courts, and 5 practice courts.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: The main court is the 23,771-seat Arthur Ashe Stadium, which opened in 1997. A US$180 million retractable roof was added in 2016. The stadium is named after Arthur Ashe, who won the men's singles title at the inaugural US Open in 1968, the Australian Open in 1970, and Wimbledon in 1975 and who was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1985. The next largest court is the 14,061-seat Louis Armstrong Stadium, which cost US$200 million to build and opened in 2018. The 6,400-seat lower tier of this stadium is separately ticketed, reserved seating while the 7,661-seat upper tier is general admission and not separately ticketed. The third largest court is the 8,125-seat Grandstand in the southwest corner of the grounds, which opened in 2016. Court 17 in the southeast corner of the grounds is the fourth largest stadium. It opened with temporary seating in 2011 and received its permanent seating the following year. It has a seating capacity of 2,800, all of which is general admission and not separately ticketed. It is nicknamed "The Pit", partly because the playing surface is sunk 8 feet into the ground. The total seating capacity for practice courts P1-P5 is 672 and for competition Courts 4–16 is 12,656, itemized as follows:


title: US Open (tennis)

text: All the courts used by the US Open are illuminated, allowing matches and television coverage to extend into primetime. In 2001, the women's singles final was intentionally scheduled for primetime for the first time. CBS Sports president Sean McManus cited significant public interest in star players Serena Williams and Venus Williams and the good ratings performance of the 1999 women's singles final, which was pushed into primetime by rain delays.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: From 1978 to 2019, the US Open was played on a hardcourt surface called Pro DecoTurf. It is a multi-layer cushioned surface and classified by the International Tennis Federation as medium-fast. Each August before the start of the tournament, the courts are resurfaced. In March 2020, the USTA announced that Laykold would become the new court surface supplier beginning with the 2020 tournament.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: Since 2005, all US Open and US Open Series tennis courts have been painted a shade of blue (trademarked as "US Open Blue") inside the lines to make it easier for players, spectators, and television viewers to see the ball. The area outside the lines is still painted "US Open Green".


title: US Open (tennis)

text: In 2006, the US Open introduced instant replay reviews of line calls, using the Hawk-Eye computer system. It was the first Grand Slam tournament to use the system. The Open felt the need to implement the system because of the controversial quarterfinal match at the 2004 US Open between Serena Williams and Jennifer Capriati, where important line calls went against Williams. Instant replay was available only on the Arthur Ashe Stadium and Louis Armstrong Stadium courts through the 2008 tournament. In 2009, it became available on the Grandstand court. Starting in 2018, all competition courts are outfitted with Hawk-Eye and all matches in the main draws (Men's and Women's Singles and Doubles) follow the same procedure each player is allowed three incorrect challenges per set, with one more being allowed in a tiebreak. Player challenges were eliminated in 2021, when the tournament became the second Grand Slam to fully incorporate Hawk-Eye Live, where all line calls are made electronically; the previous year's tournament had also incorporated Hawk-Eye Live on all courts except for Arthur Ashe and Louis Armstrong stadiums to reduce personnel during the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: In 2007, JPMorgan Chase renewed its sponsorship of the US Open and, as part of the arrangement, the replay system was renamed to "Chase Review" on in-stadium video and television.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: Ranking points for the men (ATP) and women (WTA) have varied at the US Open through the years. Below is a series of tables for each of the competitions showing the ranking points on offer for each event:


title: US Open (tennis)

text: The total prize money for the 2022 US Open was $60,102,000 and is the largest package of all Grand Slams and the largest in tournament history. The package is divided as follows:


title: US Open (tennis)

text: The men's and women's singles prize money (US$42,628,000) accounts for 70.9 percent of total player base compensation, while men's and women's doubles (US$6,943,200), men's and women's singles qualifying (US$6,259,200), and mixed doubles (US$667,700) account for 11.6 percent, 10.4 percent, and 1.1 percent, respectively. All prize money for the doubles competitions are distributed per team. The prize money for the wheelchair draw amounts to a total of US$1,032,000, which accounts for a total of 1.7 percent of the package, and additional expenses, such as per diem and direct hotel payments of US$2,571,900 accounts for a total of 4.3 percent.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: In 2012, the USTA agreed to increase the US Open prize money to $50,400,000 by 2017. As a result, the prize money for the 2013 tournament was US$33.6 million, a record US$8.1 million increase from 2012. The champions of the 2013 US Open Series also had the opportunity to add US$2.6 million in bonus prize money, potentially bringing the total 2013 US Open purse to more than US$36 million. In 2014, the prize money was US$38.3 million. In 2015, the prize money was raised to US$42.3 million. In 2021, the USTA set a new record for the highest prize money and total player compensation in the tournament's history with $57,462,000, and also boosted the prize money for the qualifying tournament to $6,000,000, a 66% increase over the package in 2019.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: The US Open's website allows viewing of live streaming video, but unlike other Grand Slam tournaments, does not allow watching video on demand. The site also offers live radio coverage.


title: US Open (tennis)

text: ESPN took full control of televising the event in 2015. When taking over, ESPN ended 47 years of coverage produced and aired by CBS. ESPN uses ESPN and ESPN2 for broadcasts, while putting outer court coverage on ESPN+. The tournament briefly returned to broadcast television for only a few seconds in 2022, as ABC aired a quad box with a simulcast look in of ESPN2’s coverage multiple times during ABC’s college football coverage.


title: James Charles

text: James Charles Dickinson (born May 23, 1999) is an American beauty YouTuber and makeup artist. While working as a local makeup artist in his hometown of Bethlehem, New York, Charles started a YouTube channel, where he posts makeup tutorials. In 2016, he became the first male brand ambassador for CoverGirl after a tweet featuring his makeup went viral online.


title: James Charles

text: In 2020, Charles hosted, directed, and co-produced the YouTube Originals reality competition series "Instant Influencer". He has released an eyeshadow palette and created a makeup line in collaboration with Morphe Cosmetics, and has received numerous awards for his work on social media, including two People's Choice Awards, three Streamy Awards, one Shorty Award, and one Teen Choice Award.


title: James Charles

text: His career has included multiple online controversies, including a widely publicized feud with fellow beauty YouTuber Tati Westbrook in 2019. After being accused by several underage boys of online grooming, Charles admitted to sexting with two underage boys.


title: James Charles

text: James Charles Dickinson was born on May 23, 1999 in Bethlehem, New York, to parents Skip, a contractor, and Christine Dickinson. His younger brother, Ian Jeffrey, works as a model. He attended Bethlehem Central High School, where he graduated in 2017. Describing his high school experience, he stated, "I did get bullied a lot in high school and personally, I just ignored it." Charles began working as an amateur hairstylist and started doing makeup after being asked by a friend to do her makeup for a school dance. After teaching himself how to apply makeup, he soon began doing it professionally for girls in his area.


title: James Charles

text: In December 2015, Charles started a YouTube channel where he began posting makeup tutorials. A tweet of him retaking his senior portrait with a ring light and makeup on went viral in September 2016. In October 2016, when he was 17, he became the first male brand ambassador for cosmetics brand CoverGirl. The appointment was met with significant praise on social media. His first appearance was in advertisements for CoverGirl's So Lashy mascara. He started a clothing line, Sisters Apparel, and a makeup collection, the Sister Collection, made in collaboration with cosmetics brand Morphe Cosmetics, in November 2018.


title: James Charles

text: By early 2019, he had 10 million subscribers on YouTube. His January 2019 visit to Birmingham for the opening of Morphe Cosmetics' second United Kingdom store caused gridlock in the city center. Charles did Australian rapper Iggy Azalea's makeup for promotional art for her single "Sally Walker" in March 2019 and appeared in the song's music video. He announced he would go on the Sisters Tour throughout the US in April 2019. However, the tour was canceled the following month following a highly publicized feud with American social media personality Tati Westbrook.


title: James Charles

text: Charles hosted the first season of the YouTube Originals reality competition series "Instant Influencer", which premiered on his YouTube channel in April 2020. For his work on the show, he won the award for Show of the Year at the 10th Streamy Awards. In March 2021, YouTube announced that he would not return to host the second season of the show. In October 2020, Charles made a cameo appearance in the music video for American social media personality Larray's single "Canceled".


title: James Charles

text: Since the launch of his channel, Charles has made a number of collaborative videos, doing makeup on and with various public figures including: Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, Lil Nas X, Kesha, Madison Beer, Doja Cat, JoJo Siwa, Charli D'Amelio, Addison Rae, Trixie Mattel, Avani Gregg, Bretman Rock, and Plastique Tiara.


