These apparently contradictory statements are both true. Cities and towns everywhere share some basic characteristics, some common patterns that can be recognized whether we are exploring classical Athens, medieval Paris, or modern San Francisco. On the other hand, each urban place is distinctive in some respects, whether in location, what it does for a living, what kind of people live there, the style and size of buildings, the infrastructure of roads, or even the network of institutions and organizations that help make a concentration of people and activities into a community. One of the aims of using urban history as a tool for understanding a local community is that urban history tends to act as a sort of middle ground between the Social Sciences approach which concentrates on common patterns, on the univeral and the general, and on the other hand, the interests of local history, in which the particular and the unique are emphasized. Urban places are created.
Urban places create themselves.
The middle ground of urban history is also useful for the study of this seeming paradox. Both statements can be valid for the same place, depending on the scale of your explanation. Cities and towns are created, to a certain extent, by outside forces acting within the contexts we have already discussed the international, the national, and the regional. Some of these outside forces are listed below. They provide opportunites and difficulties which still have to be acted on by individuals and groups at the local level.