Susan in NC’s Reviews > Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention > Status Update

“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 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...”