title: James Charles

text: In May 2022, Charles posted a story of him being taught how to tuck by drag queen Krystal Versace, after which he stated he lost over 80,000 followers. After noting the loss of followers, he stated, "I'm so sorry that y'all are boring, u will not be missed." "The Tab" noted the loss of followers eventually topped 130,000. Charles and Versace also collaborated on a makeup makeover video.


title: James Charles

text: Early in his career, Charles received attention for being a young male makeup artist. Todd Spangler of "Variety" called him "YouTube's most famous beauty vlogger". Writing for the "Irish Independent", Caitlin McBride remarked that he "spearheaded a makeup revolution among men", while Amelia Tait of "The Guardian" wrote that his online platform was "arguably revolutionary". "Teen Vogue" referred to him in 2019 as "one of the most famous YouTube makeup artists and beauty influencers around", while Noelle Faulkner of "Vogue Australia" wrote in 2018 that he had "one of the most engaged followings on YouTube".


title: James Charles

text: Charles refers to his fans as "sisters". He has cited Jaclyn Hill and Nikkie de Jager as his biggest influences. He has said that, for him, makeup is "a creative outlet and an art form". In May 2021, he was sued by a former employee of his for wrongful termination.


title: James Charles

text: In 2019, Tati Westbrook, a fellow makeup artist and frequent collaborator with Charles, uploaded a 43-minute video titled "Bye Sister", accusing him of disloyalty and attempting to seduce a heterosexual man. YouTuber Jeffree Star and singer Zara Larsson corroborated Westbrook's claims and Charles became the first YouTuber to lose one million subscribers in 24 hours. He uploaded an eight-minute apology video to Westbrook, which became one of the most disliked videos on YouTube before it was deleted. He posted a second 41-minute video titled "No More Lies" addressing and refuting the comments made by Westbrook, which led to renewed online support for Charles and criticism of Westbrook. Westbrook later removed the original video and, in 2020, posted a follow-up video in which she stated that Star and Shane Dawson manipulated her into making the original video. This series of events sparked media analysis relating to cancel culture, allegations of toxicity against YouTube's beauty community, stereotypes of gay men as predatory, and the profits made from online feuds.


title: James Charles

text: In February 2021, a 16-year-old boy named Isaiyah posted a video to TikTok alleging that Charles groomed him by sending him nude photos and pressuring him into sexting with him despite knowing his age. Charles responded to the video with a tweet denying the grooming accusations and stating that the boy initially claimed to be 18 years old. In March 2021, other underage boys accused Charles of sending unsolicited nude photos and pressuring them into sexting with him. In April 2021, Charles posted a 14-minute-long video titled "Holding Myself Accountable", in which he stated that he sent sexually explicit messages to "two different people, both under the age of 18", though he denied knowing they were underage at the time. Charles called his past behavior "reckless" and "desperate", stating, "to the guys involved in the situation, I wanna say I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I flirted with you and I'm really sorry if I ever made you uncomfortable. It is completely unacceptable". Later that month, Morphe released a statement saying they would cut business ties with Charles and YouTube temporarily demonetized his channel. He returned to YouTube with a video titled "An Open Conversation" in July 2021.


title: James Charles

text: Charles came out as gay to his parents at age 12. Addressing questions about his gender identity, he stated, "I'm confident in myself and my gender identity – [I'm] happy being a boy. But at the same time, I love makeup. I have a full set of nails on all the time." As of 2019, his net worth was estimated to be US$12 million. In 2020, he purchased a US$7 million mansion in Los Angeles.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: Billboard (stylized as billboard) is an American music and entertainment magazine published weekly by Penske Media Corporation. The magazine provides music charts, news, video, opinion, reviews, events, and style related to the music industry. Its music charts include the Hot 100, the 200, and the Global 200, tracking the most popular albums and songs in different genres of music. It also hosts events, owns a publishing firm, and operates several TV shows.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: "Billboard" was founded in 1894 by William Donaldson and James Hennegan as a trade publication for bill posters. Donaldson later acquired Hennegan's interest in 1900 for $500. In the early years of the 20th century, it covered the entertainment industry, such as circuses, fairs, and burlesque shows, and also created a mail service for travelling entertainers. "Billboard" began focusing more on the music industry as the jukebox, phonograph, and radio became commonplace. Many topics it covered were spun-off into different magazines, including "Amusement Business" in 1961 to cover outdoor entertainment, so that it could focus on music. After Donaldson died in 1925, "Billboard" was passed down to his children and Hennegan's children, until it was sold to private investors in 1985, and has since been owned by various parties.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: The first issue of "Billboard" was published in Cincinnati, Ohio, by William Donaldson and James Hennegan on November 1, 1894. Initially, it covered the advertising and bill posting industry, and was known as Billboard Advertising. At the time, billboards, posters, and paper advertisements placed in public spaces were the primary means of advertising. Donaldson handled editorial and advertising, while Hennegan, who owned Hennegan Printing Co., managed magazine production. The first issues were just eight pages long. The paper had columns like "The Bill Room Gossip" and "The Indefatigable and Tireless Industry of the Bill Poster". A department for agricultural fairs was established in 1896. The "Billboard Advertising" publication was renamed The Billboard in 1897.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: After a brief departure over editorial differences, Donaldson purchased Hennegan's interest in the business in 1900 for $500 (equal to $ today) to save it from bankruptcy. On May 5, Donaldson changed it from a monthly to a weekly paper with a greater emphasis on breaking news. He improved editorial quality and opened new offices in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London, and Paris, and also re-focused the magazine on outdoor entertainment such as fairs, carnivals, circuses, vaudeville, and burlesque shows. A section devoted to circuses was introduced in 1900, followed by more prominent coverage of outdoor events in 1901. "Billboard" also covered topics including regulation, a lack of professionalism, economics, and new shows. It had a "stage gossip" column covering the private lives of entertainers, a "tent show" section covering traveling shows, and a sub-section called "Freaks to order". According to "The Seattle Times", Donaldson also published news articles "attacking censorship, praising productions exhibiting 'good taste' and fighting yellow journalism".


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: As railroads became more developed, "Billboard" set up a mail forwarding system for traveling entertainers. The location of an entertainer was tracked in the paper's Routes Ahead column, then "Billboard" would receive mail on the star's behalf and publish a notice in its "Letter-Box" column that it had mail for them. This service was first introduced in 1904, and became one of "Billboard"s largest sources of profit and celebrity connections. By 1914, there were 42,000 people using the service. It was also used as the official address of traveling entertainers for draft letters during World War I. In the 1960s, when it was discontinued, "Billboard" was still processing 1,500 letters per week.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: In 1920, Donaldson made a controversial move by hiring African-American journalist James Albert Jackson to write a weekly column devoted to African-American performers. According to "The Business of Culture: Strategic Perspectives on Entertainment and Media", the column identified discrimination against black performers and helped validate their careers. Jackson was the first black critic at a national magazine with a predominantly white audience. According to his grandson, Donaldson also established a policy against identifying performers by their race. Donaldson died in 1925.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: "Billboard"s editorial changed focus as technology in recording and playback developed, covering "marvels of modern technology" such as the phonograph and wireless radios. It began covering coin-operated entertainment machines in 1899, and created a dedicated section for them called "Amusement Machines" in March 1932. "Billboard" began covering the motion picture industry in 1907, but ended up focusing on music due to competition from "Variety". It created a radio broadcasting station in the 1920s.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: The jukebox industry continued to grow through the Great Depression, and was advertised heavily in "Billboard", which led to even more editorial focus on music. The proliferation of the phonograph and radio also contributed to its growing music emphasis. "Billboard" published the first music hit parade on January 4, 1936, and introduced a "Record Buying Guide" in January 1939. In 1940, it introduced "Chart Line", which tracked the best-selling records, and was followed by a chart for jukebox records in 1944 called Music Box Machine charts. By the 1940s, "Billboard" was more of a music industry specialist publication. The number of charts it published grew after World War II, due to a growing variety of music interests and genres. It had eight charts by 1987, covering different genres and formats, and 28 charts by 1994.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: By 1943, "Billboard" had about 100 employees. The magazine's offices moved to Brighton, Ohio, in 1946, then to New York City in 1948. A five-column tabloid format was adopted in November 1950 and coated paper was first used in "Billboard"s print issues in January 1963, allowing for photojournalism. Sometime prior to September 1960, the name had been changed to The Billboard.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: "Billboard Publications Inc." acquired a monthly trade magazine for candy and cigarette machine vendors called "Vend", and, in the 1950s, acquired an advertising trade publication called "Tide". By 1969, Billboard Publications Inc. owned eleven trade and consumer publications, a publisher called Watson-Guptill Publications, a set of self-study cassette tapes, and four television franchises. It also acquired "Photo Weekly" that year.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: Over time, subjects that "Billboard" still covered outside of music were spun-off into separate publications: "Funspot" magazine was created in 1957 to cover amusement parks, and "Amusement Business" was created in 1961 to cover outdoor entertainment. In January 1961, "Billboard" was renamed as Billboard Music Week to emphasize its newly exclusive interest in music. Two years later, it was renamed to just "Billboard". According to "The New Business Journalism", by 1984, Billboard Publications was a "prosperous" conglomerate of trade magazines, and "Billboard" had become the "undisputed leader" in music industry news. In the early 1990s, "Billboard" introduced "Billboard Airplay Monitors", a publication for disc jockeys and music programmers. By the end of the 1990s, "Billboard" dubbed itself the "bible" of the recording industry.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: "Billboard" struggled after its founder William Donaldson died in 1925, and, within three years, was once again heading towards bankruptcy. Donaldson's son-in-law Roger Littleford took over in 1928 and "nursed the publication back to health". His sons Bill and Roger became co-publishers in 1946 and inherited the publication in the late 1970s after Roger Littleford's death. They sold it to private investors in 1985 for an estimated $40 million. The investors cut costs and acquired a trade publication for the Broadway theatre industry called "Backstage".


