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

“ 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.”

“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.”