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Metropolis: A history of cities - humankind’s greatest invention.
From the Sunday Times bestselling author, a dazzling, globe-spanning history of humankind's greatest invention: the city.
'Brilliant...enchanting' Evening Standard 'Exhilarating' New York Times
The story of the city is the story of civilisation. From Uruk and Babylon to Baghdad and Venice, and on to London, New York, Shanghai and Lagos, Ben Wilson takes us through millennia on a thrilling global tour of the key urban centres of history.
Rich with individual characters, scenes and snapshots of daily life, Metropolis is at once the story of these extraordinary places and of the vital role they have played in making us who we are.
'Panoramic...entertaining and rich in wondrous detail' Tom Holland
'A towering achievement... Reading this book is like visiting an exhilarating city for the first time' Wall Street Journal
'Brilliant...enchanting' Evening Standard 'Exhilarating' New York Times
The story of the city is the story of civilisation. From Uruk and Babylon to Baghdad and Venice, and on to London, New York, Shanghai and Lagos, Ben Wilson takes us through millennia on a thrilling global tour of the key urban centres of history.
Rich with individual characters, scenes and snapshots of daily life, Metropolis is at once the story of these extraordinary places and of the vital role they have played in making us who we are.
'Panoramic...entertaining and rich in wondrous detail' Tom Holland
'A towering achievement... Reading this book is like visiting an exhilarating city for the first time' Wall Street Journal
438 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 4, 2020
760 people are currently reading
8574 people want to read
About the author
Ben Wilson
10 books82 followersBen Wilson was born in 1980 and educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a first class degree and an MPhil in history. He is the author of three books and was named in 2005 as one of Waterstone's 25 Authors of the Future. He has consulted on scripts for various TV history progammes, and has himself appeared on TV and on national radio in the UK, Ireland and the USA. He has given lectures at Tate Britain, Cambridge and Zagreb and at book festivals in the UK including the Edinburgh Festival. He has written for the Spectator, Literary Review, Independent on Sunday, Scotsman, Men's Health, Guardian Online and GQ.
He is the author of five previous books, including What Price Liberty?, for which he received the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times bestseller Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy.
He is the author of five previous books, including What Price Liberty?, for which he received the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times bestseller Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 358 reviews
August 13, 2020
This is undoubtedly a book which is wearing its heart on its sleeve: '... the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention' - but then I'm a born and bred Londoner so I'm there with Wilson! It's just worth bearing in mind that if you're not a city person, the endless enthusiasm for urban life might not suit.
I'd situate this book as a crossover that is not really academic, even though it is certainly well-read and wide-ranging. Wilson has an enthusiastic way of writing and while the book is packed with fascinating facts and anecdotes (I have nearly 200 notes on my Kindle!), it's always lively, entertaining as well as informative.
In some ways, it's almost a mini history of the world through cities: so we range from Uruk as mentioned in The Epic of Gilgamesh from 4000-1900 BCE through to the quasi-futuristic 'smart city' of Lagos today, taking in a panorama en route.
Wilson has organised his material with great verve: so we travel through the cities in chronological order but each chapter also has a theme e.g. sex and the city in the chapter on Babylon, cosmopolitanism and city politics in the chapter on Athens and Alexandria, street food and immigration in the chapter on Baghdad. He has also mastered the fine art of organised digression: so what starts as an excavation of the public baths in ancient Rome morphs into an exploration of leisure facilities and public spaces in later cities from the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in London to lidos and swimming pools.
There are some overriding themes and key-points: that cities are clusters of knowledge, innovation and reinvention; that migration and multiculturalism have always been part of city life and contribute to their vitality and robustness; that the history of cities embraces world history and that cities have both supported and been supported by global moves towards exploration, trade, finance, and the transmission of ideas. Wilson restrains himself from making the obvious Brexit connection when discussing the Hanseatic League and other international economic unions/trading blocs but they're there subliminally.
My only tiny criticism is that this is so overwhelmingly positive about cities that it almost erases some of the negatives: for example, Wilson almost airbrushes out the fact that amongst all the positives of the Athenian city-based democratic experiment, women were completely excluded as they were never given citizen status. I'd also suggest that some of the periodisation is a bit old-fashioned now - academic historians don't use the term 'Dark Ages' now, generally because it turns out they were actually pretty vibrant and not 'dark' at all!
Still, those are nit-picks in what is, overall, a wonderfully immersive, enthusiastic and wide-ranging history.
Many thanks to Vintage for an ARC via NetGalley
I'd situate this book as a crossover that is not really academic, even though it is certainly well-read and wide-ranging. Wilson has an enthusiastic way of writing and while the book is packed with fascinating facts and anecdotes (I have nearly 200 notes on my Kindle!), it's always lively, entertaining as well as informative.
In some ways, it's almost a mini history of the world through cities: so we range from Uruk as mentioned in The Epic of Gilgamesh from 4000-1900 BCE through to the quasi-futuristic 'smart city' of Lagos today, taking in a panorama en route.
Wilson has organised his material with great verve: so we travel through the cities in chronological order but each chapter also has a theme e.g. sex and the city in the chapter on Babylon, cosmopolitanism and city politics in the chapter on Athens and Alexandria, street food and immigration in the chapter on Baghdad. He has also mastered the fine art of organised digression: so what starts as an excavation of the public baths in ancient Rome morphs into an exploration of leisure facilities and public spaces in later cities from the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in London to lidos and swimming pools.
There are some overriding themes and key-points: that cities are clusters of knowledge, innovation and reinvention; that migration and multiculturalism have always been part of city life and contribute to their vitality and robustness; that the history of cities embraces world history and that cities have both supported and been supported by global moves towards exploration, trade, finance, and the transmission of ideas. Wilson restrains himself from making the obvious Brexit connection when discussing the Hanseatic League and other international economic unions/trading blocs but they're there subliminally.
My only tiny criticism is that this is so overwhelmingly positive about cities that it almost erases some of the negatives: for example, Wilson almost airbrushes out the fact that amongst all the positives of the Athenian city-based democratic experiment, women were completely excluded as they were never given citizen status. I'd also suggest that some of the periodisation is a bit old-fashioned now - academic historians don't use the term 'Dark Ages' now, generally because it turns out they were actually pretty vibrant and not 'dark' at all!
Still, those are nit-picks in what is, overall, a wonderfully immersive, enthusiastic and wide-ranging history.
Many thanks to Vintage for an ARC via NetGalley
October 18, 2021
Until 1800, no more than 3 to 5 percent of the world's population lived in urban areas. By 2050 this will be two thirds. Compact urban areas lead to creativity and new start-ups, as any latte drinking hipster will tell you. But the city also provides less pleasant things, which sometimes take epidemic forms such as crime and drug use.
This makes the city "man's greatest invention" - it is a history of man (or woman). Not of thinkers, princes or politicians, but of mankind itself. Cities are being formed by people, for people.
Starting with Uruk, the first city in Mesopotamia (4000-1900 BC) and ending with Lagos in Nigeria at the beginning of the 21st century, we are confronted with a whole range of - sometimes unexpected - topics: prostitution in Babylon, bathing culture in Rome and street food in Baghdad.
A 500-page history of the city: it could easily be boring. But by jumping in time, and by telling lots of facts and anecdotes, Wilson keeps the momentum going. It provides a very pleasant reading experience. We find ourselves in sixth century Baghdad, where we accompany a rich lady while shopping for exotic goods to sixteenth-century London where Sephardic Jewish refugees are frying fish.
“Metropolis” is a bold undertaking that makes for gripping reading, and uses a original approach - I really liked it.
Read in Dutch
This makes the city "man's greatest invention" - it is a history of man (or woman). Not of thinkers, princes or politicians, but of mankind itself. Cities are being formed by people, for people.
Starting with Uruk, the first city in Mesopotamia (4000-1900 BC) and ending with Lagos in Nigeria at the beginning of the 21st century, we are confronted with a whole range of - sometimes unexpected - topics: prostitution in Babylon, bathing culture in Rome and street food in Baghdad.
A 500-page history of the city: it could easily be boring. But by jumping in time, and by telling lots of facts and anecdotes, Wilson keeps the momentum going. It provides a very pleasant reading experience. We find ourselves in sixth century Baghdad, where we accompany a rich lady while shopping for exotic goods to sixteenth-century London where Sephardic Jewish refugees are frying fish.
“Metropolis” is a bold undertaking that makes for gripping reading, and uses a original approach - I really liked it.
Read in Dutch
December 29, 2020
This is the first book I have ever read that I simultaneously decided not to finish but also felt compelled to review. This isn't because it's bad. The merits of Wilson's text outweigh the negatives, but this would have worked better as a series of short essays extolling various qualities of urban life and their universal applicability throughout history than as a single, stand alone book intended to be read straight through. Because the New York Times review that compelled me to seek out this book went to great lengths to wax eloquent over its merits, and the majority of reviews here also seem singularly devoted to praising "Metropolis" at the expense of ignoring its flaws, I will focus on why this book is two-hundred pages too long.
One of Wilson's biggest flaws is that the text is simply repetitive. Chapters one through four cover nearly 120 pages but have so many overlapping themes that his editor should have urged him to condense the first three chapters to one. Instead of languishing over the emergence of social stratification in Babylon and the speculative, contrasting egalitarian society of Harappa for twenty pages, this overall theme could have been managed in short order and condensed with the laborious comparisons between Athenian democracy and Alexandrian authoritarianism in the following chapter. And for all Wilson's extensive discourse on public baths in Rome and recreational waterways in chapter four, the discussion of public baths begins with Harappa in chapter two and carries through chapter three as well. There is simply no reason for this if you are devoting an entire chapter to bathing. We are given a respite from this theme when we shift to Baghdad where we are given over to another laborious treatment of how interstate commerce is the underlying framework for gastroculture--an underlying framework responsible for the bath houses of chapter four, democracy and authority in chapter three, social stratification and egalitarianism in chapter two, and even the emergence and flourishing of the city itself in chapter one. Again, it is simply unforgiveable to spend so much time reiterating the same idea over and over and over again. One would be forgiven if they assumed Wilson was being paid by the word.
Perhaps Wilson's most meritorious threads woven into the narrative is the nearly universal experience of a city as an organism. Even the planned metropolises of Alexandria and Baghdad end up surrounded with sprawling, chaotic neighborhoods. Utopia does not come easy, and every city reaches its critical mass where the pre-planning gives way to the impulses of the city's residences to spread. It is deeply ironic, then, that Wilson does not meaningfully look at some of the most extensively planned cities on earth beyond brief mentions three-hundred pages in. In discussing the destruction of Warsaw in WWII, Wilson finally mentions the Soviet Union and drops a deliciously scintillating fact--that the Soviet urban population experienced a 30 million increase between 1917 and 1939, but he does not give us a chapter on the civil engineering miracles of Soviet and PRC planners. He does not entertain the history of Soviet demographics that show the overall population of the Soviet Union doubling in a single generation despite the purges and losing more people in WWII than any other country on earth. Instead, he refers to Soviet architecture as monstrosities in a passing dismissal of the immense sacrifice the Soviet people made to halt Hitler's war of aggression. If Wilson wanted to entertain his overwhelmingly centrist-liberal worldview while still acknowledging the real novelties of Soviet urbanization, he could have discussed Pripyat and Chernobyl in the same breath as simultaneously a perfect 20th Century city and an abysmal Soviet failure. Instead, he largely forgets anything outside of Christian Europe and the Islamic world exists.
Keeping in mind that this is a book framed for the Western historical tradition, snaking its way from Uruk to London, New York, and LA, and then pivoting to Lagos for its grand finale, the lack of extensive looks at places like Chang'e and Edo can be forgiven (thirty pages are devoted to "Cities of the World" to be fair). A book written by a westerner for a western audience should not shoehorn inclusion unless it is meaningful; however, Wilson and his editor become careless when discussing places as far afield as Tokyo in the context of key cities of the Western tradition. An example in keeping with Wilson's 120 pages of bathing, barely half a page is devoted to the extensive development and maturation of Japanese bath culture. Yet this treatment is lodged securely within the context of bath culture in the Roman world and Mediterranean Basin of Classical Antiquity and gives the appearance that the Japanese bath house would not have existed were it not for the Romans. Yet in the same chapter Wilson goes out of his way to make it explicitly clear that seeking out clean, running water is a universal impulse, at least among working class shmoes of Industrial London and New York. The same impulse is not ascribed to the Japanese, however.
I would not recommend this book except for someone who already likes Ben Wilson and wants to expand their library. For me, this book does not make me want to read any of his other titles.