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: In 1987, "Billboard" was sold again to Affiliated Publications for $100 million. Billboard Publications Inc. became a subsidiary of Affiliated Publications called BPI Communications. As BPI Communications, it acquired "The Hollywood Reporter", "Adweek", "Marketing Week", and "Mediaweek", and also purchased Broadcast Data Systems, a high-tech firm for tracking music airtime. Private investors from Boston Ventures and BPI executives re-purchased a two-thirds interest in Billboard Publications for $100 million, and more acquisitions followed. In 1993, it created a division known as Billboard Music Group for music-related publications.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: In 1994, Billboard Publications was sold to Dutch media conglomerate Verenigde Nederlandse Uitgeverijen (VNU) for $220 million. VNU acquired the Clio Awards in advertising and the National Research Group in 1997, as well as "Editor & Publisher" in 1999. In July 2000, it paid $650 million for the publisher Miller Freeman. BPI was combined with other entities in VNU in 2000 to form Bill Communications Inc. By the time CEO Gerald Hobbs retired in 2003, VNU had grown substantially larger, but had a large amount of debt from the acquisitions. An attempted $7 billion acquisition of IMS Health in 2005 prompted protests from shareholders that halted the deal; it eventually agreed to an $11 billion takeover bid from investors in 2006.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: VNU then changed its name to Nielsen in 2007, the namesake of a company it acquired for $2.5 billion in 1999. New CEO Robert Krakoff divested some of the previously owned publications, restructured the organization, and planned some acquisitions before dying suddenly in 2007; he was subsequently replaced by Greg Farrar.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: Nielsen owned "Billboard" until 2009, when it was one of eight publications sold to e5 Global Media Holdings. e5 was formed by investment firms Pluribus Capital Management and Guggenheim Partners for the purpose of the acquisition. The following year, the new parent company was renamed as Prometheus Global Media. Three years later, Guggenheim Partners acquired Pluribus' share of Prometheus and became the sole owner of "Billboard".


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: In December 2015, Guggenheim Digital Media spun out several media brands, including "Billboard", to its own executive Todd Boehly. The assets operate under the Hollywood Reporter-Billboard Media Group, a unit of the holding company Eldridge Industries.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: Timothy White was appointed editor-in-chief in 1991, a position he held until his unexpected death in 2002. White wrote a weekly column promoting music with "artistic merit", while criticizing music with violent or misogynistic themes, and also reworked the publication's music charts. Rather than relying on data from music retailers, new charts used data from store checkout scanners obtained from Nielsen SoundScan. White also wrote in-depth profiles on musicians, but was replaced by Keith Girard, who was subsequently fired in May 2004. He and a female employee filed a $29 million lawsuit alleging that "Billboard" fired them unfairly with an intent to damage their reputations. The lawsuit claimed that they experienced sexual harassment, a hostile work environment, and a financially motivated lack of editorial integrity. Email evidence suggested that human resources were given special instructions to watch minority employees. The case was settled out-of-court in 2006 for a non-disclosed sum.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: In the 2000s, economic decline in the music industry dramatically reduced readership and advertising from "Billboard"s traditional audience. Circulation declined from 40,000 in circulation in the 1990s to less than 17,000 by 2014. The publication's staff and ownership were also undergoing frequent changes.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: In 2004, Tamara Conniff became the first female and youngest-ever executive editor at "Billboard", and led its first major redesign since the 1960s, by Daniel Stark and Stark Design. During her tenure, "Billboard" newsstand sales jumped 10%, ad pages climbed 22%, and conference registrations rose 76%. In 2005, "Billboard" expanded its editorial outside the music industry into other areas of digital and mobile entertainment. In 2006, after leading Billboard's radio publication, former ABC News and CNN journalist, Scott McKenzie, was named editorial director across all Billboard properties. Conniff launched the Billboard Women in Music event in 2007.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: Bill Werde was named editorial director in 2008, and was followed by Janice Min in January 2014, also responsible for editorial content at "The Hollywood Reporter". The magazine has since been making changes to make it more of a general interest music news source as opposed to solely an industry trade, branching out into covering more celebrity, fashion, and gossip. Min hired Tony Gervino as the publication's editor, which was unusual, in that he did not have a background in the music industry. Tony Gervino was appointed editor-in-chief in April 2014. An item on NPR covered a leaked version of "Billboard"s annual survey, which it said had more gossip and focused on less professional topics than prior surveys. For example, it polled readers on a lawsuit that singer Kesha filed against her producer alleging sexual abuse.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: Gervino was let go in May 2016. A note from Min to the editorial staff indicated that Senior Vice President of Digital Content Mike Bruno would serve as the head of editorial moving forward.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: On June 15, 2016, BillboardPH, the first "Billboard" chart company in Southeast Asia, mainly in the Philippines, was announced. On September 12, 2016, "Billboard" expanded into China by launching "Billboard China" in a partnership with Vision Music Ltd.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: On September 23, 2020, it was announced that Penske Media Corporation would assume operations of the MRC Media & Info publications under a joint venture with MRC known as PMRC. The joint venture includes management of "Billboard".


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: "Billboard" publishes a news website and weekly trade magazine that cover music, video and home entertainment. Most of the articles are written by staff writers, while some are written by industry experts. It covers news, gossip, opinion, and music reviews, but its "most enduring and influential creation" is the "Billboard" charts. The charts track music sales, radio airtime and other data about the most popular songs and albums. The "Billboard" Hot 100 chart of the top-selling songs was introduced in 1958. Since then, the "Billboard" 200, which tracks the top-selling albums, has become more popular as an indicator of commercial success. "Billboard" has also published books in collaboration with Watson-Guptill and a radio and television series called American Top 40, based on Billboard charts. A daily "Billboard Bulletin" was introduced in February 1997 and "Billboard" hosts about 20 industry events each year.


