Urban history is a field of history that examines the historical nature of
cities and towns, and the process of urbanization. The approach is often
multidisciplinary, crossing boundaries into fields like social history,
architectural history, urban sociology, urban geography, business history, and
archaeology. Urbanization and industrialization were popular themes for 20th-
century historians, often tied to an implicit model of modernization, or the
transformation of rural traditional societies.
The history of urbanization focuses on the processes of by which existing
populations concentrate in urban localities over time, and on the social,
political, cultural and economic contexts of cities.