# PTE RL #8: Historical Perspectives on Ideal City...

Re-tell Lecture #8 - Level 2 - Feeds Speaking + Listening

> You will hear a lecture. When it ends, you have 10 seconds to prepare, then 40 seconds to retell the lecture in your own words.

## Explanation

The lecture discusses how early theorists like Plato and Leonardo da Vinci envisioned ideal city populations, specifically suggesting a limit of around 25,000 to 30,000 inhabitants to ensure manageability and self-sufficiency.

## Hints

- Focus on the speaker's comparison between modern megacities and the ideal city sizes proposed by historical figures.
- Note the specific population figures mentioned for the ideal city and the reasoning behind these limits, such as ease of governance and food supply.

## Transcript

We have briefly looked at some of the problems involved in running a bigish city, like, say, Melbourne, keeping the road and rail systems running, policing, providing food and housing, and so on. In another lecture, I'm going to deal with what we must now call the megalopolis, cities with populations of 10 million or more. However, first I want to go back in history to when the population of cities could be numbered in the thousands rather than the millions. One of the earliest theorists of the city was, of course, Plato, who created an ideal city in his text, The Republic. The population of this city would be around 25 to 30,000 at most. Oddly enough, the same figures were chosen by Leonardo da Vinci for his ideal cities. Now, of these 25 to 30,000 inhabitants, only about 5,000 would be citizens. A reason for this might be that it is the largest number that could be addressed publicly at one time and by one person, and makes a voting system much easier to manage. Also, perhaps the numbers are kept deliberately low because a large population would be harder to control, or because, in practical terms, fewer inhabitants are easier to feed from local supplies without having to depend on outside sources.

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