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“ But where medieval cities excelled was in the development of humankind’s most technologically complex machine before the spacecraft: the ship. The evolution of the Venetian great galley, the Hanseatic cog and the Portuguese caravel and carrack as vessels, interchangeably, of war and commerce was the work primarily of the competing European maritime cities.”

“ Business always came first. The Hansa fought for gold and profit, not God and country; they were led not by kings, earls and knights, but by merchants, town councillors and mayors.”

“ In 1252 bankers from Genoa and Florence began minting gold coins. Bullion coin had not been issued on the continent for well over five centuries. Gold, credit and global trade heralded the rejuvenation of the European economy and the rebirth of cities.”

“ There was an intimate connection between holy war and Europe’s urban take-off, beginning in the twelfth century and gathering momentum in the thirteenth. In the second half of the thirteenth century some 300 new towns were being created in central Europe every decade.”

“ The destruction, in the thirteenth century, of several global cities—Palembang, Merv, Kiev, Baghdad and Constantinople—disrupted ancient patterns of world trade. But this titanic disruption sparked the emergence of new cities and urban cultures. The thirteenth century was to be pivotal in the history of urbanisation.”

“By pioneering smart-city technologies and green policies and trumpeting its architecture, cleanliness, safety and quality of life, [Singapore] offers an Asian alternative to the West. Placed deliberately at the centre of the Asian Civilisations Museum, the Belitung shipwreck, and the world it represents, foregrounds a time when Asia was the world’s urban powerhouse and Europe was an unsophisticated…backwater.”

“…we know more about Uruk in the fourth millennium BC than we do about Palembang in the eleventh century AD. Indeed, much of the medieval Indian Ocean urban world is like that: it was an ever-shifting, free-flowing, outward-looking culture, that left scant remains in its wake.”

“Palembang was where the traders of the two greatest empires on earth, those of the Abbasid caliphate and the Tang dynasty, encountered one another. For centuries a booming, busy, cosmopolitan place, Palembang ranks as one of the great vanished world metropolises of history. Unfortunately, not much remains of the city; the Sri Vijayan Empire was wiped off the face of the earth in the thirteenth century…”

“ One of the hallmarks of the Islamic renaissance was the way in which masses of knowledge—both ancient and modern—were brought together, synthesised, and simplified for everyday use. In other words, it was utilitarian. Mathematics, astronomy and geography were the keys to world mastery because they produced, among other things, maps and navigational aids.”

“ By the middle of the ninth century Baghdad was by far the biggest storehouse of knowledge in the world. The Bait al-Hikma—the House of Wisdom—was a massive royal archive of manuscripts and books. The concept of Baghdad as the “crossroads of the universe” did not just apply to trade.”

“ The Abbasid caliphs regarded their city as “the navel of the universe,” and its perfect roundness was an embodiment of that metaphor. Mesopotamia was considered to be the centre of the world, and Baghdad the centre of Mesopotamia.”

“Throughout the Middle Ages, nineteen of the world’s twenty largest cities were Muslim or in the Chinese Empire... (The only non-Muslim, non-Chinese city on the list was Constantinople.)... For Europe it was the Dark Ages; most of the rest of the world, however, enjoyed a golden age. For Europe it was the Dark Ages; most of the rest of the world, however, enjoyed a golden age.”

“ But in this world of long-distance trade and multiplying connections, there was one place rich and powerful enough to generate the heat of global trade. The preserved cargo of the Belitung shipwreck represents just a sliver of the exotic wonders that streamed to Baghdad not just from China and south-east Asia but from central Asia, the steppes, the Levant, Africa and the Mediterranean.”

“One unspectacular cargo ship travelling in a single season illustrates in startling colours an intermeshed world. The diverse merchandise shows how widely tastes in household ware and food were spreading and hybridising…Its sinking in the Java Sea represented the loss of money and, without doubt, life; but its recent discovery has revolutionised how we see the Middle Ages.”

“ Roman soldiers expected, as a minimal condition of their service, to be bathed and entertained as if they were in Rome, or at least their home cities in Italy, southern France or elsewhere in the empire. In the cold, soggy north, baths provided troops deprived of the Mediterranean sunshine with much-needed warmth.”

“Occupations in squares and parks across the globe were self-consciously a critique of the contemporary metropolis, and an attempt to re-create a kind of ideal, utopian city within the existing city—places where political dissent and discussion rub shoulders with performance, satire, food, recreation, markets and social interaction—at a time when urban public life appeared to have subordinated…”

“ The post-9/11 era has made security and surveillance a key feature of city centres, places where movement and activities are monitored. Across the planet, public areas have in many cases been privatised, sanitised and regulated. Malls, shopping centres, financial districts and shopping streets are neither fully public nor private, but something in between.”

“ When he wrote that “a human being is by nature a political animal,” Aristotle did not necessarily mean we love the nitty-gritty of political drama. A better translation might be that we are by nature “a city animal”: we tend to coalesce together to satisfy our needs and form culture. For the Greeks, the city was the natural state of humankind and a sacred thing in itself.”

“At the heart of Greek society was the polis. It is the root of words connoting things urban—“metropolis,” “metropolitan” and “cosmopolitan”—as well as those to do with the organisation of human society itself—“polity,” “politics” and “political.” …Put simply, the polis was a political, religious, military and economic community of free (male) citizens organised within an urban environment.”

“Excellent navigators, sailors and entrepreneurs, the Phoenicians pushed farther into the western Mediterranean than anyone else…The urban world exploded onto the European and African coast with the proliferation of Phoenician trading stations and colonies. The most famous of them was called “New Town”…better known as Carthage, that…centuries later, grew to contest with Rome for control of the Mediterranean.”

“Babylon’s end was a 1,500-year long whimper, not a sudden bang. But myth overtook reality. Suspicious of all things oriental, the Greeks were eager to make the Mesopotamian cities seem as despotic, luxurious and decadent as they could in order to magnify the glories of their own urban civilisation and obscure their debt to their eastern neighbours.”

“The gay city existed in parallel with the straight city. Negotiating it meant constructing an entirely different mental map of the city and code of behaviour to avoid the dangers of violence, blackmail and arrest. You had to know which pubs, coffee houses, bathhouses and clubs were safe; you had to learn a series of visual codes and cues and turns of phrase.”

“Most remarkable of all was the crowning glory of Indus urban planning, its citywide sewerage system. Forget great public edifices soaring above the rooftops. The most important aspect of Mohenjo-Daro lay under street…Few things symbolise collective civic endeavour more than the seriousness with which a city deals with its daily tonnage of human waste. The builders of the Indus cities put that consideration first.”

“… History is littered with utopian schemes to rip up the messy city and replace it with a scientifically planned alternative. Le Corbusier never got his chance to demolish Paris or New York and start over. But experiments in modernist architecture—high-rise towers in the park—changed the face of cities throughout the world and the lives of people who lived in them after the Second World War.”

“ The rat is a symbol of city life. And the menacing, teeming masses inhabiting the dark recesses of the city have been frequently likened to rats: trapped in the overcrowded metropolis, separated from nature, they become subhuman and a threat to the entire social order.”

“The rebellious people of Babel were separated, given different languages, and dispersed. The city stands for corruption, confusion and fragmentation…the cities of the second and first millennia BC were sources of violence and lust, the antipathy of the pastoral idyll and the good life. That thinking has coloured views of the city down to our own times. There is a deep strain of anti-urbanism in Western culture.”

“In Genesis the city is humankind’s ultimate symbol of hubris. God commanded people to go forth and populate the earth. But in direct contradiction of the commandment, people began herding into cities and filling them with symbols of their self-pride.”