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: "Billboard" is considered one of the most reputable sources of music industry news. The website includes the Billboard Charts, news separated by music genre, videos, and a separate website. It also compiles lists, hosts a fashion website called Pret-a-Reporter, and publishes eight different newsletters. The print magazine's regular sections include:


title: Billboard (magazine)

text: "Billboard" is known for publishing several annual listicles on its website, in recognition of the most influential executives, artists and companies in the music industry, such as the following:


title: City

text: A city is a human settlement of notable size. It can be defined as a permanent and densely settled place with administratively defined boundaries whose members work primarily on non-agricultural tasks. Cities generally have extensive systems for housing, transportation, sanitation, utilities, land use, production of goods, and communication. Their density facilitates interaction between people, government organisations and businesses, sometimes benefiting different parties in the process, such as improving efficiency of goods and service distribution.


title: City

text: Historically, city-dwellers have been a small proportion of humanity overall, but following two centuries of unprecedented and rapid urbanization, more than half of the world population now lives in cities, which has had profound consequences for global sustainability. Present-day cities usually form the core of larger metropolitan areas and urban areas—creating numerous commuters traveling towards city centres for employment, entertainment, and education. However, in a world of intensifying globalization, all cities are to varying degrees also connected globally beyond these regions. This increased influence means that cities also have significant influences on global issues, such as sustainable development, global warming, and global health. Because of these major influences on global issues, the international community has prioritized investment in sustainable cities through Sustainable Development Goal 11. Due to the efficiency of transportation and the smaller land consumption, dense cities hold the potential to have a smaller ecological footprint per inhabitant than more sparsely populated areas. Therefore, compact cities are often referred to as a crucial element of fighting climate change. However, this concentration can also have significant negative consequences, such as forming urban heat islands, concentrating pollution, and stressing water supplies and other resources.


title: City

text: Other important traits of cities besides population include the capital status and relative continued occupation of the city. For example, country capitals such as Beijing, London, Mexico City, Moscow, Nairobi, New Delhi, Paris, Rome, Athens, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo, Manila, and Washington, D.C. reflect the identity and apex of their respective nations. Some historic capitals, such as Kyoto and Xi'an, maintain their reflection of cultural identity even without modern capital status. Religious holy sites offer another example of capital status within a religion, Jerusalem, Mecca, Varanasi, Ayodhya, Haridwar and Prayagraj each hold significance.


title: City

text: A city can be distinguished from other human settlements by its relatively great size, but also by its functions and its special symbolic status, which may be conferred by a central authority. The term can also refer either to the physical streets and buildings of the city or to the collection of people who dwell there, and can be used in a general sense to mean urban rather than rural territory.


title: City

text: National censuses use a variety of definitions – invoking factors such as population, population density, number of dwellings, economic function, and infrastructure – to classify populations as urban. Typical working definitions for small-city populations start at around 100,000 people. Common population definitions for an urban area (city or town) range between 1,500 and 50,000 people, with most U.S. states using a minimum between 1,500 and 5,000 inhabitants. Some jurisdictions set no such minima. In the United Kingdom, city status is awarded by the Crown and then remains permanently. (Historically, the qualifying factor was the presence of a cathedral, resulting in some very small cities such as Wells, with a population 12,000 and St Davids, with a population of 1,841 .) According to the "functional definition", a city is not distinguished by size alone, but also by the role it plays within a larger political context. Cities serve as administrative, commercial, religious, and cultural hubs for their larger surrounding areas.


title: City

text: The presence of a literate elite is sometimes included in the definition. A typical city has professional administrators, regulations, and some form of taxation (food and other necessities or means to trade for them) to support the government workers. (This arrangement contrasts with the more typically horizontal relationships in a tribe or village accomplishing common goals through informal agreements between neighbors, or through leadership of a chief.) The governments may be based on heredity, religion, military power, work systems such as canal-building, food-distribution, land-ownership, agriculture, commerce, manufacturing, finance, or a combination of these. Societies that live in cities are often called civilizations.


title: City

text: The "degree of urbanization" is a modern metric to help define what comprises a city: "a population of at least 50,000 inhabitants in contiguous dense grid cells (>1,500 inhabitants per square kilometer)". This metric was "devised over years by the European Commission, OECD, World Bank and others, and endorsed in March [2021] by the United Nations... largely for the purpose of international statistical comparison".


title: City

text: The word "city" and the related "civilization" come from the Latin root "civitas", originally meaning 'citizenship' or 'community member' and eventually coming to correspond with "urbs", meaning 'city' in a more physical sense. The Roman "civitas" was closely linked with the Greek "polis"—another common root appearing in English words such as "metropolis".


title: City

text: In toponymic terminology, names of individual cities and towns are called "astionyms" (from Ancient Greek ἄστυ 'city or town' and ὄνομα 'name').


title: City

text: Urban geography deals both with cities in their larger context and with their internal structure. Cities are estimated to cover about 3% of the land surface of the Earth.


title: City

text: Town siting has varied through history according to natural, technological, economic, and military contexts. Access to water has long been a major factor in city placement and growth, and despite exceptions enabled by the advent of rail transport in the nineteenth century, through the present most of the world's urban population lives near the coast or on a river.


title: City

text: Urban areas as a rule cannot produce their own food and therefore must develop some relationship with a hinterland which sustains them. Only in special cases such as mining towns which play a vital role in long-distance trade, are cities disconnected from the countryside which feeds them. Thus, centrality within a productive region influences siting, as economic forces would in theory favor the creation of market places in optimal mutually reachable locations.


title: City

text: The vast majority of cities have a central area containing buildings with special economic, political, and religious significance. Archaeologists refer to this area by the Greek term temenos or if fortified as a citadel. These spaces historically reflect and amplify the city's centrality and importance to its wider sphere of influence. Today cities have a city center or downtown, sometimes coincident with a central business district.


title: City

text: Cities typically have public spaces where anyone can go. These include privately owned spaces open to the public as well as forms of public land such as public domain and the commons. Western philosophy since the time of the Greek agora has considered physical public space as the substrate of the symbolic public sphere. Public art adorns (or disfigures) public spaces. Parks and other natural sites within cities provide residents with relief from the hardness and regularity of typical built environments.


title: City

text: Urban structure generally follows one or more basic patterns: geomorphic, radial, concentric, rectilinear, and curvilinear. Physical environment generally constrains the form in which a city is built. If located on a mountainside, urban structure may rely on terraces and winding roads. It may be adapted to its means of subsistence (e.g. agriculture or fishing). And it may be set up for optimal defense given the surrounding landscape. Beyond these "geomorphic" features, cities can develop internal patterns, due to natural growth or to city planning.


title: City

text: In a radial structure, main roads converge on a central point. This form could evolve from successive growth over a long time, with concentric traces of town walls and citadels marking older city boundaries. In more recent history, such forms were supplemented by ring roads moving traffic around the outskirts of a town. Dutch cities such as Amsterdam and Haarlem are structured as a central square surrounded by concentric canals marking every expansion. In cities such as Moscow, this pattern is still clearly visible.


title: City

text: A system of rectilinear city streets and land plots, known as the grid plan, has been used for millennia in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The Indus Valley civilisation built Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa and other cities on a grid pattern, using ancient principles described by Kautilya, and aligned with the compass points. The ancient Greek city of Priene exemplifies a grid plan with specialized districts used across the Hellenistic Mediterranean.


title: City

text: Urban-type settlement extends far beyond the traditional boundaries of the city proper in a form of development sometimes described critically as urban sprawl. Decentralization and dispersal of city functions (commercial, industrial, residential, cultural, political) has transformed the very meaning of the term and has challenged geographers seeking to classify territories according to an urban-rural binary.


title: City

text: Metropolitan areas include suburbs and exurbs organized around the needs of commuters, and sometimes edge cities characterized by a degree of economic and political independence. (In the US these are grouped into metropolitan statistical areas for purposes of demography and marketing.) Some cities are now part of a continuous urban landscape called urban agglomeration, conurbation, or megalopolis (exemplified by the BosWash corridor of the Northeastern United States.)


title: City

text: The cities of Jericho, Aleppo, Faiyum, Yerevan, Athens, Damascus and Argos are among those laying claim to the longest continual inhabitation.


title: City

text: Cities, characterized by population density, symbolic function, and urban planning, have existed for thousands of years. In the conventional view, civilization and the city both followed from the development of agriculture, which enabled production of surplus food, and thus a social division of labour (with concomitant social stratification) and trade. Early cities often featured granaries, sometimes within a temple. A minority viewpoint considers that cities may have arisen without agriculture, due to alternative means of subsistence (fishing), to use as communal seasonal shelters, to their value as bases for defensive and offensive military organization, or to their inherent economic function. Cities played a crucial role in the establishment of political power over an area, and ancient leaders such as Alexander the Great founded and created them with zeal.


title: City

text: Jericho and Çatalhöyük, dated to the eighth millennium BC, are among the earliest proto-cities known to archaeologists. However, the Mesopotamian city of Uruk from the mid fourth millennium BC (ancient Iraq) is considered by some to be the first true City, with its name attributed to the Uruk period.


title: City

text: In the fourth and third millennium BC, complex civilizations flourished in the river valleys of Mesopotamia, India, China, and Egypt. Excavations in these areas have found the ruins of cities geared variously towards trade, politics, or religion. Some had large, dense populations, but others carried out urban activities in the realms of politics or religion without having large associated populations.


title: City

text: Among the early Old World cities, Mohenjo-daro of the Indus Valley civilization in present-day Pakistan, existing from about 2600 BC, was one of the largest, with a population of 50,000 or more and a sophisticated sanitation system. China's planned cities were constructed according to sacred principles to act as celestial microcosms.


