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

“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.”

“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.”