Status Updates From Metropolis: A History of th...

“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.”

“ Uruk and the Mesopotamian cities speak powerfully to us. The ghosts of once mighty centres laid waste by climate change and economic decline, they are haunting reminders of the ultimate fate of all cities.”

“…by 700 the mysterious ruins were completely abandoned, almost 5,000 years after Uruk had arisen from the marshes to greatness. Deprived of irrigation, the great wheat fields were swallowed up by desert. When the city was rediscovered in 1849 it was a buried ruin…Its discoverers found it hard to believe that a great urban civilisation could have flourished so long before biblical times...”

“ Here, then, are Uruk’s two gifts to the world: urbanisation and the written word. The first achievement led to the second. This was not a society afraid of radical innovation or assaults on established ways of thinking. Writing and mathematics emerged from the urban cauldron as an administrative technique of managing complexity.”

“ If Uruk was an experiment in how humans might live and thrive together, it proved highly attractive. People adopted Uruk’s religious ideology, its dietary habits and social structures. Like a mighty seed head, Uruk broadcast its culture over a huge distance. It was the mother city, the world’s original metropolis.”

“Innovation begat innovation. The high temperature of the potters’ kiln was used for experiments in metallurgy and chemical processes. Mesopotamian boatmen were the first to use a sail. It is a memorable and counterintuitive fact that the invention of the city came long before the invention of the wheel.”

“The end of the last Ice Age, approximately 11,700 years ago, profoundly altered human life on earth. Around the world, hunter-gatherer societies began to cultivate and domesticate wild crops that benefited from a warming planet. But it was the Fertile Crescent—a semicircle that stretches from the Nile in the west through to the Persian Gulf in the east…that provided the most favourable area for agriculture.”

“ “Uruk” means simply “the city.” It was the world’s first city and for over 1,000 years its most powerful urban centre. When people clustered into vast communities things changed with incredible velocity; the citizens of Uruk pioneered world-changing technologies and experienced radically new ways of living, dressing, eating and thinking.”

“ Cities from Uruk and Babylon to Rome, Teotihuacan and Byzantium, from Baghdad and Venice to Paris, New York and Shanghai, have bedazzled people as the idealised cities of the imagination made real, the pinnacles of human creativity.”

“ This global urban sprawl is pushing our cities into wetlands, wildernesses, rainforests, estuaries, mangrove forests, floodplains and agricultural land—with devastating consequences for biodiversity and the climate. Mountains are being moved to make way for this epic splurge of urbanisation.”

“ This is not a book just about grand buildings or urban planning; it is about the people who settled in cities and the ways they found to cope with and survive the pressure cooker of urban life. That is not to say that architecture is not important: it is the interaction between the built environment and humans that is at the heart of urban life, and of this book.”

“ The rapid proliferation of skyscrapers and shanty towns alike heralds the present “urban century.” Citizens of even the most strained megacity earn more, educate their children better and enjoy greater material comforts than their rural cousins.”

“1 billion people—one out of every four city-dwellers—lives in a slum, shanty town, favela, barrio, township, kampung, campamento, gecekondu, villa miseria, or whatever name is given to these kinds of unplanned, self-built urban areas. Some 61% of the global workforce—2 billion people—make their living off the books, in the informal economy, many of them feeding, clothing and housing expanding urban populations.”

“Plagues, pandemics and diseases have coursed along trade routes and mercilessly ravaged dense urban areas since the first cities. In 1854 6% of Chicago’s population was killed by cholera. But it did not stop people herding to the miracle metropolis of the nineteenth century: its population surged from 30,000 at the beginning of the 1850s to 112,000 by the end.”

“ Younger, better educated, richer and more multicultural than their national populations, global cities have more in common with each other. In many modern societies the deepest divide is not age, race, class or urban versus rural: it is between big metropolises and the villages, suburbs, towns and cities that have been left behind in the globalised knowledge economy.”

“ Technological, artistic and financial innovations occur when experts cluster: humans thrive when they share knowledge, collaborate and compete in face-to-face settings—and in particular in places that facilitate information flows. Where once cities tried to woo big manufacturing plants or capture a share of world trade, they now compete for brains.”