Susan in NC’s Reviews > Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention > Status Update
Susan in NC
is 33% done
“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.”
— Oct 15, 2026 05:38PM
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Susan in NC’s Previous Updates
Susan in NC
is 44% done
“… the revolution occurring in Amsterdam was truly mind-blowing. Contemporary visitors puzzled why a small waterlogged city could become so rich and powerful so quickly. The answer had a lot to do with the city itself. The ethos of the city was moneymaking and the removal of obstacles to its fulfilment. Religious persecution was bad for business; free discussion and political liberties were good for it.”
— 3 minutes ago
Susan in NC
is 43% done
“…at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the flow of goods transformed Amsterdam into a leviathan. Exiles from Antwerp brought with them large amounts of capital, but also sophisticated financial techniques…The Amsterdamsche Wisselbank (Amsterdam Exchange Bank), founded in 1609, invented many of the things we take for granted in modern banking…”
— 10 minutes ago
Susan in NC
is 41% done
“ If one place on earth symbolised the shock of the new during the Renaissance and the collision of cultures, it was surely this city. Lisbon’s triumph meant the decline of Venice and a string of Asian metropolises, most notably Malacca. Here is the tale of one global city engrossing its rivals and growing fat on their carcasses.”
— 40 minutes ago
Susan in NC
is 40% done
“Within a few years, Calicut, one of the world’s great cities, was ruined…Faced with this brutal and persistent intimidation, and without the means to defend themselves, the cities of the Malabar coast began to come to terms with the violent incomers. The Portuguese established a protection racket over the whole ocean, obliging ships to purchase certificates or face annihilation.”
— 52 minutes ago
Susan in NC
is 40% done
“ Fuelled by the dreams of a visionary king, the desire for wealth beyond the horizon, and by religious zeal, Lisbon had been propelled from relative obscurity into the very first rank of European metropolises.”
— 1 hour, 4 min ago
Susan in NC
is 39% done
“ In 1500 seven of the world’s twelve largest metropolises—Vijayanagara, Gauda, Guangzhou, Beijing, Nanjing, Hangzhou and Tabriz—were in Asia. Benin City in modern-day Nigeria, the largest city in sub-Saharan Africa, and Tenochtitlan in Mesoamerica were both bigger than Paris, which with 185,000 people was the only Christian European city in the top twelve. The urban heartland of the world remained in Asia.”
— 1 hour, 15 min ago
Susan in NC
is 38% done
“ 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.”
— 23 hours, 1 min ago
Susan in NC
is 37% done
“ 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.”
— 23 hours, 6 min ago
Susan in NC
is 34% done
“ 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.”
— Oct 15, 2026 06:56PM
Susan in NC
is 34% done
“ 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.”
— Oct 15, 2026 05:49PM