One of Wilson's biggest flaws is that the text is simply repetitive. Chapters one through four cover nearly 120 pages but have so many overlapping themes that his editor should have urged him to condense the first three chapters to one. Instead of languishing over the emergence of social stratification in Babylon and the speculative, contrasting egalitarian society of Harappa for twenty pages, this overall theme could have been managed in short order and condensed with the laborious comparisons between Athenian democracy and Alexandrian authoritarianism in the following chapter. And for all Wilson's extensive discourse on public baths in Rome and recreational waterways in chapter four, the discussion of public baths begins with Harappa in chapter two and carries through chapter three as well. There is simply no reason for this if you are devoting an entire chapter to bathing. We are given a respite from this theme when we shift to Baghdad where we are given over to another laborious treatment of how interstate commerce is the underlying framework for gastroculture--an underlying framework responsible for the bath houses of chapter four, democracy and authority in chapter three, social stratification and egalitarianism in chapter two, and even the emergence and flourishing of the city itself in chapter one. Again, it is simply unforgiveable to spend so much time reiterating the same idea over and over and over again. One would be forgiven if they assumed Wilson was being paid by the word.
Perhaps Wilson's most meritorious threads woven into the narrative is the nearly universal experience of a city as an organism. Even the planned metropolises of Alexandria and Baghdad end up surrounded with sprawling, chaotic neighborhoods. Utopia does not come easy, and every city reaches its critical mass where the pre-planning gives way to the impulses of the city's residences to spread. It is deeply ironic, then, that Wilson does not meaningfully look at some of the most extensively planned cities on earth beyond brief mentions three-hundred pages in. In discussing the destruction of Warsaw in WWII, Wilson finally mentions the Soviet Union and drops a deliciously scintillating fact--that the Soviet urban population experienced a 30 million increase between 1917 and 1939, but he does not give us a chapter on the civil engineering miracles of Soviet and PRC planners. He does not entertain the history of Soviet demographics that show the overall population of the Soviet Union doubling in a single generation despite the purges and losing more people in WWII than any other country on earth. Instead, he refers to Soviet architecture as monstrosities in a passing dismissal of the immense sacrifice the Soviet people made to halt Hitler's war of aggression. If Wilson wanted to entertain his overwhelmingly centrist-liberal worldview while still acknowledging the real novelties of Soviet urbanization, he could have discussed Pripyat and Chernobyl in the same breath as simultaneously a perfect 20th Century city and an abysmal Soviet failure. Instead, he largely forgets anything outside of Christian Europe and the Islamic world exists.
Keeping in mind that this is a book framed for the Western historical tradition, snaking its way from Uruk to London, New York, and LA, and then pivoting to Lagos for its grand finale, the lack of extensive looks at places like Chang'e and Edo can be forgiven (thirty pages are devoted to "Cities of the World" to be fair). A book written by a westerner for a western audience should not shoehorn inclusion unless it is meaningful; however, Wilson and his editor become careless when discussing places as far afield as Tokyo in the context of key cities of the Western tradition. An example in keeping with Wilson's 120 pages of bathing, barely half a page is devoted to the extensive development and maturation of Japanese bath culture. Yet this treatment is lodged securely within the context of bath culture in the Roman world and Mediterranean Basin of Classical Antiquity and gives the appearance that the Japanese bath house would not have existed were it not for the Romans. Yet in the same chapter Wilson goes out of his way to make it explicitly clear that seeking out clean, running water is a universal impulse, at least among working class shmoes of Industrial London and New York. The same impulse is not ascribed to the Japanese, however.
I would not recommend this book except for someone who already likes Ben Wilson and wants to expand their library. For me, this book does not make me want to read any of his other titles.
April 6, 2022
“Най-добрата психологическа защита за градския човек е да не допуска да възприеме позата на “дистанцираност” или “преситеност”. Спасението е именно в пълното потапяне в гледките, звуците, емоциите и усещанията, изпълващи града, който пулсира около нас.”
Не си спомням кога за последно съм чела толкова интересно и добре написано документално четиво и то на тема, която пряко засяга качеството на живот на по-голямата част от населението на нашата планета. Градът – според епохата, географията и конкретните човешки обстоятетелства, може да е индустриално чудовище от библейски порядък, крепост-символ на цяла цивилизация, стерилно убежище за преуспели в неактивна възраст или пищна сцена за кокетството и суетата на живота.
Пътешествието, на което ни отвежда “Метрополис”, е от такъв порядък, че след него никога вече няма да гледаме на познатите ни градове по същия начин, нито на града като концепция и място за живот. Градовете, подбрани от Бен Уилсън от древността до днес, са надраснали конкретната си роля и предназначение, оттам и разглеждането им като символи: на първата градска цивилизация (Урук), пищната сетивност и ориенталска омая (Багдад), търговските монополи (Любек и Амстердам), шеметната индустриализация (Манчестър и Чикаго), културата на общуването, доведено до висша форма (Лондон), Бел епок (Париж), на тоталната разруха и възкръсването за нов живот (Варшава и Токио).
Градът може и да е органично неприсъщ на нашия вид, но парадоксално, той фокусира човешкият стремеж към по-плътна организационна спойка, към общуване, което прераства в творчество и креативност, като лаборатория за идеи и инкубатор на гражданското общество в по-ново време. Книгата поставя на фокус интересни феномени, които обясняват защо например за един жител на Париж е по-лесно да се премести в Мадрид, отколкото в Гренобъл, защо понякога сме готови да платим висока цена в най-буквалния смисъл, за да живеем на места със съмнително качество на живот, но носещи етикета “вълнуващи” и защо самият факт на живеене в даден град не означава непременно, че жителите му притежават градски рефлекси. Нова за мен е и тезата, че градовете могат да са наши неочаквани съюзници в борбата с климатичните промени.
“Метрополис” предлага както кодове за разчитане на добре познати места, така и начини да преоткрием града, в който живеем – особено полезно за “прегрелите” обитатели на градските джунгли.
Като пропуск отчитам липсата на Константинопол/Цариград/Истанбул. Не ми бяха особено интересни и главите за американските градове Ню Йорк и Лос Анджелис заради личните ми пристрастия, но мястото им определено е в тази книга заради типа урбанизация, който символизират. Наистина, единственият недостатък на книгата е, че в някакъв момент свършва, а има още толкова много градове...
“Градът променя самата настройка на мозъка, ето защо урбанизираното население е много по-податливо ��а афективни и тревожни разстройства в сравнение с хората в провинцията.”
“Нищо не действа така пагубно на дружелюбната улица, както появата на автомобилите.”
Не си спомням кога за последно съм чела толкова интересно и добре написано документално четиво и то на тема, която пряко засяга качеството на живот на по-голямата част от населението на нашата планета. Градът – според епохата, географията и конкретните човешки обстоятетелства, може да е индустриално чудовище от библейски порядък, крепост-символ на цяла цивилизация, стерилно убежище за преуспели в неактивна възраст или пищна сцена за кокетството и суетата на живота.
Пътешествието, на което ни отвежда “Метрополис”, е от такъв порядък, че след него никога вече няма да гледаме на познатите ни градове по същия начин, нито на града като концепция и място за живот. Градовете, подбрани от Бен Уилсън от древността до днес, са надраснали конкретната си роля и предназначение, оттам и разглеждането им като символи: на първата градска цивилизация (Урук), пищната сетивност и ориенталска омая (Багдад), търговските монополи (Любек и Амстердам), шеметната индустриализация (Манчестър и Чикаго), културата на общуването, доведено до висша форма (Лондон), Бел епок (Париж), на тоталната разруха и възкръсването за нов живот (Варшава и Токио).
Градът може и да е органично неприсъщ на нашия вид, но парадоксално, той фокусира човешкият стремеж към по-плътна организационна спойка, към общуване, което прераства в творчество и креативност, като лаборатория за идеи и инкубатор на гражданското общество в по-ново време. Книгата поставя на фокус интересни феномени, които обясняват защо например за един жител на Париж е по-лесно да се премести в Мадрид, отколкото в Гренобъл, защо понякога сме готови да платим висока цена в най-буквалния смисъл, за да живеем на места със съмнително качество на живот, но носещи етикета “вълнуващи” и защо самият факт на живеене в даден град не означава непременно, че жителите му притежават градски рефлекси. Нова за мен е и тезата, че градовете могат да са наши неочаквани съюзници в борбата с климатичните промени.
“Метрополис” предлага както кодове за разчитане на добре познати места, така и начини да преоткрием града, в който живеем – особено полезно за “прегрелите” обитатели на градските джунгли.
Като пропуск отчитам липсата на Константинопол/Цариград/Истанбул. Не ми бяха особено интересни и главите за американските градове Ню Йорк и Лос Анджелис заради личните ми пристрастия, но мястото им определено е в тази книга заради типа урбанизация, който символизират. Наистина, единственият недостатък на книгата е, че в някакъв момент свършва, а има още толкова много градове...
“Градът променя самата настройка на мозъка, ето защо урбанизираното население е много по-податливо ��а афективни и тревожни разстройства в сравнение с хората в провинцията.”
“Нищо не действа така пагубно на дружелюбната улица, както появата на автомобилите.”
March 17, 2021
What a hot mess of a book! 7,000 years of urban history, from Uruk to Lagos, presented in a linear fashion (excellent) with frequent detours across wide swaths of time (irritating), to topics that are only marginally relevant to the stated intent of the book (maddening). I learned a lot, but was frustrated by the frequent detours, adn was relieved to finally finish the journey.
August 22, 2020
Having lived in London all my life, I am a definite city dweller, and city lover. The countryside has never appealed and I cannot see myself ever being enticed by a quieter life. However, if you are not a fan of urban living, you may find this a difficult read, as, even when discussing the negative points of living in cities, Wilson sounds secretly enthusiastic. If you do prefer pavements over paths, this will be an intriguing look at how cities function.
We begin at the dawn of city life, in Uruk, in Mesopatamia – now Iraq – in 4000-1900 BC and take a whistle stop tour to modern day Lagos. Along the way, Wilson takes in Babylon, Rome, Baghdad, Lubeck, London, Manchester, Chicago, Paris, New York, Warsaw, Los Angeles, and many other cities. Each city begins with a theme, so Rome centres on Roman Baths, before leading to a discussion of urban swimming pools, lidos and swimming generally. London (1666-1820) starts with the first European coffee shop, then evolves – the threads sprawling like city streets – into debate, news, business and finance, social distinctions and male, urban fashion.
From skyscrapers, through the suburbs, to organised crime, this is a fascinating look at how the city changes people and how they change the city. Ever growing, expanding and changing. From the Industrial Revolution to war, I found this a fascinating read. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.
We begin at the dawn of city life, in Uruk, in Mesopatamia – now Iraq – in 4000-1900 BC and take a whistle stop tour to modern day Lagos. Along the way, Wilson takes in Babylon, Rome, Baghdad, Lubeck, London, Manchester, Chicago, Paris, New York, Warsaw, Los Angeles, and many other cities. Each city begins with a theme, so Rome centres on Roman Baths, before leading to a discussion of urban swimming pools, lidos and swimming generally. London (1666-1820) starts with the first European coffee shop, then evolves – the threads sprawling like city streets – into debate, news, business and finance, social distinctions and male, urban fashion.
From skyscrapers, through the suburbs, to organised crime, this is a fascinating look at how the city changes people and how they change the city. Ever growing, expanding and changing. From the Industrial Revolution to war, I found this a fascinating read. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.
December 18, 2022
Δεν αγαπώ τις πόλεις. Με πνίγουν. Αυτό όμως δεν με εμπόδισε να απολαύσω το εξαιρετικά ενδιαφέρον βιβλίο του Ben Wilson.
Ξεκινώντας απο την Ουρούκ στη Μεσοποταμία το 4000πΧ φτάνει στο Λάγκος του σήμερα, μας ξεναγεί σε πόλεις που έγραψαν την δική τους ιστορία και άλλαξαν την ιστορία του κόσμου.
Μας διηγείται την γέννηση, την καταστροφή και την αναγέννηση πόλεων. Μας μιλάει την ανθεκτικότητα αυτού του πολύπλοκου οργανισμού που λέγεται πόλη.
Τα κεφάλαια για την Βαρσοβία, το Στάλινγκραντ, την Χιροσίμα ήταν συγκλονιστικά.
Έμαθα πολλά πράγματα που δεν γνώριζα, οι πληροφορίες είναι πάρα πολλές. Απο το πως φτιαχτηκε το αποχετευτικό σύστημα στο Σικάγο μέχρι τις πόρνες στους δρόμους της Βαβυλώνας. Απο τους καθετους κήπους της Σιγκαπούρης μέχρι την ιστορία των προαστίων του L.A. Απο τους ουρανοξύστες μέχρι τα έγκατα του Παρισιού.
Η αφήγηση ρέει, δεν βαρέθηκα καθόλου. Ο Γουίλσον αγαπάει τις πόλεις και αυτό φαίνεται. Ίσως και λίγο παραπάνω απο όσο πρέπει για να είναι αντικειμενικός, σαν να μην βρίσκει τίποτα αρνητικό στις πόλεις και είναι και πάρα πολύ αισιόδοξος για το μέλλον. Ίσως να είμαι εγώ προκατειλημμένη βέβαια.
Το βιβλίο πάντως είναι πάρα πολύ ωραίο.
