What Makes a City?

I looked back to my class notes from a couple of weeks ago and I found that I have written down a question that was posed during the class: What makes a city? I remember that one of the key point mentioned in class was that a city do not hold a single role, rather it has multiple functions that made it self-sustaining. One of my peer gave the example of Detroit where the city used to be the center of the automobile industry. Once that was taken away due to alternative places to develop the automobile industry, Detroit was soon on the decline.

I never had the opportunity to visit Detroit and to experience first-hand on the current status of Detroit. However, I had the opportunity to visit other towns in Australia and Malaysia that was once a significant area of growth in the country but suffered massive decline due to the fall of the industry in which the town is known for.

Bendigo in Victoria was once a significant boomtown in Australia due to the gold rush era in the mid to late 19^th Century. However, the population soon decline as the gold mining operations were reduced. However, Bendigo was able to recover from the growth slump by using the rich historical culture and turning it into a tourist attraction. In addition, it has ventured from a mining town to a commercial precinct that relies on commerce and education sector on top of tourism as the main industries.

Another town that suffered a growth slump similar to Bendigo and Detroit is one I visited in Pahang, Malaysia called Sungai Lembing. It was one of the major producer of tin and the town benefited from having the largest and deepest tin mine in the world during its heyday. It was once one of the richest town in Malaysia. The fortune of the town change significantly once the price of tin dropped in the mid 1980s and Sungai Lembing was on a sharp decline ever since. Today, it is a quiet and forgotten town despite locating just 42km away from Kuantan, the capital town in Pahang.

The growth of the city or town depends heavily on the fate of the major industries it is known for. The more diversified the city is the lower the chance of the city suffering from growth decline if one of the industry were to collapse. On the other hand, if the city or town relies heavily on a single major industry to support the growth as in the case in Sungai Lembing, chances are that the fate of the town will decline as soon as the industry were to collapse.