This chapter considers a number of facets of urbanism in the seventeenth century that was a difficult period for Russia. It addresses two issues, namely the symbolic and religious role of towns and their physical morphology. The appearance of many new towns in Russia during the course of the seventeenth century is largely explained by the process of frontier expansion and colonisation of new territories. The fragmented character of urban society which characterised sixteenth century towns continued to be a feature of the seventeenth. Moscow remained the centre of Russian commercial life in this period. An important feature of Moscow's economy in the seventeenth century was the extensive 'in house' production for the benefit of the court, government, army and other central agencies. Religion was central to the life of Russian towns in the seventeenth century. Something of its significance for the individual town emerges in the 1627 cadaster for Vologda, as discussed by Mertsalov.

This chapter focuses on Russian towns as commercial foci and on their multifunctional character. The sixteenth century was thus a dynamic period for the founding of new towns, and especially the latter half. Towns with any degree of commercial life generally had a population of 'taxpaying' or posad people. Many town dwellers supported themselves to greater or lesser degree by engaging in agriculture and various kinds of primary production. By clustering around the towns commerce and manufacture were able to benefit from the military protection, access to important officials and geographical nodality available in urban centres. Crafts and manufactures were a key feature of the posad of many towns, as well as of many of the 'white' suburbs. The character of commerce and trade in Russia's regions and their towns is known in part. Referring to Europe's regional economies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Kristof Glamann has written that 'it is isolation, not interaction, that leaps to the eye'.

Iran shares with so many others a rapid sequence of social changes and hence has to cope with the passing of traditional society, and the creation of a new society. In view of the ecological conditions existing in much of the country, the nomadic-pastoral way of life is an admirable human response over extensive areas, and that there can be in these parts no other equally satisfactory economic activity, and associated tribal social organization. With the introduction of a costly irrigation scheme, pastoralism must give way to a regular and continuous form of land utilization such as agriculture or intensive animal husbandry. A significant element of the social scene in Iran today is the urban group. New urban dwellers just arrived from the countryside provide many heterogeneous elements for urban society, and it is often reported that a certain uneasiness, symptomatic of difficulties of adjustment, exists among the newcomers.