Ξεκινώντας απο την Ουρούκ στη Μεσοποταμία το 4000πΧ φτάνει στο Λάγκος του σήμερα, μας ξεναγεί σε πόλεις που έγραψαν την δική τους ιστορία και άλλαξαν την ιστορία του κόσμου.
Μας διηγείται την γέννηση, την καταστροφή και την αναγέννηση πόλεων. Μας μιλάει την ανθεκτικότητα αυτού του πολύπλοκου οργανισμού που λέγεται πόλη.
Τα κεφάλαια για την Βαρσοβία, το Στάλινγκραντ, την Χιροσίμα ήταν συγκλονιστικά.
Έμαθα πολλά πράγματα που δεν γνώριζα, οι πληροφορίες είναι πάρα πολλές. Απο το πως φτιαχτηκε το αποχετευτικό σύστημα στο Σικάγο μέχρι τις πόρνες στους δρόμους της Βαβυλώνας. Απο τους καθετους κήπους της Σιγκαπούρης μέχρι την ιστορία των προαστίων του L.A. Απο τους ουρανοξύστες μέχρι τα έγκατα του Παρισιού.
Η αφήγηση ρέει, δεν βαρέθηκα καθόλου. Ο Γουίλσον αγαπάει τις πόλεις και αυτό φαίνεται. Ίσως και λίγο παραπάνω απο όσο πρέπει για να είναι αντικειμενικός, σαν να μην βρίσκει τίποτα αρνητικό στις πόλεις και είναι και πάρα πολύ αισιόδοξος για το μέλλον. Ίσως να είμαι εγώ προκατειλημμένη βέβαια.
Το βιβλίο πάντως είναι πάρα πολύ ωραίο.
April 26, 2022
`Quizá no haya otro fenómeno psíquico que esté tan incondicionalmente reservado a la ciudad como la mirada indiferente, Escribió el sociólogo alemán Georg Simmel, en su ensayo La metrópolis y la vida mental (1903). Para Simmel, la personalidad urbana moderna, la conforma, en parte. Un cambio rápido y continuo de los estímulos internos y externos. Si hubiese que involucrarse en cada pieza del bombardeo de información, Internamente, quedarías totalmente atomizado y entrarías en un estado psíquico inimaginable. La otra fuerza que modelaba . El aspecto psíquico general de la metrópolis. En la economía de mercado y la división de la fuerza de trabajo, que despersonalizaba las relaciones entre la gente y deshacía los vínculos tradicionales que unían a la sociedad. En su análisis del Manchéster industrial, ya en 1840, Engels, Había atisbo la misma crisis psicológica. En sí mismo, el torbellino de las calles, repugnaba a la naturaleza humana. Cuántas más personas hay en un espacio reducido, más repulsiva y ofensiva se vuelve la indiferencia brutal, la concentración insensible de cada uno de sus propios asuntos. En la gran ciudad, el capitalismo tiene, como efecto, un aislamiento que se lleva al extremo: La disolución de la humanidad en mónadas, cada una de las cuales tiene un principio diferente, el mundo de los átomos. Supera aquí todos los límites. ´
Le debo el conocimiento de este ensayo a la radio. La historia de las ciudades, la sociedad que terminan conformándose en las mismas y la historia que marca el ritmo de la humanidad a través de las mismas siempre es algo que me ha interesado mucho.
Como, por ejemplo, la cantidad de negocios que comúnmente solían estar en el centro de las ciudades terminan por ir ala periferia, es uno de los fenómenos en los que podemos caer a día de hoy.
El libro parte de una premisa muy interesante. ¿Son las ciudades las que construyen a la sociedad o es la sociedad la que evoluciona a través de las construcciones de las ciudades?
Plantea una serie de preguntas y reflexiones interesantes sobre las ideologías que nacieron en las ciudades, la evolución como sociedad a través de las mismas, incluso del cambio de geografía que ha supuesto el mayor invento de la humanidad. Las Metrópolis, partiendo de la base de que conforman un órgano más en el motor de nuestra evolución, un invento humano casi casual que nos ha llevado a donde nos encontramos ahora.
Abarca toda la historia de las ciudades más importantes de nuestra civilización, a través de una basta documentación se basa en los hechos que conforman sociológicamente nuestra evolución humana. Hacia donde vamos es una de las preguntas que termina por responder, justificando todo el argumento del ensayo y dotándole de todo el sentido a la misma pregunta.
La casualidad me llevó a este ensayo, para que después digan que la radio no sirve de nada, le debo la bonita casualidad de encontrarme con este libro, a eso, a la radio.
Lo he disfrutado como un enano, ya que de vez en cuando me gusta leer un buen ensayo, sea sociológico o con base histórica. Recomendadísimo.
Le debo el conocimiento de este ensayo a la radio. La historia de las ciudades, la sociedad que terminan conformándose en las mismas y la historia que marca el ritmo de la humanidad a través de las mismas siempre es algo que me ha interesado mucho.
Como, por ejemplo, la cantidad de negocios que comúnmente solían estar en el centro de las ciudades terminan por ir ala periferia, es uno de los fenómenos en los que podemos caer a día de hoy.
El libro parte de una premisa muy interesante. ¿Son las ciudades las que construyen a la sociedad o es la sociedad la que evoluciona a través de las construcciones de las ciudades?
Plantea una serie de preguntas y reflexiones interesantes sobre las ideologías que nacieron en las ciudades, la evolución como sociedad a través de las mismas, incluso del cambio de geografía que ha supuesto el mayor invento de la humanidad. Las Metrópolis, partiendo de la base de que conforman un órgano más en el motor de nuestra evolución, un invento humano casi casual que nos ha llevado a donde nos encontramos ahora.
Abarca toda la historia de las ciudades más importantes de nuestra civilización, a través de una basta documentación se basa en los hechos que conforman sociológicamente nuestra evolución humana. Hacia donde vamos es una de las preguntas que termina por responder, justificando todo el argumento del ensayo y dotándole de todo el sentido a la misma pregunta.
La casualidad me llevó a este ensayo, para que después digan que la radio no sirve de nada, le debo la bonita casualidad de encontrarme con este libro, a eso, a la radio.
Lo he disfrutado como un enano, ya que de vez en cuando me gusta leer un buen ensayo, sea sociológico o con base histórica. Recomendadísimo.
September 14, 2020
If the city is nothing more than the backdrop to your daily life, this book will convince you why you should be paying more attention--there's so much more to the city than you could ever imagine. Unashamedly enthusiastic, Wilson charts the story of the city from Uruk to the present day, covering topics like crime, trade, tech, public spaces, suburbs and more. It's crammed with information, and not always an easy read because of it, but there's no doubt it's fascinating stuff.
ARC via Netgalley
ARC via Netgalley
October 17, 2022
“Aquí, la humanidad muestra su evolución más completa, y la más brutal, aquí la civilización obra sus milagros y el hombre civilizado vuelve a ser casi un salvaje.”
Alexis de Tocqueville al conocer Mánchester en el siglo XIX.
Al principio de esta obra se nos exponen dos conceptos que la permean a todo lo largo: la ciudad como un centro de energía y creatividad humana, como un lugar que potencia el progreso, un sitio para convivir y generar placer sensual, una fuente de alegría e ideas, pero por contra se nos dice que las urbes son un espacio en el cual nacen y se desarrollan las peores de las miserias humanas y la degradación, es un sitio ideal para que las enfermedades se propaguen, un lugar en donde con gran facilidad se transmiten las pandemias y donde la corrupción humana medra con la criminalidad.
El historiador Ben Wilson (1980) recorre cronológicamente 6,000 años y más de 20 ciudades de todos los continentes abarcando en cada una de ellas un lapso de tiempo determinado en el cual nos detalla la manera en que nacieron y se desarrollaron estas urbes; las virtudes y las desventajas de cada una de ellas, así como sus emplazamientos principales, su arquitectura y su cultura. Y en muchos casos su declive y desaparición. Interesante también su reflexión acerca de cómo la geopolítica y otras fuerzas globales han contribuido a definir y a diseñar urbes y extensiones suburbanas.
Cada una de las ciudades aquí descritas tiene su encanto y sus misterios, sus hazañas y sus derrotas propias. Tal vez los capítulos que más me llamaron la atención fueron los dedicados a la Bagdad del año 600 al 1,200 aproximadamente, debido a su sofisticación cultural, científica y gastronómica. Otro capítulo que también me gustó mucho fue el dedicado a la esplendorosa ciudad de Lisboa de alrededor del año 1,500. Y qué decir del tratamiento que se le da al surgimiento de las manchas urbanas a partir de Los Ángeles del 1945 y su cultura de los suburbios.
El autor no omite mencionar el muy importante papel que ha desempeñado el fenómeno migratorio para el desarrollo particular de cada ciudad, incluso las más antiguas también fueron destino importante de extranjeros que iban en busca de una mejor vida y que atiborraron de energía cada ciudad a la cual fueron a dar, imprimiéndoles un sello multicultural y multiétnico.
Otro apunte interesante es el que se refiere a que Europa era un continente sombrío, atrasado e ignorante durante la Edad Media y en cambio Oriente era el corazón del mundo urbano en donde se encontraba el mayor grado de desarrollo en varios campos. El autor la describe como una edad de oro para esa parte del mundo. Yo nunca lo había pensado así.
Es curioso como el desarrollo de las urbes, así como su nivel cultural y tecnológico ha seguido un movimiento pendular yendo de Oriente a Occidente y ahora todo parece indicar que el péndulo se dirige de nuevo hacia Oriente. Sin duda la Geopolítica y otras fuerzas globales han contribuido a diseñar urbes y extensiones suburbanas y en consecuencia han definido nuestro desarrollo personal, nuestra forma de vida y nuestra personalidad.
En algunos capítulos se incluyen interesantes observaciones de carácter digamos que de psicología urbana, literatura urbana y pintura urbana.
Siempre se admira y se agradece el trabajo de investigación que se lleva a cabo para escribir este tipo de libros los cuales nos colman de conocimientos y datos interesantes y hasta curiosos, aunque desafortunadamente al día siguiente ya los hayamos olvidado por completo.
Alexis de Tocqueville al conocer Mánchester en el siglo XIX.
Al principio de esta obra se nos exponen dos conceptos que la permean a todo lo largo: la ciudad como un centro de energía y creatividad humana, como un lugar que potencia el progreso, un sitio para convivir y generar placer sensual, una fuente de alegría e ideas, pero por contra se nos dice que las urbes son un espacio en el cual nacen y se desarrollan las peores de las miserias humanas y la degradación, es un sitio ideal para que las enfermedades se propaguen, un lugar en donde con gran facilidad se transmiten las pandemias y donde la corrupción humana medra con la criminalidad.
El historiador Ben Wilson (1980) recorre cronológicamente 6,000 años y más de 20 ciudades de todos los continentes abarcando en cada una de ellas un lapso de tiempo determinado en el cual nos detalla la manera en que nacieron y se desarrollaron estas urbes; las virtudes y las desventajas de cada una de ellas, así como sus emplazamientos principales, su arquitectura y su cultura. Y en muchos casos su declive y desaparición. Interesante también su reflexión acerca de cómo la geopolítica y otras fuerzas globales han contribuido a definir y a diseñar urbes y extensiones suburbanas.
Cada una de las ciudades aquí descritas tiene su encanto y sus misterios, sus hazañas y sus derrotas propias. Tal vez los capítulos que más me llamaron la atención fueron los dedicados a la Bagdad del año 600 al 1,200 aproximadamente, debido a su sofisticación cultural, científica y gastronómica. Otro capítulo que también me gustó mucho fue el dedicado a la esplendorosa ciudad de Lisboa de alrededor del año 1,500. Y qué decir del tratamiento que se le da al surgimiento de las manchas urbanas a partir de Los Ángeles del 1945 y su cultura de los suburbios.
El autor no omite mencionar el muy importante papel que ha desempeñado el fenómeno migratorio para el desarrollo particular de cada ciudad, incluso las más antiguas también fueron destino importante de extranjeros que iban en busca de una mejor vida y que atiborraron de energía cada ciudad a la cual fueron a dar, imprimiéndoles un sello multicultural y multiétnico.
Otro apunte interesante es el que se refiere a que Europa era un continente sombrío, atrasado e ignorante durante la Edad Media y en cambio Oriente era el corazón del mundo urbano en donde se encontraba el mayor grado de desarrollo en varios campos. El autor la describe como una edad de oro para esa parte del mundo. Yo nunca lo había pensado así.
Es curioso como el desarrollo de las urbes, así como su nivel cultural y tecnológico ha seguido un movimiento pendular yendo de Oriente a Occidente y ahora todo parece indicar que el péndulo se dirige de nuevo hacia Oriente. Sin duda la Geopolítica y otras fuerzas globales han contribuido a diseñar urbes y extensiones suburbanas y en consecuencia han definido nuestro desarrollo personal, nuestra forma de vida y nuestra personalidad.
En algunos capítulos se incluyen interesantes observaciones de carácter digamos que de psicología urbana, literatura urbana y pintura urbana.
