Continuing Redfield and Singer’s concern for the cultural role of cities within their societies, Paul Wheatley in The Pivot of the Four Quarters (1971) has taken the earliest form of urban culture to be a ceremonial or cult centre that organized and dominated a surrounding rural region through its sacred practices and authority.

Many historians and geographers have explained away the existence of cities in simple economic terms: Steady commerce lured peasants, villagers and other country folk to urban areas in droves, forming massive agglomerations of convenience and proximity.

Paul Wheatley, an England-born geographer who honed his map-reading skills as a navigator on World War II bombers, challenged that notion, arguing that religious and cultural factors may have been just as important as economics in turning cities into cornerstones of modern society.