title: City

text: The Ancient Egyptian cities known physically by archaeologists are not extensive. They include (known by their Arab names) El Lahun, a workers' town associated with the pyramid of Senusret II, and the religious city Amarna built by Akhenaten and abandoned. These sites appear planned in a highly regimented and stratified fashion, with a minimalistic grid of rooms for the workers and increasingly more elaborate housing available for higher classes.


title: City

text: In Mesopotamia, the civilization of Sumer, followed by Assyria and Babylon, gave rise to numerous cities, governed by kings and fostering multiple languages written in cuneiform. The Phoenician trading empire, flourishing around the turn of the first millennium BC, encompassed numerous cities extending from Tyre, Cydon, and Byblos to Carthage and Cádiz.


title: City

text: In the following centuries, independent city-states of Greece, especially Athens, developed the "polis", an association of male landowning citizens who collectively constituted the city. The agora, meaning "gathering place" or "assembly", was the center of athletic, artistic, spiritual and political life of the polis. Rome was the first city that surpassed one million inhabitants. Under the authority of its empire, Rome transformed and founded many cities ("coloniae"), and with them brought its principles of urban architecture, design, and society.


title: City

text: In the ancient Americas, early urban traditions developed in the Andes and Mesoamerica. In the Andes, the first urban centers developed in the Norte Chico civilization, Chavin and Moche cultures, followed by major cities in the Huari, Chimu and Inca cultures. The Norte Chico civilization included as many as 30 major population centers in what is now the Norte Chico region of north-central coastal Peru. It is the oldest known civilization in the Americas, flourishing between the 30th and 18th centuries BC. Mesoamerica saw the rise of early urbanism in several cultural regions, beginning with the Olmec and spreading to the Preclassic Maya, the Zapotec of Oaxaca, and Teotihuacan in central Mexico. Later cultures such as the Aztec, Andean civilization, Mayan, Mississippians, and Pueblo peoples drew on these earlier urban traditions. Many of their ancient cities continue to be inhabited, including major metropolitan cities such as Mexico City, in the same location as Tenochtitlan; while ancient continuously inhabited Pueblos are near modern urban areas in New Mexico, such as Acoma Pueblo near the Albuquerque metropolitan area and Taos Pueblo near Taos; while others like Lima are located nearby ancient Peruvian sites such as Pachacamac.


title: City

text: Jenné-Jeno, located in present-day Mali and dating to the third century BC, lacked monumental architecture and a distinctive elite social class—but nevertheless had specialized production and relations with a hinterland. Pre-Arabic trade contacts probably existed between Jenné-Jeno and North Africa. Other early urban centers in sub-Saharan Africa, dated to around 500 AD, include Awdaghust, Kumbi-Saleh the ancient capital of Ghana, and Maranda a center located on a trade route between Egypt and Gao.


title: City

text: In the remnants of the Roman Empire, cities of late antiquity gained independence but soon lost population and importance. The locus of power in the West shifted to Constantinople and to the ascendant Islamic civilization with its major cities Baghdad, Cairo, and Córdoba. From the 9th through the end of the 12th century, Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, was the largest and wealthiest city in Europe, with a population approaching 1 million. The Ottoman Empire gradually gained control over many cities in the Mediterranean area, including Constantinople in 1453.


title: City

text: In the Holy Roman Empire, beginning in the 12th century, free imperial cities such as Nuremberg, Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Basel, Zurich, Nijmegen became a privileged elite among towns having won self-governance from their local lord or having been granted self-governanace by the emperor and being placed under his immediate protection. By 1480, these cities, as far as still part of the empire, became part of the Imperial Estates governing the empire with the emperor through the Imperial Diet.


title: City

text: By the 13th and 14th centuries, some cities become powerful states, taking surrounding areas under their control or establishing extensive maritime empires. In Italy medieval communes developed into city-states including the Republic of Venice and the Republic of Genoa. In Northern Europe, cities including Lübeck and Bruges formed the Hanseatic League for collective defense and commerce. Their power was later challenged and eclipsed by the Dutch commercial cities of Ghent, Ypres, and Amsterdam. Similar phenomena existed elsewhere, as in the case of Sakai, which enjoyed a considerable autonomy in late medieval Japan.


title: City

text: In the first millennium AD, the Khmer capital of Angkor in Cambodia grew into the most extensive preindustrial settlement in the world by area, covering over 1,000 km and possibly supporting up to one million people.


title: City

text: In the West, nation-states became the dominant unit of political organization following the Peace of Westphalia in the seventeenth century. Western Europe's larger capitals (London and Paris) benefited from the growth of commerce following the emergence of an Atlantic trade. However, most towns remained small.


title: City

text: During the Spanish colonization of the Americas the old Roman city concept was extensively used. Cities were founded in the middle of the newly conquered territories, and were bound to several laws regarding administration, finances and urbanism.


title: City

text: The growth of modern industry from the late 18th century onward led to massive urbanization and the rise of new great cities, first in Europe and then in other regions, as new opportunities brought huge numbers of migrants from rural communities into urban areas. England led the way as London became the capital of a world empire and cities across the country grew in locations strategic for manufacturing. In the United States from 1860 to 1910, the introduction of railroads reduced transportation costs, and large manufacturing centers began to emerge, fueling migration from rural to city areas.


title: City

text: Industrialized cities became deadly places to live, due to health problems resulting from overcrowding, occupational hazards of industry, contaminated water and air, poor sanitation, and communicable diseases such as typhoid and cholera. Factories and slums emerged as regular features of the urban landscape.


title: City

text: In the second half of the twentieth century, deindustrialization (or "economic restructuring") in the West led to poverty, homelessness, and urban decay in formerly prosperous cities. America's "Steel Belt" became a "Rust Belt" and cities such as Detroit, Michigan, and Gary, Indiana began to shrink, contrary to the global trend of massive urban expansion. Such cities have shifted with varying success into the service economy and public-private partnerships, with concomitant gentrification, uneven revitalization efforts, and selective cultural development. Under the Great Leap Forward and subsequent five-year plans continuing today, China has undergone concomitant urbanization and industrialization and to become the world's leading manufacturer.


title: City

text: Amidst these economic changes, high technology and instantaneous telecommunication enable select cities to become centers of the knowledge economy. A new smart city paradigm, supported by institutions such as the RAND Corporation and IBM, is bringing computerized surveillance, data analysis, and governance to bear on cities and city-dwellers. Some companies are building brand new masterplanned cities from scratch on greenfield sites.


title: City

text: Urbanization is the process of migration from rural into urban areas, driven by various political, economic, and cultural factors. Until the 18th century, an equilibrium existed between the rural agricultural population and towns featuring markets and small-scale manufacturing. With the agricultural and industrial revolutions urban population began its unprecedented growth, both through migration and through demographic expansion. In England the proportion of the population living in cities jumped from 17% in 1801 to 72% in 1891. In 1900, 15% of the world population lived in cities. The cultural appeal of cities also plays a role in attracting residents.


title: City

text: Urbanization rapidly spread across the Europe and the Americas and since the 1950s has taken hold in Asia and Africa as well. The Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, reported in 2014 that for the first time more than half of the world population lives in cities. Latin America is the most urban continent, with four-fifths of its population living in cities, including one fifth of the population said to live in shantytowns (favelas, poblaciones callampas, etc.). Batam, Indonesia, Mogadishu, Somalia, Xiamen, China and Niamey, Niger, are considered among the world's fastest-growing cities, with annual growth rates of 5–8%. In general, the more developed countries of the "Global North" remain more urbanized than the less developed countries of the "Global South"—but the difference continues to shrink because urbanization is happening faster in the latter group. Asia is home to by far the greatest absolute number of city-dwellers: over two billion and counting. The UN predicts an additional 2.5 billion citydwellers (and 300 million fewer countrydwellers) worldwide by 2050, with 90% of urban population expansion occurring in Asia and Africa.


title: City

text: Megacities, cities with population in the multi-millions, have proliferated into the dozens, arising especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Economic globalization fuels the growth of these cities, as new torrents of foreign capital arrange for rapid industrialization, as well as relocation of major businesses from Europe and North America, attracting immigrants from near and far. A deep gulf divides rich and poor in these cities, with usually contain a super-wealthy elite living in gated communities and large masses of people living in substandard housing with inadequate infrastructure and otherwise poor conditions.


title: City

text: Cities around the world have expanded physically as they grow in population, with increases in their surface extent, with the creation of high-rise buildings for residential and commercial use, and with development underground.