Siempre se admira y se agradece el trabajo de investigación que se lleva a cabo para escribir este tipo de libros los cuales nos colman de conocimientos y datos interesantes y hasta curiosos, aunque desafortunadamente al día siguiente ya los hayamos olvidado por completo.
July 5, 2020
I am a city person, I love being in the centre of things, I love the opportunities for art, culture, business and society all mushing up against each other. I also fancy myself as a systems person, so seeing how complex organisations work, often due to design flaws or the inability to actually understand what is going on means I find the history and workings of city endlessly fascinating. So I came to this grand history of cities described hyperbolically as "A History Of Humankind's Greatest Invention" with a lot of interest but with quite a high bar for it to jump. And despite a few initial qualms, once I worked out how it was working, and that actually the writing was actually this good, it became compulsive.
My qualms? It is a history and it goes back as far as it can to Uruk in 4000BC. And when I got to the Uruk chapter my heart sank slightly because I feared it was going to be a strictly chronological history. That's an pretty common and obvious way of organising a history, particularly if you are looking at development, but cities aren't merely chronologically as much as subject to parallel evolution and planned (or not) to death. And whilst the book has a chronological throughline, I should not have worried. Instead he takes a number of example cities through time as jumping off points, often to discuss and go off on tangents through time. Its the kind of book where in the chapter ostensibly about Rome, he quotes Carlito's Way rather than Cicero. (The diversion is by way of the history and importance of public bathing, up to the surf and turf wars in New York over who got to use the swimming pools). We get Flaneurs, but we get more on NWA and how they were a product of a racist Los Angles designed to be that way. Wilson is awed by cities, about how they live, survive and often how they refuse to die, and he peppers the text with no end of well researched and rounded diversions like the ones above (my favourite being the oversaturation on ranch style bungalows in LA and most US cities being because the had the highest survivability ration in a nuclear war). The London chapter i subtitled The Sociable Metropolis (1666-1820) and is as much about coffee shops and how ideas and politics promulgate and prosper than London. You feel the righteous anger in the firebombing of Lubeck and the almost total destruction of Warsaw - and the wonder in these cities still actually existing, crawling from the ashes.
This is a great book to dip in and out of as well as a fascinating narrative read. And it is Utopian to a grand degree, the final chapter on Lagos describes a supermegalopolis in the making, with scant infrastructure and extreme poverty, but also as the most exciting cultural place on earth, He reclaims the suburbs (they are part of the urbs), and the last few chapters which talk about LA, Lagos and Tokyo, he sketches a broad theory of how successful cities thrive - put the development in the hands of the people, and never try to overplan. Always accept unintended consequences, and get the people invovled in solving their own problems. The history is interesting, and he certainly has little time for the moralising anti-city brigade, but its the present and his hints for a future in a majority urban world, with climate crisis and overpopulation at its heart which is fascinating and I got a genuine sense of excitement about how these futures will unfold. A terrific piece of work.
[NetGalley ARC]
My qualms? It is a history and it goes back as far as it can to Uruk in 4000BC. And when I got to the Uruk chapter my heart sank slightly because I feared it was going to be a strictly chronological history. That's an pretty common and obvious way of organising a history, particularly if you are looking at development, but cities aren't merely chronologically as much as subject to parallel evolution and planned (or not) to death. And whilst the book has a chronological throughline, I should not have worried. Instead he takes a number of example cities through time as jumping off points, often to discuss and go off on tangents through time. Its the kind of book where in the chapter ostensibly about Rome, he quotes Carlito's Way rather than Cicero. (The diversion is by way of the history and importance of public bathing, up to the surf and turf wars in New York over who got to use the swimming pools). We get Flaneurs, but we get more on NWA and how they were a product of a racist Los Angles designed to be that way. Wilson is awed by cities, about how they live, survive and often how they refuse to die, and he peppers the text with no end of well researched and rounded diversions like the ones above (my favourite being the oversaturation on ranch style bungalows in LA and most US cities being because the had the highest survivability ration in a nuclear war). The London chapter i subtitled The Sociable Metropolis (1666-1820) and is as much about coffee shops and how ideas and politics promulgate and prosper than London. You feel the righteous anger in the firebombing of Lubeck and the almost total destruction of Warsaw - and the wonder in these cities still actually existing, crawling from the ashes.
This is a great book to dip in and out of as well as a fascinating narrative read. And it is Utopian to a grand degree, the final chapter on Lagos describes a supermegalopolis in the making, with scant infrastructure and extreme poverty, but also as the most exciting cultural place on earth, He reclaims the suburbs (they are part of the urbs), and the last few chapters which talk about LA, Lagos and Tokyo, he sketches a broad theory of how successful cities thrive - put the development in the hands of the people, and never try to overplan. Always accept unintended consequences, and get the people invovled in solving their own problems. The history is interesting, and he certainly has little time for the moralising anti-city brigade, but its the present and his hints for a future in a majority urban world, with climate crisis and overpopulation at its heart which is fascinating and I got a genuine sense of excitement about how these futures will unfold. A terrific piece of work.
[NetGalley ARC]
June 29, 2024
This is more a history of how cities have been depicted than how they have operated. In this vein there are some brilliant chapters: Skyscraper Souls exploring New York through expressionist cinema, and Sound of the Suburbs exploring Los Angeles through West Coast Rap. I, however, would have preferred a technological history of cities, how architecture, planning, transportation and distribution made huge concentrations of people possible. Especially in the case of Lagos, which seems to have developed in the absence of these things.
In his discussion of Warsaw, Wilson suggests there is something that makes cities particularly difficult to eradicate. If that is the case why does archaeology provide us with so many examples of cities that were abandoned? He concludes that the city is also impervious to current technological change, in the form of the internet. According to Geoffrey West in Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies, but not discussed here: the underlying economic advantage modern cities offer is the way they speedily disseminate knowledge through a population, so urban economies switch up faster than rural economies. I finished reading Scale in 2022, when home-working was still fashionable as a consequence of covid. I finished that review by discussing the impact home-working has had on my daughter's career.
Two years later she has relocated to Barcelona, she has incidentally changed firms, but still works as a software engineer, but she doesn't speak Spanish, Catalan or German (the native language of her employer). Her move to Barcelona was predicated by a search for a better climate rather than a need to find better work. She still works primarily from home. The role of the office which she visits regularly seems to be a place from which her employer can recruit and support talent in Spain. For some of us, our employer doesn't worry about where we are so long as we have stable access to the internet. My wife works regularly from home, and I had recently had the pleasure of assigning and marking one of my students tests while she was a thousand kilometres away in Sweden. Although there is something of a reaction now to homeworking, I still believe that the internet has undermined the greatest economic advantage of cities, and they will become primarily places of leisure rather than of production and distribution.
I can imagine a world in which cities as centres of leisure become subject to fashion rather like English seaside towns, which became popular with the advent of the train, and became unpopular with the advent of the plane. Barcelona already has problems with water supply, accommodation and petty crime that are caused by its popularity as centre for tourism and ex-patriate workers. What effect this will have on the continued growth of cities like Barcelona is now debateable.
In his discussion of Warsaw, Wilson suggests there is something that makes cities particularly difficult to eradicate. If that is the case why does archaeology provide us with so many examples of cities that were abandoned? He concludes that the city is also impervious to current technological change, in the form of the internet. According to Geoffrey West in Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies, but not discussed here: the underlying economic advantage modern cities offer is the way they speedily disseminate knowledge through a population, so urban economies switch up faster than rural economies. I finished reading Scale in 2022, when home-working was still fashionable as a consequence of covid. I finished that review by discussing the impact home-working has had on my daughter's career.
Two years later she has relocated to Barcelona, she has incidentally changed firms, but still works as a software engineer, but she doesn't speak Spanish, Catalan or German (the native language of her employer). Her move to Barcelona was predicated by a search for a better climate rather than a need to find better work. She still works primarily from home. The role of the office which she visits regularly seems to be a place from which her employer can recruit and support talent in Spain. For some of us, our employer doesn't worry about where we are so long as we have stable access to the internet. My wife works regularly from home, and I had recently had the pleasure of assigning and marking one of my students tests while she was a thousand kilometres away in Sweden. Although there is something of a reaction now to homeworking, I still believe that the internet has undermined the greatest economic advantage of cities, and they will become primarily places of leisure rather than of production and distribution.
I can imagine a world in which cities as centres of leisure become subject to fashion rather like English seaside towns, which became popular with the advent of the train, and became unpopular with the advent of the plane. Barcelona already has problems with water supply, accommodation and petty crime that are caused by its popularity as centre for tourism and ex-patriate workers. What effect this will have on the continued growth of cities like Barcelona is now debateable.
February 8, 2021
This started out OK but lacked an overall theme or narrative. He seemed to pick a random facet of a city then run it into the ground, ignoring almost every else.
"Oh cool, Rome is coming up." - And then 20 pages about people taking baths before we move on again.
I certainly didn't expect the rise and fall of the empire in a short section but he somehow made it so focused yet repetitive. It felt like it was 4x longer and woefully uninteresting.
"Oh cool, Rome is coming up." - And then 20 pages about people taking baths before we move on again.
I certainly didn't expect the rise and fall of the empire in a short section but he somehow made it so focused yet repetitive. It felt like it was 4x longer and woefully uninteresting.
August 26, 2022
Pretend it's a city!
https://pepperlines.blogspot.com/2022...
https://pepperlines.blogspot.com/2022...
August 2, 2025
At the very beginning, Ben Wilson's enthusiasm for the city made me a bit apprehensive, as I always am when a historian is too enthusiastic about their chosen subject. I prefer my historians to be unbiased and have a balanced, measured perspective.
However, as I continued to read, I found that his enthusiasm was not misplaced. His book is filled with well-researched facts, revealing both the best and the seediest aspects of urban civilization across time.
Wilson’s central argument — that the city is one of mankind’s greatest inventions — is difficult to refute after reading Metropolis. Cities are not just passive backdrops to human history; they are active agents in its unfolding.
Nearly every major breakthrough in culture, commerce, science, governance, or spirituality either came from or through a city. Cities birth literacy and innovation, accelerate the cross-pollination of ideas, and break open the constraints of rigid traditions. They are, in every sense, civilizational accelerants.
The book opens with Uruk and ends with Lagos, tracing a long arc of humanity through our most densely populated experiments in how to live together. Wilson’s style is sweeping and often meandering — at times I found myself wishing for more linearity — but the scope is so rich, and the tangents so full of insight, that I was rarely bothered. This isn’t a survey; it’s a living, pulsing history. I felt as though I were walking the streets alongside the people who built and broke them.
Rome is portrayed less as the epicenter of empire than as a strange, decadent organism, endlessly renewing itself even as it rots from within. Wilson’s Rome is a city obsessed with spectacle and luxury — a place where the bathhouse became the dominant social institution, and where urban engineering was deployed in service of mass pleasure.
It’s almost shocking how little of Rome’s greatness rested on moral or intellectual pursuits; what defined it was infrastructure — sewers, aqueducts, coliseums — and the ability to keep its million residents housed, fed, and entertained. And when that delicate balance broke? The whole world shifted.
Baghdad, on the other hand, was an utter revelation. The chapter “Gastropolis” was a feast in every sense of the word. I never thought I might want to visit Baghdad, but Wilson paints a Baghdad that thrived on food, poetry, astronomy, and debate — a city of scholars and chefs.
At its height, it was the culinary and intellectual capital of the Islamic world, home to markets that sold dishes from across the empire, and to cafes where stories from The Thousand and One Nights were whispered by candlelight. Wilson makes you feel the fragrance of saffron and the sound of calligraphy. It’s cities like this that remind you how much human achievement can come from confluence rather than conquest.
Paris, unfortunately, felt like a missed opportunity. The chapter is oddly abstract — less about the city and more about the way people talked about the city. The philosophical meanderings about how Paris represents modernity or alienation didn’t do much for me. I wanted grit, I wanted barricades, I wanted Haussmann’s boulevards and the throb of revolution. What I got felt like a summary of people’s opinions on Paris — not the city itself.
New York suffered the same fate. Instead of a city of steel nerves and immigrant dreams, Wilson’s take felt like a compilation of quotes. I wanted to be reminded of the horror and awe of Manhattan scraping the sky for the first time, of Central Park as engineered escape, of Harlem and Wall Street and the subway strikes. But none of that came alive. Compared to cities like Amsterdam, where the civic bloodstream felt tangible, New York was a series of snapshots.
London, though, did surprise me. The chapter focuses on coffeehouses — a choice I initially found quaint, but the more I read, the more I appreciated it. London’s coffeehouses were proto-internets: nodes of information, gossip, and argument. Stock markets were born there. Science, too. They were democratic in a way the city itself was not. There’s something very British about the idea that the Enlightenment began over a bitter drink in a smoky room. I found myself wishing for more of these microhistories — the tiny, physical spaces where the city’s brain lights up.
