Europe has a long history of urbanisation, with the first cities dating back some 8,000 years. While the formal means of decision-making (if any) used to shape the form of these settlements are lost in the mists of time, it is highly likely that from the earliest times some form of control was enacted on where and how people could build. Inadvertent controls would certainly have dictated much of what was built: building technologies would have constrained building heights; the choice of building materials would have been determined by what was available locally; building form and spacing by climatic factors; the positioning of buildings by where routes and flows of people had already been established; and factors such as privacy distances, building orientation, ornamentation, and so forth might have been dictated by culture and tradition.