title: City

text: Urbanization can create rapid demand for water resources management, as formerly good sources of freshwater become overused and polluted, and the volume of sewage begins to exceed manageable levels.


title: City

text: Local government of cities takes different forms including prominently the municipality (especially in England, in the United States, in India, and in other British colonies; legally, the municipal corporation; "municipio" in Spain and in Portugal, and, along with "municipalidad", in most former parts of the Spanish and Portuguese empires) and the "commune" (in France and in Chile; or "comune" in Italy).


title: City

text: The chief official of the city has the title of mayor. Whatever their true degree of political authority, the mayor typically acts as the figurehead or personification of their city.


title: City

text: City governments have authority to make laws governing activity within cities, while its jurisdiction is generally considered subordinate (in ascending order) to state/provincial, national, and perhaps international law. This hierarchy of law is not enforced rigidly in practice—for example in conflicts between municipal regulations and national principles such as constitutional rights and property rights. Legal conflicts and issues arise more frequently in cities than elsewhere due to the bare fact of their greater density. Modern city governments thoroughly regulate everyday life in many dimensions, including public and personal health, transport, burial, resource use and extraction, recreation, and the nature and use of buildings. Technologies, techniques, and laws governing these areas—developed in cities—have become ubiquitous in many areas.


title: City

text: Cities typically provide municipal services such as education, through school systems; policing, through police departments; and firefighting, through fire departments; as well as the city's basic infrastructure. These are provided more or less routinely, in a more or less equal fashion. Responsibility for administration usually falls on the city government, though some services may be operated by a higher level of government, while others may be privately run. Armies may assume responsibility for policing cities in states of domestic turmoil such as America's King assassination riots of 1968.


title: City

text: The traditional basis for municipal finance is local property tax levied on real estate within the city. Local government can also collect revenue for services, or by leasing land that it owns. However, financing municipal services, as well as urban renewal and other development projects, is a perennial problem, which cities address through appeals to higher governments, arrangements with the private sector, and techniques such as privatization (selling services into the private sector), corporatization (formation of quasi-private municipally-owned corporations), and financialization (packaging city assets into tradable financial public contracts and other related rights. This situation has become acute in deindustrialized cities and in cases where businesses and wealthier citizens have moved outside of city limits and therefore beyond the reach of taxation. Cities in search of ready cash increasingly resort to the municipal bond, essentially a loan with interest and a repayment date. City governments have also begun to use tax increment financing, in which a development project is financed by loans based on future tax revenues which it is expected to yield. Under these circumstances, creditors and consequently city governments place a high importance on city credit ratings.


title: City

text: Governance includes government but refers to a wider domain of social control functions implemented by many actors including non-governmental organizations. The impact of globalization and the role of multinational corporations in local governments worldwide, has led to a shift in perspective on urban governance, away from the "urban regime theory" in which a coalition of local interests functionally govern, toward a theory of outside economic control, widely associated in academics with the philosophy of neoliberalism. In the neoliberal model of governance, public utilities are privatized, industry is deregulated, and corporations gain the status of governing actors—as indicated by the power they wield in public-private partnerships and over business improvement districts, and in the expectation of self-regulation through corporate social responsibility. The biggest investors and real estate developers act as the city's de facto urban planners.


title: City

text: The related concept of good governance places more emphasis on the state, with the purpose of assessing urban governments for their suitability for development assistance. The concepts of governance and good governance are especially invoked in the emergent megacities, where international organizations consider existing governments inadequate for their large populations.


title: City

text: Urban planning, the application of forethought to city design, involves optimizing land use, transportation, utilities, and other basic systems, in order to achieve certain objectives. Urban planners and scholars have proposed overlapping theories as ideals for how plans should be formed. Planning tools, beyond the original design of the city itself, include public capital investment in infrastructure and land-use controls such as zoning. The continuous process of comprehensive planning involves identifying general objectives as well as collecting data to evaluate progress and inform future decisions.


title: City

text: Government is legally the final authority on planning but in practice the process involves both public and private elements. The legal principle of eminent domain is used by government to divest citizens of their property in cases where its use is required for a project. Planning often involves tradeoffs—decisions in which some stand to gain and some to lose—and thus is closely connected to the prevailing political situation.


title: City

text: The history of urban planning dates to some of the earliest known cities, especially in the Indus Valley and Mesoamerican civilizations, which built their cities on grids and apparently zoned different areas for different purposes. The effects of planning, ubiquitous in today's world, can be seen most clearly in the layout of planned communities, fully designed prior to construction, often with consideration for interlocking physical, economic, and cultural systems.


title: City

text: Urban society is typically stratified. Spatially, cities are formally or informally segregated along ethnic, economic and racial lines. People living relatively close together may live, work, and play in separate areas, and associate with different people, forming ethnic or lifestyle enclaves or, in areas of concentrated poverty, ghettoes. While in the US and elsewhere poverty became associated with the inner city, in France it has become associated with the "banlieues", areas of urban development which surround the city proper. Meanwhile, across Europe and North America, the racially white majority is empirically the most segregated group. Suburbs in the West, and, increasingly, gated communities and other forms of "privatopia" around the world, allow local elites to self-segregate into secure and exclusive neighborhoods.


title: City

text: Landless urban workers, contrasted with peasants and known as the proletariat, form a growing stratum of society in the age of urbanization. In Marxist doctrine, the proletariat will inevitably revolt against the bourgeoisie as their ranks swell with disenfranchised and disaffected people lacking all stake in the status quo. The global urban proletariat of today, however, generally lacks the status as factory workers which in the nineteenth century provided access to the means of production.


title: City

text: Historically, cities rely on rural areas for intensive farming to yield surplus crops, in exchange for which they provide money, political administration, manufactured goods, and culture. Urban economics tends to analyze larger agglomerations, stretching beyond city limits, in order to reach a more complete understanding of the local labor market.


title: City

text: As hubs of trade cities have long been home to retail commerce and consumption through the interface of shopping. In the 20th century, department stores using new techniques of advertising, public relations, decoration, and design, transformed urban shopping areas into fantasy worlds encouraging self-expression and escape through consumerism.


title: City

text: In general, the density of cities expedites commerce and facilitates knowledge spillovers, helping people and firms exchange information and generate new ideas. A thicker labor market allows for better skill matching between firms and individuals. Population density enables also sharing of common infrastructure and production facilities, however in very dense cities, increased crowding and waiting times may lead to some negative effects.


title: City

text: Although manufacturing fueled the growth of cities, many now rely on a tertiary or service economy. The services in question range from tourism, hospitality, entertainment, housekeeping, and prostitution to grey-collar work in law, finance, and administration.


title: City

text: According to a scientific model of cities by professor Geoffrey West, with the doubling of a city's size, salaries per capita will generally increase by 15%.


title: City

text: Cities are typically hubs for education and the arts, supporting universities, museums, temples, and other cultural institutions. They feature impressive displays of architecture ranging from small to enormous and ornate to brutal; skyscrapers, providing thousands of offices or homes within a small footprint, and visible from miles away, have become iconic urban features. Cultural elites tend to live in cities, bound together by shared cultural capital, and themselves playing some role in governance. By virtue of their status as centers of culture and literacy, cities can be described as the locus of civilization, human history, and social change.


title: City

text: Density makes for effective mass communication and transmission of news, through heralds, printed proclamations, newspapers, and digital media. These communication networks, though still using cities as hubs, penetrate extensively into all populated areas. In the age of rapid communication and transportation, commentators have described urban culture as nearly ubiquitous or as no longer meaningful.


title: City

text: Today, a city's promotion of its cultural activities dovetails with place branding and city marketing, public diplomacy techniques used to inform development strategy; to attract businesses, investors, residents, and tourists; and to create a shared identity and sense of place within the metropolitan area. Physical inscriptions, plaques, and monuments on display physically transmit a historical context for urban places. Some cities, such as Jerusalem, Mecca, and Rome have indelible religious status and for hundreds of years have attracted pilgrims. Patriotic tourists visit Agra to see the Taj Mahal, or New York City to visit the World Trade Center. Elvis lovers visit Memphis to pay their respects at Graceland. Place brands (which include place satisfaction and place loyalty) have great economic value (comparable to the value of commodity brands) because of their influence on the decision-making process of people thinking about doing business in—"purchasing" (the brand of)—a city.


title: City

text: Bread and circuses among other forms of cultural appeal, attract and entertain the masses. Sports also play a major role in city branding and local identity formation. Cities go to considerable lengths in competing to host the Olympic Games, which bring global attention and tourism.