Los Angeles is one of the most significant cities in the book — not because of culture or cuisine, but because of form. Wilson argues that LA is the first truly suburban city, built around cars, sprawl, and the dream of private space.
Unlike the dense cores of New York or Paris, LA represents a different ideal: distributed, dispersed, and individualized. This wasn't just a quirk of American postwar planning — it became the model for cities across the globe. In that sense, LA is less an outlier and more a prototype of the 21st-century metropolis. Its freeways, subdivisions, and decentralized layout became the crest of a global wave that reshaped how cities are organized and how people imagine urban life.
And then there’s Manchester and Chicago — paired in the book as twin infernos of industrial birth. These chapters were riveting. Wilson doesn’t flinch from the human toll.
Both cities became machines for profit and pollution, swallowing immigrants and migrants into mills, steelworks, and slums. Manchester, with its choking soot and social upheaval, became a symbol of both progress and degradation. Chicago, with its speed, ambition, and brutality, was like the future on fire. You can smell the blood in the stockyards. I was captivated by how cities can grow too fast — how they can become inhuman in their hunger.
But even there, there was innovation. Skyscrapers. Unions. Modern art. Cities force confrontation — between classes, between values — and out of that violence, sometimes, new structures emerge.
Lagos closes the book, and I wish we had more. What we get is tantalizing: a city exploding with growth, improvisation, contradiction. Wilson portrays it as a megacity of hustle — where planning is futile but life finds a way. Lagos is not neat. It’s not stable. But it’s alive. In many ways, Lagos feels like the future of the city — chaotic, layered, semi-official, and wired for resilience. There is an elegance in its informality. But for all that, his section on Lagos was just a hint. I wanted there to be a lot more meat.
Throughout Metropolis, Wilson’s choices are occasionally frustrating — ancient Asiatic cities, for example, are all but ignored, despite their wealth and influence — but the book is so ambitious, so overflowing with detail and energy, that I can forgive the gaps.
The chapter on Warsaw was devastating. It was completely leveled by the Nazis — a city whose destruction was intended to be total. Yet even there, Wilson finds glimmers of resilience. I’d never before fully appreciated how cities bounce back — not just physically, but spiritually. People rebuild. Neighborhoods reform. Life resumes.
The chapter on Amsterdam remains my personal favorite. A city where finance, freedom, and literacy formed a virtuous triangle. Amsterdam is where the modern world began — not just in markets, but in minds.
Despite the occasional flaw or underwhelming chapter, Metropolis is a rich, illuminating read. It made me think differently about the spaces we live in and the forces that shape them. Highly recommended to anyone interested in the history of cities.
However, as I continued to read, I found that his enthusiasm was not misplaced. His book is filled with well-researched facts, revealing both the best and the seediest aspects of urban civilization across time.
Wilson’s central argument — that the city is one of mankind’s greatest inventions — is difficult to refute after reading Metropolis. Cities are not just passive backdrops to human history; they are active agents in its unfolding.
Nearly every major breakthrough in culture, commerce, science, governance, or spirituality either came from or through a city. Cities birth literacy and innovation, accelerate the cross-pollination of ideas, and break open the constraints of rigid traditions. They are, in every sense, civilizational accelerants.
The book opens with Uruk and ends with Lagos, tracing a long arc of humanity through our most densely populated experiments in how to live together. Wilson’s style is sweeping and often meandering — at times I found myself wishing for more linearity — but the scope is so rich, and the tangents so full of insight, that I was rarely bothered. This isn’t a survey; it’s a living, pulsing history. I felt as though I were walking the streets alongside the people who built and broke them.
Rome is portrayed less as the epicenter of empire than as a strange, decadent organism, endlessly renewing itself even as it rots from within. Wilson’s Rome is a city obsessed with spectacle and luxury — a place where the bathhouse became the dominant social institution, and where urban engineering was deployed in service of mass pleasure.
It’s almost shocking how little of Rome’s greatness rested on moral or intellectual pursuits; what defined it was infrastructure — sewers, aqueducts, coliseums — and the ability to keep its million residents housed, fed, and entertained. And when that delicate balance broke? The whole world shifted.
Baghdad, on the other hand, was an utter revelation. The chapter “Gastropolis” was a feast in every sense of the word. I never thought I might want to visit Baghdad, but Wilson paints a Baghdad that thrived on food, poetry, astronomy, and debate — a city of scholars and chefs.
At its height, it was the culinary and intellectual capital of the Islamic world, home to markets that sold dishes from across the empire, and to cafes where stories from The Thousand and One Nights were whispered by candlelight. Wilson makes you feel the fragrance of saffron and the sound of calligraphy. It’s cities like this that remind you how much human achievement can come from confluence rather than conquest.
Paris, unfortunately, felt like a missed opportunity. The chapter is oddly abstract — less about the city and more about the way people talked about the city. The philosophical meanderings about how Paris represents modernity or alienation didn’t do much for me. I wanted grit, I wanted barricades, I wanted Haussmann’s boulevards and the throb of revolution. What I got felt like a summary of people’s opinions on Paris — not the city itself.
New York suffered the same fate. Instead of a city of steel nerves and immigrant dreams, Wilson’s take felt like a compilation of quotes. I wanted to be reminded of the horror and awe of Manhattan scraping the sky for the first time, of Central Park as engineered escape, of Harlem and Wall Street and the subway strikes. But none of that came alive. Compared to cities like Amsterdam, where the civic bloodstream felt tangible, New York was a series of snapshots.
London, though, did surprise me. The chapter focuses on coffeehouses — a choice I initially found quaint, but the more I read, the more I appreciated it. London’s coffeehouses were proto-internets: nodes of information, gossip, and argument. Stock markets were born there. Science, too. They were democratic in a way the city itself was not. There’s something very British about the idea that the Enlightenment began over a bitter drink in a smoky room. I found myself wishing for more of these microhistories — the tiny, physical spaces where the city’s brain lights up.
Los Angeles is one of the most significant cities in the book — not because of culture or cuisine, but because of form. Wilson argues that LA is the first truly suburban city, built around cars, sprawl, and the dream of private space.
Unlike the dense cores of New York or Paris, LA represents a different ideal: distributed, dispersed, and individualized. This wasn't just a quirk of American postwar planning — it became the model for cities across the globe. In that sense, LA is less an outlier and more a prototype of the 21st-century metropolis. Its freeways, subdivisions, and decentralized layout became the crest of a global wave that reshaped how cities are organized and how people imagine urban life.
And then there’s Manchester and Chicago — paired in the book as twin infernos of industrial birth. These chapters were riveting. Wilson doesn’t flinch from the human toll.
Both cities became machines for profit and pollution, swallowing immigrants and migrants into mills, steelworks, and slums. Manchester, with its choking soot and social upheaval, became a symbol of both progress and degradation. Chicago, with its speed, ambition, and brutality, was like the future on fire. You can smell the blood in the stockyards. I was captivated by how cities can grow too fast — how they can become inhuman in their hunger.
But even there, there was innovation. Skyscrapers. Unions. Modern art. Cities force confrontation — between classes, between values — and out of that violence, sometimes, new structures emerge.
Lagos closes the book, and I wish we had more. What we get is tantalizing: a city exploding with growth, improvisation, contradiction. Wilson portrays it as a megacity of hustle — where planning is futile but life finds a way. Lagos is not neat. It’s not stable. But it’s alive. In many ways, Lagos feels like the future of the city — chaotic, layered, semi-official, and wired for resilience. There is an elegance in its informality. But for all that, his section on Lagos was just a hint. I wanted there to be a lot more meat.
Throughout Metropolis, Wilson’s choices are occasionally frustrating — ancient Asiatic cities, for example, are all but ignored, despite their wealth and influence — but the book is so ambitious, so overflowing with detail and energy, that I can forgive the gaps.
The chapter on Warsaw was devastating. It was completely leveled by the Nazis — a city whose destruction was intended to be total. Yet even there, Wilson finds glimmers of resilience. I’d never before fully appreciated how cities bounce back — not just physically, but spiritually. People rebuild. Neighborhoods reform. Life resumes.
The chapter on Amsterdam remains my personal favorite. A city where finance, freedom, and literacy formed a virtuous triangle. Amsterdam is where the modern world began — not just in markets, but in minds.
Despite the occasional flaw or underwhelming chapter, Metropolis is a rich, illuminating read. It made me think differently about the spaces we live in and the forces that shape them. Highly recommended to anyone interested in the history of cities.
October 25, 2022
Labai patiko, nors atrodo žanras tokios "paaiškinančiosios istorijos" jau išsemtas. Sakyčiau net įdomiau nei Jared Diamond ar Harrari. Knygos fokusas yra miestai, kodėl jie yra tokie kokie yra ir kodėl jie yra visuotinio progreso variklis, atsiremiant į dabar gyvus pavyzdžius, nuo Niujorko ar Paryžiaus iki Lagoso ar Bagdado. Sakyčiau gerai limpa ir ne tik istorijos mėgėjams, bet ir liberalams suprasti apie miestų planavimą, tęsiant "Vaikštomo miesto" liniją. Liuks.
December 13, 2020
The premise of this book seemed promising and the first chapter alone bored me to death. I thought it was going to be more engaging and creatively written, but instead it was just a mish-mash of writing styles and it was all over the place. I regret buying this book. I had to escape the “Metropolis”.
December 25, 2020
This book presents a history of cities, ranging chronologically from Uruk in 4000 BC to the present and large megacity connurbations such as Los Angeles and Lagos, Nigeria. Cities are seen as the most important of human creations and we live in a time of the huge expansion of cities around the world, especially in Asia and Africa. Cities are shaped by their geographies and populations, of course, but also end up shaping their populations in certain directions and not others. By the author’s estimate, two-thirds of the world will live in cities by the year 2050.
But wait a second... Cities are human and enormously complicated, some with histories going back centuries. All of the major cities in the US and Europe, also with some in Asia, have been the subject of multiple extensive histories. How does someone write a global history about this that avoids trivializing the topic and that can hold a reader’s attention across dizzying variety? The author is a skillful and prolific non academic historian who writes well. Still, I had my doubts starting the book.
The approach taken by the author is to proceed chronologically and then focus each chapter on a fairly limited set of themes as they pertain to one or a few cities. Mr. Wilson does not try to convey everything he could about each city. Rather, he picks a few points to develop and then works those points up into fairly intricate but focus chapter essays that tell the basic stories but also provide extensive comparisons and contrasts both within a chapter and across prior chapters. For example, for classical era cities, the focus in on Athens and Alexandria and comparisons of how learning and culture developed in each. For Rose, the focus is on baths - what they were, how they were supplied, what their role was in Rome and the broader empire. This allows Wilson to expand on how the Roman bath traditions influenced such later cities as London, Paris, and even New York. Other chapters talk about the rise of cities during the industrial revolution (Manchester and Chicago) and how cities interacted with the era of oceanic exploration both in the Americas and in Asia. One of the more interesting chapters for me concerned the different circumstances under which cities were attacked and destroyed during WW2. Post-1990 globalization makes it into the discussion in the final two chapters the focus on Southern California and Africa.
The book succeeds on a number of levels. While it is not a “comprehensive” history, it focal chapters are well chosen and the major topics are clearly put on the table and discussed. Were there other cities that could be covered? Sure, but the selection that was presented was exceptional and the stories in each chapter were well crafted. The book is easy to follow and their are lots of sites to follow up on any of the chapters. I have some additional books on cities that got waylaid in my queue and after reading Wilson’s book, I feel better about going back to them.
I heartily recommend the book.
But wait a second... Cities are human and enormously complicated, some with histories going back centuries. All of the major cities in the US and Europe, also with some in Asia, have been the subject of multiple extensive histories. How does someone write a global history about this that avoids trivializing the topic and that can hold a reader’s attention across dizzying variety? The author is a skillful and prolific non academic historian who writes well. Still, I had my doubts starting the book.
The approach taken by the author is to proceed chronologically and then focus each chapter on a fairly limited set of themes as they pertain to one or a few cities. Mr. Wilson does not try to convey everything he could about each city. Rather, he picks a few points to develop and then works those points up into fairly intricate but focus chapter essays that tell the basic stories but also provide extensive comparisons and contrasts both within a chapter and across prior chapters. For example, for classical era cities, the focus in on Athens and Alexandria and comparisons of how learning and culture developed in each. For Rose, the focus is on baths - what they were, how they were supplied, what their role was in Rome and the broader empire. This allows Wilson to expand on how the Roman bath traditions influenced such later cities as London, Paris, and even New York. Other chapters talk about the rise of cities during the industrial revolution (Manchester and Chicago) and how cities interacted with the era of oceanic exploration both in the Americas and in Asia. One of the more interesting chapters for me concerned the different circumstances under which cities were attacked and destroyed during WW2. Post-1990 globalization makes it into the discussion in the final two chapters the focus on Southern California and Africa.
The book succeeds on a number of levels. While it is not a “comprehensive” history, it focal chapters are well chosen and the major topics are clearly put on the table and discussed. Were there other cities that could be covered? Sure, but the selection that was presented was exceptional and the stories in each chapter were well crafted. The book is easy to follow and their are lots of sites to follow up on any of the chapters. I have some additional books on cities that got waylaid in my queue and after reading Wilson’s book, I feel better about going back to them.
I heartily recommend the book.
October 14, 2021
4.5 stars. Absolutely fascinating.
July 14, 2020
Starting with the foundation of Uruk in the fourth millennium BC, and stopping off at everywhere from Rome to Lagos via Babylon, Rome, London, Manchester, Paris, Warsaw, Leningrad , Berlin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Mumbai, Tokyo, Shanghai and many more, Ben Wilson traces the development of urbanisation. He examines the way that cities transform their environments, the people who live in them and, ultimately, the entire history of our species.
Interestingly, rather than taking a strictly chronological approach, he focuses instead on the way that attitudes towards cities have affected their development, and, in particular, the tension between the ideals of the urban planners, who have so often achieved the opposite of the utopias they sought to create, and the creative energy of the favelas and shanty towns whose illegal occupants are forced to be entrepreneurial simply in order to survive.
It's a great subject for a book and Ben Wilson can be fascinating when he turns his spotlight on the particular, like his descriptions of the way life carried on as normal during the jacking up of Chicago, block by block, in order to install a sewerage system. But, for my liking, there's a bit too much generalisation and optimistic assertion and not quite enough storytelling.
Interestingly, rather than taking a strictly chronological approach, he focuses instead on the way that attitudes towards cities have affected their development, and, in particular, the tension between the ideals of the urban planners, who have so often achieved the opposite of the utopias they sought to create, and the creative energy of the favelas and shanty towns whose illegal occupants are forced to be entrepreneurial simply in order to survive.
It's a great subject for a book and Ben Wilson can be fascinating when he turns his spotlight on the particular, like his descriptions of the way life carried on as normal during the jacking up of Chicago, block by block, in order to install a sewerage system. But, for my liking, there's a bit too much generalisation and optimistic assertion and not quite enough storytelling.
May 7, 2021
Excellent book. It might just be my favorite book I read of 2021. Metropolis provides an exciting and in-depth review of the history and impact of a variety of cities across the globe.
June 3, 2023
În cartea lui Ben Wilson, orașele ne apar mai mult decât niște aglomerări umane haotice. Ele sunt niște manifestări ale spiritului uman, ale unei tendințe de exprimare a unor nevoi ancestrale de socializare și de autodepășire. Orașele sunt o sumă de contradicții, asemeni naturii umane și asemeni ei, la fel de greu de pătruns. "Clădite pe straturi succesive de istorie a omenirii, împletind aproape neîncetat destinele și experiențele de viață ale oamenilor, orașele sunt pe cât de fascinante, pe atât de imposibil de pătruns și înțeles".
Pentru că istoria, ca un continuum de evenimente a croit odată cu manifestarea puterii politice și civilizația citadină și cultura. Autorul ne dezvăluie zorii civilizației trasând paralele cu prezentul arătându-ne cum umanitatea a parcurs drumul dezvoltării sale păstrându-și caracterul ambiguu, dual exprimat printr-o serie de credințe concurente ce-și găsesc reflexia în structurile orașelor și a orânduirii cetățenești.
Mesopotamia, leagănul civilizației umane, este fascinantă prin inovare și organizare. Orașe precum Eridu și Uruk devin cuptoare ale prefacerii sociale care după milenii de transformări conduc spiritul uman în mătci culturale concurente. Ființele lor materiale, clădiri și culturi, devin prin prisma altor culturi metafore și prototipuri. Babilonul, cu tumultul său social divers, care produce spaimă apartenenților unei culturi sedentare și conservatoare, devine o metaforă a decăderii umane căreia i se opune imaginea transcendentă a Noului Ierusalim.
Wilson captivează prin descrierea evoluțiilor marilor metropole antice și n-ar reuși fără a realiza numeroase paralele intre trecut și prezent și între culturile distincte care ajung să se întrepătrundă între zidurile cetăților. Mesopotamia și valea Indului, Babilonul și Anglia premodernă, Atena și Alexandria antice sunt exemple de descrieri în contrapunct ce subliniază asemănări și contradicții prin transpunerea politicii în dezvoltarea urbanistică.
Călătorind cu Wilson, pătrundem pe străduțele pline de arome ale Bagdadului medieval, cu străzi întrețesute de negustori de gusturi și obiecte prețioase; urmărim dezvoltarea Lisabonei, a Amsterdamului. Redescoperim aroma cafelei în proaspăt deschisle cafenele londoneze care catalizează conexiunile sociale realizând noi culmi ale dezvoltării economiei globale. Trecem prin Paris și metamorfozarea lui într-o metropolă grandioasă. Nici modernitatea americană nu e ocolită și nici megaorașul nigerian Lagos, cu sărăcia și mizeria lui conviețuind cu luxul și bunăstarea.
Povestea orașelor este o poveste a istoriei, și ele se schimbă neîncetat în funcție de suișurile și coborâșurile economiei, în funcție de inovațiile tehnologice, de conflictele militare și de climă. Uruk, Babilon, Atena, Roma, Londra, Paris, New York, "în toate aceste cazuri — și în multe altele din toate timpurile și din toată lumea —, orașul, cu dinamismul lui caracteristic și cu rețelele lui complexe, întrepătrunse, a preluat funcția organizatorică a unei mari corporații ori universități, furnizând cadrul general pentru diviziuni informale — și subdiviziuni — ale forței de muncă, ale schimbului de cunoștințe".
Dacă orașul reprezintă tendința omului de a trăi organizat, de fapt succesul unei astfel de așezări rezidă în echilibrul dintre latura haotică și cea ordonată a unui oraș. Ambele aspecte dau ceea viață unei așezări urbane. "Orașele prosperă când există o interacțiune reciproc dinamică între orașul neplanificat și informal și orașul planificat și oficial, când este loc pentru spontaneitate și experimentare". Wilson ne amintește că o metropolă este un organism cu propriul lui metabolismul, deci o dinamică complexă produsă de nevoia de organizare a omului care ajunge să-l influențeze pe el generație după generație lăsând urme asemeni straturilor de sedimente.
La final, autorul anticipează o schimbare de paradigmă în existența orașelor din cauza mediului natural a cărui influență asupra oamenilor este inevitabilă. "Orașele se vor schimba. Dar nu va fi o schimbare născută din idealism, ci din nevoie". Orașul este ca un organism adaptabil.
Pentru că istoria, ca un continuum de evenimente a croit odată cu manifestarea puterii politice și civilizația citadină și cultura. Autorul ne dezvăluie zorii civilizației trasând paralele cu prezentul arătându-ne cum umanitatea a parcurs drumul dezvoltării sale păstrându-și caracterul ambiguu, dual exprimat printr-o serie de credințe concurente ce-și găsesc reflexia în structurile orașelor și a orânduirii cetățenești.
Mesopotamia, leagănul civilizației umane, este fascinantă prin inovare și organizare. Orașe precum Eridu și Uruk devin cuptoare ale prefacerii sociale care după milenii de transformări conduc spiritul uman în mătci culturale concurente. Ființele lor materiale, clădiri și culturi, devin prin prisma altor culturi metafore și prototipuri. Babilonul, cu tumultul său social divers, care produce spaimă apartenenților unei culturi sedentare și conservatoare, devine o metaforă a decăderii umane căreia i se opune imaginea transcendentă a Noului Ierusalim.
Wilson captivează prin descrierea evoluțiilor marilor metropole antice și n-ar reuși fără a realiza numeroase paralele intre trecut și prezent și între culturile distincte care ajung să se întrepătrundă între zidurile cetăților. Mesopotamia și valea Indului, Babilonul și Anglia premodernă, Atena și Alexandria antice sunt exemple de descrieri în contrapunct ce subliniază asemănări și contradicții prin transpunerea politicii în dezvoltarea urbanistică.
Călătorind cu Wilson, pătrundem pe străduțele pline de arome ale Bagdadului medieval, cu străzi întrețesute de negustori de gusturi și obiecte prețioase; urmărim dezvoltarea Lisabonei, a Amsterdamului. Redescoperim aroma cafelei în proaspăt deschisle cafenele londoneze care catalizează conexiunile sociale realizând noi culmi ale dezvoltării economiei globale. Trecem prin Paris și metamorfozarea lui într-o metropolă grandioasă. Nici modernitatea americană nu e ocolită și nici megaorașul nigerian Lagos, cu sărăcia și mizeria lui conviețuind cu luxul și bunăstarea.
Povestea orașelor este o poveste a istoriei, și ele se schimbă neîncetat în funcție de suișurile și coborâșurile economiei, în funcție de inovațiile tehnologice, de conflictele militare și de climă. Uruk, Babilon, Atena, Roma, Londra, Paris, New York, "în toate aceste cazuri — și în multe altele din toate timpurile și din toată lumea —, orașul, cu dinamismul lui caracteristic și cu rețelele lui complexe, întrepătrunse, a preluat funcția organizatorică a unei mari corporații ori universități, furnizând cadrul general pentru diviziuni informale — și subdiviziuni — ale forței de muncă, ale schimbului de cunoștințe".
Dacă orașul reprezintă tendința omului de a trăi organizat, de fapt succesul unei astfel de așezări rezidă în echilibrul dintre latura haotică și cea ordonată a unui oraș. Ambele aspecte dau ceea viață unei așezări urbane. "Orașele prosperă când există o interacțiune reciproc dinamică între orașul neplanificat și informal și orașul planificat și oficial, când este loc pentru spontaneitate și experimentare". Wilson ne amintește că o metropolă este un organism cu propriul lui metabolismul, deci o dinamică complexă produsă de nevoia de organizare a omului care ajunge să-l influențeze pe el generație după generație lăsând urme asemeni straturilor de sedimente.
La final, autorul anticipează o schimbare de paradigmă în existența orașelor din cauza mediului natural a cărui influență asupra oamenilor este inevitabilă. "Orașele se vor schimba. Dar nu va fi o schimbare născută din idealism, ci din nevoie". Orașul este ca un organism adaptabil.
Read
March 10, 2024DNF. Artful but jumping all over through time and going from mythology to history to archeology. Not my cup of tea.
August 5, 2025
This book was all over the place, which made it hard to rate. There was a lot to love, but I'm mostly going to talk about the problems.
My initial experience with this book was in audiobook format. The narrator did a genuinely pleasant job for the most part, but his forced character accents, which he used for quoted passages, were awful. From literally yelling newspaper headlines about oysters in the accent of a cockney street urchin (causing me to crank down the volume in a rush of pain and confused panic during an otherwise peaceful dinner), to making every U.S. citizen sound like a resident of 1920s Little Italy by way of Hollywood, I hope this narrator continues to read history books to us in his normal voice but never, ever does another character accent in any of them ever again.
Nominally the book is broken into chapters about specific cities across the world, moving chronologically forward through history. For example, in the table of contents we see chapter four is titled Imperial Megacity: Rome, 30 BC-AD 537 while chapter five is Gastropolis: Baghdad, 537-1258. This structure is a big part of what drew me to the book in the first place but there are several issues with it.
The first problem is that upon reading the actual chapters we find the cutoff dates associated with each city to be somewhat randomly chosen, rather than representing any truly important dates in their relevant histories. The only logic I can conjure to explain why the very specific date 537 divides these two chapters, for example, is that the author wanted to create an illusion of linear narrative chronology where none exists. This is unfortunate because this artificial chronology did nothing for me except persistently confuse me.
Another, bigger problem is that any attempts at chronology don't work here anyway because the chapters never actually focus on their titular cities and timeframes. Instead the author uses each chapter setting as a starting point to discuss specific features of that city in that era, before leaping across continents and centuries to discuss related features in entirely different cities and eras (although usually the author's landing point just ends up being modern London). For example, if the chapter is talking about baths or sanitation in an ancient Mediterranean or Mesopotamian city, you can bet it's just a matter of time until the author starts talking about swimming in the Thames or shitting outside the London stock exchange, and he probably won't find his way back to the place and time the chapter is actually named after until said chapter is nearly over. Another example (and the first that really annoyed me, instead of only jarring and confusing me) was in the chapter on Babylon and Harappa, when the author took an interesting discussion of modern myths about ancient Babylonian sin and digressed it straight into a painfully patriarchal undergraduate thesis on sex and prostitution in modern London. At times it feels like the author would rather just be writing a book about London.
This is a serious structural problem. Can this actually be a chapter about ancient Rome, or ancient Babylon, if we just spent a quarter of it in modern London? And because the author does this so frequently, we end up with an entire chapter's worth of London content eating up space across half a dozen other chapters that are supposed to be about something else entirely. If the author wanted to write the book this way, he should have named the chapters according to their actual focus, like "Public baths: From Rome to now". But honestly this rearrangement wouldn't work either with the book's existing content, because the author never traces the development of these city features to a satisfactory degree. He needed to flesh things out much more completely if he wanted to take this route. Instead he starts at some ancient point in the past, and wherever or whenever that was, he jumps it straight to modern London in the next paragraph.