title: City

text: Cities play a crucial strategic role in warfare due to their economic, demographic, symbolic, and political centrality. For the same reasons, they are targets in asymmetric warfare. Many cities throughout history were founded under military auspices, a great many have incorporated fortifications, and military principles continue to influence urban design. Indeed, war may have served as the social rationale and economic basis for the very earliest cities.


title: City

text: Powers engaged in geopolitical conflict have established fortified settlements as part of military strategies, as in the case of garrison towns, America's Strategic Hamlet Program during the Vietnam War, and Israeli settlements in Palestine. While occupying the Philippines, the US Army ordered local people concentrated into cities and towns, in order to isolate committed insurgents and battle freely against them in the countryside.


title: City

text: During World War II, national governments on occasion declared certain cities open, effectively surrendering them to an advancing enemy in order to avoid damage and bloodshed. Urban warfare proved decisive, however, in the Battle of Stalingrad, where Soviet forces repulsed German occupiers, with extreme casualties and destruction. In an era of low-intensity conflict and rapid urbanization, cities have become sites of long-term conflict waged both by foreign occupiers and by local governments against insurgency. Such warfare, known as counterinsurgency, involves techniques of surveillance and psychological warfare as well as close combat, functionally extends modern urban crime prevention, which already uses concepts such as defensible space.


title: City

text: Although capture is the more common objective, warfare has in some cases spelt complete destruction for a city. Mesopotamian tablets and ruins attest to such destruction, as does the Latin motto "Carthago delenda est". Since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and throughout the Cold War, nuclear strategists continued to contemplate the use of "countervalue" targeting: crippling an enemy by annihilating its valuable cities, rather than aiming primarily at its military forces.


title: City

text: Urban infrastructure involves various physical networks and spaces necessary for transportation, water use, energy, recreation, and public functions. Infrastructure carries a high initial cost in fixed capital (pipes, wires, plants, vehicles, etc.) but lower marginal costs and thus positive economies of scale. Because of the higher barriers to entry, these networks have been classified as natural monopolies, meaning that economic logic favors control of each network by a single organization, public or private.


title: City

text: Infrastructure in general (if not every infrastructure project) plays a vital role in a city's capacity for economic activity and expansion, underpinning the very survival of the city's inhabitants, as well as technological, commercial, industrial, and social activities. Structurally, many infrastructure systems take the form of networks with redundant links and multiple pathways, so that the system as a whole continue to operate even if parts of it fail. The particulars of a city's infrastructure systems have historical path dependence because new development must build from what exists already.


title: City

text: Megaprojects such as the construction of airports, power plants, and railways require large upfront investments and thus tend to require funding from national government or the private sector. Privatization may also extend to all levels of infrastructure construction and maintenance.


title: City

text: Urban infrastructure ideally serves all residents equally but in practice may prove uneven—with, in some cities, clear first-class and second-class alternatives.


title: City

text: Public utilities (literally, useful things with general availability) include basic and essential infrastructure networks, chiefly concerned with the supply of water, electricity, and telecommunications capability to the populace.


title: City

text: Sanitation, necessary for good health in crowded conditions, requires water supply and waste management as well as individual hygiene. Urban water systems include principally a water supply network and a network (sewerage system) for sewage and stormwater. Historically, either local governments or private companies have administered urban water supply, with a tendency toward government water supply in the 20th century and a tendency toward private operation at the turn of the twenty-first. The market for private water services is dominated by two French companies, Veolia Water (formerly Vivendi) and Engie (formerly Suez), said to hold 70% of all water contracts worldwide.


title: City

text: Modern urban life relies heavily on the energy transmitted through electricity for the operation of electric machines (from household appliances to industrial machines to now-ubiquitous electronic systems used in communications, business, and government) and for traffic lights, street lights, and indoor lighting. Cities rely to a lesser extent on hydrocarbon fuels such as gasoline and natural gas for transportation, heating, and cooking. Telecommunications infrastructure such as telephone lines and coaxial cables also traverse cities, forming dense networks for mass and point-to-point communications.


title: City

text: Because cities rely on specialization and an economic system based on wage labour, their inhabitants must have the ability to regularly travel between home, work, commerce, and entertainment. Citydwellers travel foot or by wheel on roads and walkways, or use special rapid transit systems based on underground, overground, and elevated rail. Cities also rely on long-distance transportation (truck, rail, and airplane) for economic connections with other cities and rural areas.


title: City

text: Historically, city streets were the domain of horses and their riders and pedestrians, who only sometimes had sidewalks and special walking areas reserved for them. In the West, bicycles or (velocipedes), efficient human-powered machines for short- and medium-distance travel, enjoyed a period of popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century before the rise of automobiles. Soon after, they gained a more lasting foothold in Asian and African cities under European influence. In Western cities, industrializing, expanding, and electrifying public transit systems and especially streetcars enabled urban expansion as new residential neighborhoods sprung up along transit lines and workers rode to and from work downtown.


title: City

text: Since the mid-twentieth century, cities have relied heavily on motor vehicle transportation, with major implications for their layout, environment, and aesthetics. (This transformation occurred most dramatically in the US—where corporate and governmental policies favored automobile transport systems—and to a lesser extent in Europe.) The rise of personal cars accompanied the expansion of urban economic areas into much larger metropolises, subsequently creating ubiquitous traffic issues with accompanying construction of new highways, wider streets, and alternative walkways for pedestrians. However, severe traffic jams still occur regularly in cities around the world, as private car ownership and urbanization continue to increase, overwhelming existing urban street networks.


title: City

text: The urban bus system, the world's most common form of public transport, uses a network of scheduled routes to move people through the city, alongside cars, on the roads. Economic function itself also became more decentralized as concentration became impractical and employers relocated to more car-friendly locations (including edge cities). Some cities have introduced bus rapid transit systems which include exclusive bus lanes and other methods for prioritizing bus traffic over private cars. Many big American cities still operate conventional public transit by rail, as exemplified by the ever-popular New York City Subway system. Rapid transit is widely used in Europe and has increased in Latin America and Asia.


title: City

text: Walking and cycling ("non-motorized transport") enjoy increasing favor (more pedestrian zones and bike lanes) in American and Asian urban transportation planning, under the influence of such trends as the Healthy Cities movement, the drive for sustainable development, and the idea of a carfree city. Techniques such as road space rationing and road use charges have been introduced to limit urban car traffic.


title: City

text: Housing of residents presents one of the major challenges every city must face. Adequate housing entails not only physical shelters but also the physical systems necessary to sustain life and economic activity.


title: City

text: Home ownership represents status and a modicum of economic security, compared to renting which may consume much of the income of low-wage urban workers. Homelessness, or lack of housing, is a challenge currently faced by millions of people in countries rich and poor.


title: City

text: Urban ecosystems, influenced as they are by the density of human buildings and activities, differ considerably from those of their rural surroundings. Anthropogenic buildings and waste, as well as cultivation in gardens, create physical and chemical environments which have no equivalents in wilderness, in some cases enabling exceptional biodiversity. They provide homes not only for immigrant humans but also for immigrant plants, bringing about interactions between species which never previously encountered each other. They introduce frequent disturbances (construction, walking) to plant and animal habitats, creating opportunities for recolonization and thus favoring young ecosystems with r-selected species dominant. On the whole, urban ecosystems are less complex and productive than others, due to the diminished absolute amount of biological interactions.


title: City

text: Typical urban fauna include insects (especially ants), rodents (mice, rats), and birds, as well as cats and dogs (domesticated and feral). Large predators are scarce.


title: City

text: Cities generate considerable ecological footprints, locally and at longer distances, due to concentrated populations and technological activities. From one perspective, cities are not ecologically sustainable due to their resource needs. From another, proper management may be able to ameliorate a city's ill effects. Air pollution arises from various forms of combustion, including fireplaces, wood or coal-burning stoves, other heating systems, and internal combustion engines. Industrialized cities, and today third-world megacities, are notorious for veils of smog (industrial haze) which envelop them, posing a chronic threat to the health of their millions of inhabitants. Urban soil contains higher concentrations of heavy metals (especially lead, copper, and nickel) and has lower pH than soil in comparable wilderness.


title: City

text: Modern cities are known for creating their own microclimates, due to concrete, asphalt, and other artificial surfaces, which heat up in sunlight and channel rainwater into underground ducts. The temperature in New York City exceeds nearby rural temperatures by an average of 2–3 °C and at times 5–10 °C differences have been recorded. This effect varies nonlinearly with population changes (independently of the city's physical size). Aerial particulates increase rainfall by 5–10%. Thus, urban areas experience unique climates, with earlier flowering and later leaf dropping than in nearby countries.