And that brings up the next issue with this book - its topical coverage and historical lens. I've already belabored that we have an entire chapter of London content scattered throughout unrelated chapters. So how is it that the author then also gives us an additional standalone chapter dedicated entirely to London? This book only has 14 chapters, so committing what is effectively two of them to London means 1/7 of a book about the global history of cities is about fucking London. At times it reads like he's trying to tie the entire history of the world together with Jolly Old Imperial Biscuits as the teleological lynchpin.
I don't know about you, but I prefer zero teleological leanings in my history books. On top of that, with my Western education and media environment I am 1000% oversaturated on the history and culture of NYC, modern London, ancient Rome, and ancient Athens, so when I pick up a book about the history of cities you can bet those are the exact four environments I specifically don't want to learn anything more about. Unfortunately for me, they all get chapters in this book, so from that angle I was always going to be disappointed. And sure, you could argue that London in particular deserves an outsized spot given its oversized role in human history as the political seat of half a millennium of British imperial crimes spanning the reaches of the globe - but if we're going by that metric, why not just make this a history of empires rather than a history of cities?
In any case, this book's overfocus on the Western Greatest Hits is worse even than what I've described, because we also get a chapter each on Paris and Los Angeles, and a third split between Manchester and Chicago. (These also happen to be, without contest, the worst chapters of the book, revolving primarily and respectively around: Enlightenment hipsters; the aesthetic preferences of wealthy white supremacists; a discussion of the emergence of industrial class consciousness that somehow only mentions Marx a single time; and a play-by-play on the development of U.S. sports that, naturally, does not shut up.) Coupled with the chapters on NYC, ancient Athens, and ancient Rome, plus the effective two chapters on London, we have a global history of cities in which more than half the content is somehow about England, the United States, and the two ancient cities that every white supremacist nerd is convinced invented everything good in the world. Now maybe my math is bad or maybe it's my history, but it seems like three empires plus one city-state don't actually account for more than half the content of the actual global history of cities?
My next critique of the book goes back to what I said earlier about the London sex thesis wedged right down the middle of the Babylon chapter. That's not the only time such a thing happens. Ben Wilson clumsily meanders through so many tangents on sex and prostitution in this book. Now, yes, sex and prostitution are important parts of the history of cities, but excepting the chapter on Baghdad, he talks about them more than he talks about food, which I'm pretty sure is even more important. And since he's essentially saying the same thing in each of these sex digressions, after a while I started to get the feeling that Ben Wilson was maybe just really horny while writing this book, and I was not disabused of that feeling by the time I finished reading the book.
All of this would be a relatively minor critique except that sex and prostitution aren't just overrepresented here, their presentation is also thoroughly patriarchal. Throughout the book, when sex and prostitution are discussed it is nearly always from a very clear cis-heterosexual man's perspective, which is nevertheless treated in nearly every instance as a neutral default perspective. The author doesn't explicitly address this until quite late in the book (my memory is that he first discussed sex from the perspective of women in the chapter on Paris, which is near the end of the book) and he never gives an explanation for why he was ignoring it beforehand. As a result, we get a book that is not only overwhelmingly biased toward the capitals of white supremacy, but also overwhelmingly biased toward men as both the primary readers and the primary shapers of history. For a history book written in 2020, this archaic assumption is honestly inexcusable, not simply for ethical reasons but for didactic and epistemic ones too. The man-centric perspective of history is factually wrong and has been known as such for decades among all serious researchers of history and all its related disciplines, from sociology to anthropology. To quote every progressive liberal ever (something I normally avoid): Do better.
On a related note I have to mention a distasteful trend the author picks up as the book progresses, in which he moves from critiquing early mercantile capitalism to praising modern neoliberalism (though he does not use the latter phrase explicitly). The transition is relatively subtle, which makes me think the author is trying to pin the ills of capitalism on its earlier, more superficially warlike forms. (For an antidote to this naive framework I recommend the books Washington bullets by Vijay Prashad and What is antiracism and why it means anticapitalism by Arun Kundnani, which detail extensively the many forms of violence inherent to modern neoliberalism.) However, what really gave me the ick was the author treating slums in the last few chapters as a kind of nobly savage realm of innovation and community where, when you think about it, people are lucky to live in the forced squalor that is the inevitable result of capitalism, because it means they get to invent things and rely on social networks!
It's a disgusting viewpoint that reminded me, more than anything, of white supremacist Hollywood movies. You know the ones, where the Black American slaves and the Indian slaves are all smiling jovially all the time cuz golly darn, they're just so happy to serve their White U.S. and British masters, respectively! After all, what is a colonial slaveowner if not the rightful father of a righteous extended family? That's the image that flashed into my head every time Ben Wilson went off on another rapturous reverie about the secretly transcendent lives of megaslum residents (or whatever drier but functionally equivalent phrasing he used): The beaten and murdered smiling happily at those who beat and murder them. (Read Liberalism by Domenico Losurdo to learn more about how this attitude has played out ad nauseam over the centuries.)
My final major critique is reserved for the final chapter, which is titled Megacity: Lagos, 1999-2020. Shamefully, it is the only African city to get a chapter to itself in an entire book on the global history of cities (even Alexandria shares a chapter with Athens) - but that's still better than the standard nothing, so even before starting the book proper I was excited for this chapter simply from having looked at the table of contents. Then, after the nearly unbroken, excruciatingly boring late-book slog of London, Manchester, Chicago, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles, I wasn't just excited for this chapter anymore, I was craving it. To add even more anticipation, in a history of cities this is the only chapter about one whose surge to prominence is happening now, so I was extremely curious how the author would handle it.
Imagine, then, my growing confusion, frustration, and eventually anger when Lagos was not even mentioned until roughly half an hour into the chapter. Proper discussion of the city didn't begin until several minutes after that. In a chapter 1.5 hours long, the first third did not even mention the topic of the chapter. What, then, took up all this space? Thankfully, it wasn't another digression into the sex life of London. It was actually interesting content, weaving together conceptual threads from the rest of the book into a discussion primarily about climate change and population dynamics and how these will impact the future of cities. However, just like the endless London interludes, my issue with this material is that it's in the wrong fucking spot.
In short, the first third of the final chapter is, in both content and tone, quite obviously a short conclusion chapter that, for some unknown but regardless terrible reason, was artificially crammed into the start of the final proper numbered chapter. Was this decision on the part of the author, editor, or publisher? Did they think a chapter on an African city couldn't hold its own, so they merged it with the conclusion chapter? Did they think readers would skip the conclusion chapter, so they hid it at the start of what should have been the book's most interesting chapter? Most bafflingly of all, did they think readers wouldn't notice? I don't know the answers to any of these questions but I guess it doesn't really matter, because every answer I can think of is insulting in some way.
Yet after all that critique I'm still giving this book three stars, because pretty much everything I didn't already mention was enjoyable and informative, sometimes deeply so. I was fascinated by (and learned an enormous amount from) the chapters on Uruk, Harappa, Babylon, Baghdad, Lubeck, Lisbon, Malacca, Tenochtitlan, Amsterdam, Warsaw, and even the part of the Lagos chapter that was actually about Lagos (after the book's conclusion had concluded). I'm not going to articulate what I loved about these chapters, because there was a lot and this review is already enormous. But if after all my criticisms you're still curious to see the good side of this book, these are the chapters I recommend.
These cities each deserved more space, and so did many other cities from Africa, Asia, and South America - including many that have played much greater roles in global history than, say, Chicago. Many of them are crammed together unjustly (Harappa and Babylon shared one chapter; Lisbon, Malacca, Tenochtitlan, and Amsterdam shared another). Yet within them I found some of my favorite reading experiences of the past few years. Thus we are left with a solid third of this book that I loved, a third that I hated, and a third that lay somewhere in between. So, it looks like we're landing on three stars.
After all, even the book's conclusion was mostly enjoyable, despite being placed where a conclusion isn't supposed to go, and that kind of sums up this book as well as anything can.
My initial experience with this book was in audiobook format. The narrator did a genuinely pleasant job for the most part, but his forced character accents, which he used for quoted passages, were awful. From literally yelling newspaper headlines about oysters in the accent of a cockney street urchin (causing me to crank down the volume in a rush of pain and confused panic during an otherwise peaceful dinner), to making every U.S. citizen sound like a resident of 1920s Little Italy by way of Hollywood, I hope this narrator continues to read history books to us in his normal voice but never, ever does another character accent in any of them ever again.
Nominally the book is broken into chapters about specific cities across the world, moving chronologically forward through history. For example, in the table of contents we see chapter four is titled Imperial Megacity: Rome, 30 BC-AD 537 while chapter five is Gastropolis: Baghdad, 537-1258. This structure is a big part of what drew me to the book in the first place but there are several issues with it.
The first problem is that upon reading the actual chapters we find the cutoff dates associated with each city to be somewhat randomly chosen, rather than representing any truly important dates in their relevant histories. The only logic I can conjure to explain why the very specific date 537 divides these two chapters, for example, is that the author wanted to create an illusion of linear narrative chronology where none exists. This is unfortunate because this artificial chronology did nothing for me except persistently confuse me.
Another, bigger problem is that any attempts at chronology don't work here anyway because the chapters never actually focus on their titular cities and timeframes. Instead the author uses each chapter setting as a starting point to discuss specific features of that city in that era, before leaping across continents and centuries to discuss related features in entirely different cities and eras (although usually the author's landing point just ends up being modern London). For example, if the chapter is talking about baths or sanitation in an ancient Mediterranean or Mesopotamian city, you can bet it's just a matter of time until the author starts talking about swimming in the Thames or shitting outside the London stock exchange, and he probably won't find his way back to the place and time the chapter is actually named after until said chapter is nearly over. Another example (and the first that really annoyed me, instead of only jarring and confusing me) was in the chapter on Babylon and Harappa, when the author took an interesting discussion of modern myths about ancient Babylonian sin and digressed it straight into a painfully patriarchal undergraduate thesis on sex and prostitution in modern London. At times it feels like the author would rather just be writing a book about London.
This is a serious structural problem. Can this actually be a chapter about ancient Rome, or ancient Babylon, if we just spent a quarter of it in modern London? And because the author does this so frequently, we end up with an entire chapter's worth of London content eating up space across half a dozen other chapters that are supposed to be about something else entirely. If the author wanted to write the book this way, he should have named the chapters according to their actual focus, like "Public baths: From Rome to now". But honestly this rearrangement wouldn't work either with the book's existing content, because the author never traces the development of these city features to a satisfactory degree. He needed to flesh things out much more completely if he wanted to take this route. Instead he starts at some ancient point in the past, and wherever or whenever that was, he jumps it straight to modern London in the next paragraph.
And that brings up the next issue with this book - its topical coverage and historical lens. I've already belabored that we have an entire chapter of London content scattered throughout unrelated chapters. So how is it that the author then also gives us an additional standalone chapter dedicated entirely to London? This book only has 14 chapters, so committing what is effectively two of them to London means 1/7 of a book about the global history of cities is about fucking London. At times it reads like he's trying to tie the entire history of the world together with Jolly Old Imperial Biscuits as the teleological lynchpin.
I don't know about you, but I prefer zero teleological leanings in my history books. On top of that, with my Western education and media environment I am 1000% oversaturated on the history and culture of NYC, modern London, ancient Rome, and ancient Athens, so when I pick up a book about the history of cities you can bet those are the exact four environments I specifically don't want to learn anything more about. Unfortunately for me, they all get chapters in this book, so from that angle I was always going to be disappointed. And sure, you could argue that London in particular deserves an outsized spot given its oversized role in human history as the political seat of half a millennium of British imperial crimes spanning the reaches of the globe - but if we're going by that metric, why not just make this a history of empires rather than a history of cities?
In any case, this book's overfocus on the Western Greatest Hits is worse even than what I've described, because we also get a chapter each on Paris and Los Angeles, and a third split between Manchester and Chicago. (These also happen to be, without contest, the worst chapters of the book, revolving primarily and respectively around: Enlightenment hipsters; the aesthetic preferences of wealthy white supremacists; a discussion of the emergence of industrial class consciousness that somehow only mentions Marx a single time; and a play-by-play on the development of U.S. sports that, naturally, does not shut up.) Coupled with the chapters on NYC, ancient Athens, and ancient Rome, plus the effective two chapters on London, we have a global history of cities in which more than half the content is somehow about England, the United States, and the two ancient cities that every white supremacist nerd is convinced invented everything good in the world. Now maybe my math is bad or maybe it's my history, but it seems like three empires plus one city-state don't actually account for more than half the content of the actual global history of cities?