title: City

text: Poor and working-class people face disproportionate exposure to environmental risks (known as environmental racism when intersecting also with racial segregation). For example, within the urban microclimate, less-vegetated poor neighborhoods bear more of the heat (but have fewer means of coping with it).


title: City

text: One of the main methods of improving the urban ecology is including in the cities more urban green space: parks, gardens, lawns, and trees. These areas improve the health, the well-being of the human, animal, and plant populations of the cities. Well-maintained urban trees can provide many social, ecological, and physical benefits to the residents of the city.


title: City

text: A study published in Nature's Scientific Reports journal in 2019 found that people who spent at least two hours per week in nature were 23 percent more likely to be satisfied with their life and were 59 percent more likely to be in good health than those who had zero exposure. The study used data from almost 20,000 people in the UK. Benefits increased for up to 300 minutes of exposure. The benefits applied to men and women of all ages, as well as across different ethnicities, socioeconomic status, and even those with long-term illnesses and disabilities. People who did not get at least two hours – even if they surpassed an hour per week – did not get the benefits. The study is the latest addition to a compelling body of evidence for the health benefits of nature. Many doctors already give nature prescriptions to their patients. The study didn't count time spent in a person's own yard or garden as time in nature, but the majority of nature visits in the study took place within two miles from home. "Even visiting local urban green spaces seems to be a good thing," Dr. White said in a press release. "Two hours a week is hopefully a realistic target for many people, especially given that it can be spread over an entire week to get the benefit."


title: City

text: As the world becomes more closely linked through economics, politics, technology, and culture (a process called globalization), cities have come to play a leading role in transnational affairs, exceeding the limitations of international relations conducted by national governments. This phenomenon, resurgent today, can be traced back to the Silk Road, Phoenicia, and the Greek city-states, through the Hanseatic League and other alliances of cities. Today the information economy based on high-speed internet infrastructure enables instantaneous telecommunication around the world, effectively eliminating the distance between cities for the purposes of the international markets and other high-level elements of the world economy, as well as personal communications and mass media.


title: City

text: A global city, also known as a world city, is a prominent centre of trade, banking, finance, innovation, and markets. Saskia Sassen used the term "global city" in her 1991 work, "The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo" to refer to a city's power, status, and cosmopolitanism, rather than to its size. Following this view of cities, it is possible to rank the world's cities hierarchically. Global cities form the capstone of the global hierarchy, exerting command and control through their economic and political influence. Global cities may have reached their status due to early transition to post-industrialism or through inertia which has enabled them to maintain their dominance from the industrial era. This type of ranking exemplifies an emerging discourse in which cities, considered variations on the same ideal type, "must" compete with each other globally to achieve prosperity.


title: City

text: Critics of the notion point to the different realms of power and interchange. The term "global city" is heavily influenced by economic factors and, thus, may not account for places that are otherwise significant. Paul James, for example argues that the term is "reductive and skewed" in its focus on financial systems.


title: City

text: Multinational corporations and banks make their headquarters in global cities and conduct much of their business within this context. American firms dominate the international markets for law and engineering and maintain branches in the biggest foreign global cities.


title: City

text: Global cities feature concentrations of extremely wealthy and extremely poor people. Their economies are lubricated by their capacity (limited by the national government's immigration policy, which functionally defines the supply side of the labor market) to recruit low- and high-skilled immigrant workers from poorer areas. More and more cities today draw on this globally available labor force.


title: City

text: Cities increasingly participate in world political activities independently of their enclosing nation-states. Early examples of this phenomenon are the sister city relationship and the promotion of multi-level governance within the European Union as a technique for European integration. Cities including Hamburg, Prague, Amsterdam, The Hague, and City of London maintain their own embassies to the European Union at Brussels.


title: City

text: New urban dwellers are increasingly transmigrants, keeping one foot each (through telecommunications if not travel) in their old and their new homes.


title: City

text: Cities participate in global governance by various means including membership in global networks which transmit norms and regulations. At the general, global level, United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) is a significant umbrella organization for cities; regionally and nationally, Eurocities, Asian Network of Major Cities 21, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities the National League of Cities, and the United States Conference of Mayors play similar roles. UCLG took responsibility for creating Agenda 21 for culture, a program for cultural policies promoting sustainable development, and has organized various conferences and reports for its furtherance.


title: City

text: Networks have become especially prevalent in the arena of environmentalism and specifically climate change following the adoption of Agenda 21. Environmental city networks include the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, World Association of Major Metropolises ("Metropolis"), the United Nations Global Compact Cities Programme, the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance (CNCA), the Covenant of Mayors and the Compact of Mayors, ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, and the Transition Towns network.


title: City

text: Cities with world political status as meeting places for advocacy groups, non-governmental organizations, lobbyists, educational institutions, intelligence agencies, military contractors, information technology firms, and other groups with a stake in world policymaking. They are consequently also sites for symbolic protest.


title: City

text: The United Nations System has been involved in a series of events and declarations dealing with the development of cities during this period of rapid urbanization.


title: City

text: UN-Habitat coordinates the UN urban agenda, working with the UN Environmental Programme, the UN Development Programme, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank.


title: City

text: The World Bank, a United Nations specialized agency, has been a primary force in promoting the Habitat conferences, and since the first Habitat conference has used their declarations as a framework for issuing loans for urban infrastructure. The bank's structural adjustment programs contributed to urbanization in the Third World by creating incentives to move to cities. The World Bank and UN-Habitat in 1999 jointly established the Cities Alliance (based at the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C.) to guide policymaking, knowledge sharing, and grant distribution around the issue of urban poverty. (UN-Habitat plays an advisory role in evaluating the quality of a locality's governance.) The Bank's policies have tended to focus on bolstering real estate markets through credit and technical assistance.


title: City

text: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO has increasingly focused on cities as key sites for influencing cultural governance. It has developed various city networks including the International Coalition of Cities against Racism and the Creative Cities Network. UNESCO's capacity to select World Heritage Sites gives the organization significant influence over cultural capital, tourism, and historic preservation funding.


title: City

text: Cities figure prominently in traditional Western culture, appearing in the Bible in both evil and holy forms, symbolized by Babylon and Jerusalem. Cain and Nimrod are the first city builders in the Book of Genesis. In Sumerian mythology Gilgamesh built the walls of Uruk.


title: City

text: Cities can be perceived in terms of extremes or opposites: at once liberating and oppressive, wealthy and poor, organized and chaotic. The name anti-urbanism refers to various types of ideological opposition to cities, whether because of their culture or their political relationship with the country. Such opposition may result from identification of cities with oppression and the ruling elite. This and other political ideologies strongly influence narratives and themes in discourse about cities. In turn, cities symbolize their home societies.


title: City

text: Writers, painters, and filmmakers have produced innumerable works of art concerning the urban experience. Classical and medieval literature includes a genre of "descriptiones" which treat of city features and history. Modern authors such as Charles Dickens and James Joyce are famous for evocative descriptions of their home cities. Fritz Lang conceived the idea for his influential 1927 film "Metropolis" while visiting Times Square and marveling at the nighttime neon lighting. Other early cinematic representations of cities in the twentieth century generally depicted them as technologically efficient spaces with smoothly functioning systems of automobile transport. By the 1960s, however, traffic congestion began to appear in such films as "The Fast Lady" (1962) and "Playtime" (1967).


title: City

text: Literature, film, and other forms of popular culture have supplied visions of future cities both utopian and dystopian. The prospect of expanding, communicating, and increasingly interdependent world cities has given rise to images such as Nylonkong (New York, London, Hong Kong) and visions of a single world-encompassing ecumenopolis.


title: Cantonese

text: Cantonese () is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding area in Southeastern China. It is the traditional prestige variety of the Yue Chinese dialect group, which has over 80 million native speakers. While the term "Cantonese" specifically refers to the prestige variety, it is often used to refer to the entire Yue subgroup of Chinese, including related but largely mutually unintelligible languages and dialects such as Taishanese.


title: Cantonese

text: Cantonese is viewed as a vital and inseparable part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swaths of Southeastern China, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as in overseas communities. In mainland China, it is the "lingua franca" of the province of Guangdong (being the majority language of the Pearl River Delta) and neighbouring areas such as Guangxi. It is also the dominant and co-official language of Hong Kong and Macau. Cantonese is also widely spoken amongst Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia (most notably in Vietnam and Malaysia, as well as in Singapore and Cambodia to a lesser extent) and throughout the Western world.