My next critique of the book goes back to what I said earlier about the London sex thesis wedged right down the middle of the Babylon chapter. That's not the only time such a thing happens. Ben Wilson clumsily meanders through so many tangents on sex and prostitution in this book. Now, yes, sex and prostitution are important parts of the history of cities, but excepting the chapter on Baghdad, he talks about them more than he talks about food, which I'm pretty sure is even more important. And since he's essentially saying the same thing in each of these sex digressions, after a while I started to get the feeling that Ben Wilson was maybe just really horny while writing this book, and I was not disabused of that feeling by the time I finished reading the book.
All of this would be a relatively minor critique except that sex and prostitution aren't just overrepresented here, their presentation is also thoroughly patriarchal. Throughout the book, when sex and prostitution are discussed it is nearly always from a very clear cis-heterosexual man's perspective, which is nevertheless treated in nearly every instance as a neutral default perspective. The author doesn't explicitly address this until quite late in the book (my memory is that he first discussed sex from the perspective of women in the chapter on Paris, which is near the end of the book) and he never gives an explanation for why he was ignoring it beforehand. As a result, we get a book that is not only overwhelmingly biased toward the capitals of white supremacy, but also overwhelmingly biased toward men as both the primary readers and the primary shapers of history. For a history book written in 2020, this archaic assumption is honestly inexcusable, not simply for ethical reasons but for didactic and epistemic ones too. The man-centric perspective of history is factually wrong and has been known as such for decades among all serious researchers of history and all its related disciplines, from sociology to anthropology. To quote every progressive liberal ever (something I normally avoid): Do better.
On a related note I have to mention a distasteful trend the author picks up as the book progresses, in which he moves from critiquing early mercantile capitalism to praising modern neoliberalism (though he does not use the latter phrase explicitly). The transition is relatively subtle, which makes me think the author is trying to pin the ills of capitalism on its earlier, more superficially warlike forms. (For an antidote to this naive framework I recommend the books Washington bullets by Vijay Prashad and What is antiracism and why it means anticapitalism by Arun Kundnani, which detail extensively the many forms of violence inherent to modern neoliberalism.) However, what really gave me the ick was the author treating slums in the last few chapters as a kind of nobly savage realm of innovation and community where, when you think about it, people are lucky to live in the forced squalor that is the inevitable result of capitalism, because it means they get to invent things and rely on social networks!
It's a disgusting viewpoint that reminded me, more than anything, of white supremacist Hollywood movies. You know the ones, where the Black American slaves and the Indian slaves are all smiling jovially all the time cuz golly darn, they're just so happy to serve their White U.S. and British masters, respectively! After all, what is a colonial slaveowner if not the rightful father of a righteous extended family? That's the image that flashed into my head every time Ben Wilson went off on another rapturous reverie about the secretly transcendent lives of megaslum residents (or whatever drier but functionally equivalent phrasing he used): The beaten and murdered smiling happily at those who beat and murder them. (Read Liberalism by Domenico Losurdo to learn more about how this attitude has played out ad nauseam over the centuries.)
My final major critique is reserved for the final chapter, which is titled Megacity: Lagos, 1999-2020. Shamefully, it is the only African city to get a chapter to itself in an entire book on the global history of cities (even Alexandria shares a chapter with Athens) - but that's still better than the standard nothing, so even before starting the book proper I was excited for this chapter simply from having looked at the table of contents. Then, after the nearly unbroken, excruciatingly boring late-book slog of London, Manchester, Chicago, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles, I wasn't just excited for this chapter anymore, I was craving it. To add even more anticipation, in a history of cities this is the only chapter about one whose surge to prominence is happening now, so I was extremely curious how the author would handle it.
Imagine, then, my growing confusion, frustration, and eventually anger when Lagos was not even mentioned until roughly half an hour into the chapter. Proper discussion of the city didn't begin until several minutes after that. In a chapter 1.5 hours long, the first third did not even mention the topic of the chapter. What, then, took up all this space? Thankfully, it wasn't another digression into the sex life of London. It was actually interesting content, weaving together conceptual threads from the rest of the book into a discussion primarily about climate change and population dynamics and how these will impact the future of cities. However, just like the endless London interludes, my issue with this material is that it's in the wrong fucking spot.
In short, the first third of the final chapter is, in both content and tone, quite obviously a short conclusion chapter that, for some unknown but regardless terrible reason, was artificially crammed into the start of the final proper numbered chapter. Was this decision on the part of the author, editor, or publisher? Did they think a chapter on an African city couldn't hold its own, so they merged it with the conclusion chapter? Did they think readers would skip the conclusion chapter, so they hid it at the start of what should have been the book's most interesting chapter? Most bafflingly of all, did they think readers wouldn't notice? I don't know the answers to any of these questions but I guess it doesn't really matter, because every answer I can think of is insulting in some way.
Yet after all that critique I'm still giving this book three stars, because pretty much everything I didn't already mention was enjoyable and informative, sometimes deeply so. I was fascinated by (and learned an enormous amount from) the chapters on Uruk, Harappa, Babylon, Baghdad, Lubeck, Lisbon, Malacca, Tenochtitlan, Amsterdam, Warsaw, and even the part of the Lagos chapter that was actually about Lagos (after the book's conclusion had concluded). I'm not going to articulate what I loved about these chapters, because there was a lot and this review is already enormous. But if after all my criticisms you're still curious to see the good side of this book, these are the chapters I recommend.
These cities each deserved more space, and so did many other cities from Africa, Asia, and South America - including many that have played much greater roles in global history than, say, Chicago. Many of them are crammed together unjustly (Harappa and Babylon shared one chapter; Lisbon, Malacca, Tenochtitlan, and Amsterdam shared another). Yet within them I found some of my favorite reading experiences of the past few years. Thus we are left with a solid third of this book that I loved, a third that I hated, and a third that lay somewhere in between. So, it looks like we're landing on three stars.
After all, even the book's conclusion was mostly enjoyable, despite being placed where a conclusion isn't supposed to go, and that kind of sums up this book as well as anything can.
September 13, 2022
I’m going to review this book in three parts, unprecedented as this is for a McCluskey™ review, I feel it is warranted in this case.
Chapters preceding the Paris chapter, 4 ⭐️: I really enjoyed this section of the book. It concerns the ancient, middle age and pre-modern city and goes into interesting detail about how cities formed and their purposes prior to the scientific revolution (c.1500). It is full of information about where the processes of the city have their origins and how they came to be. Great section.
Manchester, Chicago and Paris chapters, 1 ⭐️: This is the first time I’ve skipped a section of a book; the Manchester and Chicago section wasn’t great but the Paris chapter was so excruciatingly boring that it was necessary to leave it behind. It started with promise, about how the city’s layout changed under Napoleon III, however, the interest stops there. Wilson goes on to describe, in minute detail, works of art in an extremely poetic manner which is a radical and unwelcome change of style to how the former chapters were written. Shite section.
Chapters following the Paris chapter, 3 ⭐️: The poetry didn’t stop in Paris unfortunately but it made its exit as WWII rolled onto the page, which is where the book really picks up again. Full of interesting details, facts and stories about how ubiquitous things and processes came to be is what I look for in a history book and this section of the book carries this style on from the beginning. Decent section.
Overall I wouldn’t recommend this book to Lucy, a couple of chapters were interesting enough, however, it was such a grind to finish it I can’t put anyone through that again.
Chapters preceding the Paris chapter, 4 ⭐️: I really enjoyed this section of the book. It concerns the ancient, middle age and pre-modern city and goes into interesting detail about how cities formed and their purposes prior to the scientific revolution (c.1500). It is full of information about where the processes of the city have their origins and how they came to be. Great section.
Manchester, Chicago and Paris chapters, 1 ⭐️: This is the first time I’ve skipped a section of a book; the Manchester and Chicago section wasn’t great but the Paris chapter was so excruciatingly boring that it was necessary to leave it behind. It started with promise, about how the city’s layout changed under Napoleon III, however, the interest stops there. Wilson goes on to describe, in minute detail, works of art in an extremely poetic manner which is a radical and unwelcome change of style to how the former chapters were written. Shite section.
Chapters following the Paris chapter, 3 ⭐️: The poetry didn’t stop in Paris unfortunately but it made its exit as WWII rolled onto the page, which is where the book really picks up again. Full of interesting details, facts and stories about how ubiquitous things and processes came to be is what I look for in a history book and this section of the book carries this style on from the beginning. Decent section.
Overall I wouldn’t recommend this book to Lucy, a couple of chapters were interesting enough, however, it was such a grind to finish it I can’t put anyone through that again.
September 29, 2023
Más que un libro nos encontramos ante una colección de mini ensayos, algunos curiosos (la breve reseña a la adaptación de algunas aves a los entornos urbanos modernos), algunos no tanto y algunos un poco cansinos (lo de los romanos y los baños es para hacérselo mirar, en serio no había otra cosa que tratar sobre la Roma republicana y/o imperial).
Con todo mi principal problema con este libro es doble. Por una parte, proyecta valores, actitudes y comportamientos actuales hacia el pasado y eso, desde mi punto de vista, es un error mayúsculo, no hace falta retrotraerse 100, ni 500 ni 1.000 años para ver que no son iguales, basta con que nos fijemos en nuestros padres o abuelos o nuestros hijos o nietos, cada cual que coja su opción, no somos iguales. Por otra parte, tiene el vicio de los malos historiadores, expone una teoría o una argumentación con la que se puede estar o no de acuerdo, pero oculta el resto de posibilidades y es más, sólo aporta los datos históricos o sociológicos que corroboran su exposición, ocultando aquellos que la debilitarían. No obstante, hay que ser justos, como dije al principio, más que un libro es una colección de mini ensayos y, si tenemos esto en cuenta, es lógico, por un tema de extensión, que obvie determinados aspectos (como en CSI que siempre encuentran la colilla clave al primer intento, no se van a tirar 20 minutos recolectando colillas).
En definitiva, un texto con elementos curiosos, pero los que tengan cierto fondo de armario mejor que dediquen su tiempo a otros asuntos como tricotar, dar de comer al canario, hacer puñetas o cortarse los padrastros.
Con todo mi principal problema con este libro es doble. Por una parte, proyecta valores, actitudes y comportamientos actuales hacia el pasado y eso, desde mi punto de vista, es un error mayúsculo, no hace falta retrotraerse 100, ni 500 ni 1.000 años para ver que no son iguales, basta con que nos fijemos en nuestros padres o abuelos o nuestros hijos o nietos, cada cual que coja su opción, no somos iguales. Por otra parte, tiene el vicio de los malos historiadores, expone una teoría o una argumentación con la que se puede estar o no de acuerdo, pero oculta el resto de posibilidades y es más, sólo aporta los datos históricos o sociológicos que corroboran su exposición, ocultando aquellos que la debilitarían. No obstante, hay que ser justos, como dije al principio, más que un libro es una colección de mini ensayos y, si tenemos esto en cuenta, es lógico, por un tema de extensión, que obvie determinados aspectos (como en CSI que siempre encuentran la colilla clave al primer intento, no se van a tirar 20 minutos recolectando colillas).
En definitiva, un texto con elementos curiosos, pero los que tengan cierto fondo de armario mejor que dediquen su tiempo a otros asuntos como tricotar, dar de comer al canario, hacer puñetas o cortarse los padrastros.
September 5, 2022
Extraordinario libro. Se trata de un viaje histórico a través de varias ciudades. Mezcla de forma brillante el pasado con hechos y realidades actuales.
July 10, 2022
“Метрополис” – градовете през хилядолетията: http://knigolandia.info/book-review/m...
“Метрополис” на Бен Уилсън е една от най-впечатляващите книги, които съм чел в последно време – шеметно пътешествие през историята на човечеството, погледната през призмата на градовете от различни епохи. Авторът обаче не просто ож��вява образите на тези градове от миналото и настоящето, той търси как те самите влияят на хората, които ги населяват, и как всяко от тези населени места е станало символ на голяма промяна за цивилизацията изобщо. Във всяка от главите авторът не се задоволява да описва историята на избрания град, а успява да прави паралели със съвременни градове и как в тях се появяват тенденци, които задвижват колелото на нестихващата промяна.
Издателство "Изток-Запад"
http://knigolandia.info/book-review/m...
“Метрополис” на Бен Уилсън е една от най-впечатляващите книги, които съм чел в последно време – шеметно пътешествие през историята на човечеството, погледната през призмата на градовете от различни епохи. Авторът обаче не просто ож��вява образите на тези градове от миналото и настоящето, той търси как те самите влияят на хората, които ги населяват, и как всяко от тези населени места е станало символ на голяма промяна за цивилизацията изобщо. Във всяка от главите авторът не се задоволява да описва историята на избрания град, а успява да прави паралели със съвременни градове и как в тях се появяват тенденци, които задвижват колелото на нестихващата промяна.
Издателство "Изток-Запад"
http://knigolandia.info/book-review/m...
August 4, 2023
Found it very interesting. It's good as an audiobook - there's some bits which could be condensed, the same argument made in different words, but the repetition works very well in audio mode. Each chapter covers a different city, but actually more like covers a different topic, taking that city as an example but bringing in other places for discussion too.
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