A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention. Dive into “Metropolis,” where Ben Wilson masterfully unravels the fabric of urban life, revealing a tapestry rich with innovation and human spirit. This compelling narrative captures the essence of cities as the heartbeat of civilization.
Embark on this enlightening exploration of humanity’s greatest invention; continue reading to uncover the transformative power of cities.
Table of Contents
Genres
History, Education, Society, Culture, Urban Studies, Sociology, Architecture, Urban Planning, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Geography, Environmental Studies, Economics
“Metropolis” by Ben Wilson is a vibrant chronicle of urban development, tracing the evolution of cities from ancient times to the modern era. Wilson argues that cities are the crucibles of human progress, fostering innovation, culture, and social dynamics that have propelled civilization forward. The book delves into the origins of urban centers in Mesopotamia, the rise of trade in Baghdad, the birth of finance in London’s coffeehouses, and the transformation of cities like New York and Shanghai in the face of modern challenges.
Review
Ben Wilson’s “Metropolis” is an erudite and engaging account of the city’s role in shaping human history. With a keen eye for detail and a storyteller’s flair, Wilson takes readers on a journey through time, examining how urban environments have influenced everything from governance to gastronomy. The book is a testament to the enduring power and adaptability of cities, even as they face contemporary issues like pandemics and climate change. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of urban life.
Introduction: Learn from humanity’s greatest laboratories
Metropolis (2020) charts how cities have profoundly shaped humanity. From Athenian democracy to Baghdad’s bazaars and London finance, it reveals cities as the driving force of civilization for over 200,000 years.
How did the world’s first great city emerge nearly 7,000 years ago amid marshes and flood plains? And can the growing pains of nineteenth-century urbanization offer lessons for today’s megacities?
From the cradle of civilization in ancient Mesopotamia to the chaotic dynamism of twenty-first-century Lagos, cities have long served as forges of innovation and advancement. But concentrated urban living has carried steep costs as well. Now, in an era of global challenges like climate change and mass migration, over half the world inhabits fast-expanding cities. Understanding the triumphs and pitfalls of past metropolises can help teach us how to guide our urban future.
In this summary, we’ll embark on a time-traveling journey through humanity’s grand urban experiment – focusing on a few cities to find signposts for the winding path ahead.
Engines of innovation
From ancient Mesopotamia to modern Shanghai, cities have long served as crucibles of human innovation. But what draws us to them? And what enables cities to endure crisis after crisis – from wars to pandemics to climate change?
Cities offer economic opportunities, access to amenities, and social mobility exceeding what’s available in rural areas. Cities are humanity’s laboratories. The density and diversity of cities make them engines of innovation, where new ideas emerge through chance encounters and collaborations. In ancient Mesopotamia, less than 5 percent of people inhabited cities. But this minority, however small, propelled advancements in writing, mathematics, law, and the use of tools. Cities concentrate talent and facilitate the exchange of ideas, the specialization of skills, and the accumulation of wealth.
Over two millennia, pioneering metropolises like Uruk and Harappa gave way to Athens, imperial Rome, and Muslim Cordoba. Medieval Bruges established capitalism while the Italian city-states birthed artistic and technical breakthroughs. By the mid-nineteenth century, new transport and manufacturing technologies enabled unprecedented, rapid urbanization.
In 1900, 10 percent of humanity lived in cities. By the close of the century, this number exceeded 50 percent. Now, the twenty-first century is experiencing stunning urban expansion. Cities occupy ever more land area, spreading outward even as they shoot upward.
Humanity’s future depends on the future of cities. Understanding historical urban successes and failures can help guide urban planning and policy today. Citizens shouldn’t have to passively accept squalor, sprawl, and pollution as inevitable costs of urban living. Across generations, people have reshaped cities; if we learn from this past and work together, we can create places that meet twenty-first – and twenty-second – century needs.
Uruk
Seven thousand years ago, urban civilization was born in an unlikely place: the swampy marshlands of southern Mesopotamia. This watery cradle of civilization spawned humanity’s first great metropolis, Uruk, which pioneered monumental advances in architecture, arts, mathematics, administration, and technology – advances that still reverberate to this day.
Yet the path to progress came with a steep price. Concentrating tens of thousands of people together fostered inequality, violence, slavery, and environmental strain. The costs of civilization were already apparent when Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Uruk, ventured beyond his magnificent city walls into the wilderness in search of meaning.
There – as told in the earliest known work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh – the weary monarch discovered that while individual human lives are fleeting, humankind’s collective achievements possess the potential for a kind of immortality.
Uruk emerged around 5000 BCE from clusters of small villages occupying marshes and sandbanks between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the Persian Gulf. Abundant fish and game attracted hunter-gatherers who began settling permanently. In time, these settlers fused into a complex, multiethnic society that erected shrines to fertility deities governing fresh water and vegetation.
The nascent city of Uruk expanded around sacred nuclei: mud-brick ziggurats dedicated to the gods Anu and Inanna. But floods, shifting rivers, and encroaching dunes threatened these fragile communities of the marshes. Surmounting these challenges required communal organization far exceeding that of villages or temporary encampments.
The resulting concentration of population resulted in technological and administrative innovations. Irrigation systems were dug to harness the Euphrates while surplus grain and dates were cultivated in surrounding fields. Specialized workshops developed the region’s first casting ovens. Fast-spinning potter’s wheels allowed for mass-produced ceramics and items for luxury trade.
To regulate this intensive agriculture and long-distance commerce, you needed people like Kushim, history’s first named individual. His receipt for “29,086 measures of barley,” inscribed in pictographic symbols on wet clay, was a precursor to cuneiform – the world’s inaugural writing system. For centuries, the increasing complexities of urban living spurred gradual advancements in communication, standardization, and bureaucratic process.
However, less benign byproducts of city life also emerged. Wall carvings and other archaeological evidence indicate societies like Uruk’s were rigidly stratified. Merchants, officials, and artisans occupied the upper tiers, while manual labor was performed by enslaved people captured in conflicts with rival city-states.
War itself became endemic as populations grew and competition intensified over land and resources. The necessity of defense fed the centralization of power into hereditary god-king rulers like Gilgamesh. Cities amassed wealth and projected might by extracting tribute from smaller towns they’d conquered. This also influenced cultural change: Sumerian deities, myths, architectural styles, and even culinary traditions spread and rooted themselves across broader areas.
By 2000 BCE, climate shifts and crop failures had toppled the last Mesopotamian dynasties. But city-based civilizations proved resilient. Amorites, Assyrians, Elamites, and others absorbed urban lifestyles. Babylon and Nineveh emerged even more splendid than their forebears. The fundamentals pioneered at Uruk – writing, trade, mathematics, monumental building, sophisticated arts – were preserved, adapted, and built upon by successor societies across the Middle East.
That developmental arc, from tiny wilderness hamlet to mighty metropolis and center of civilization, played out repeatedly across the ancient world from China to Mexico. It also left an ambiguous human legacy. Concentrating multitudes together fostered creativity and capability but also exploitation and violence. Like Gilgamesh, we still wrestle with dilemmas first confronted on the urban riverbanks of ancient Iraq.
Manchester and Chicago
The nineteenth century brought a new type of urban landscape: Dickensian “shock cities” like Manchester and Chicago. These pioneering industrial cities astonished visitors with their technological wonders – and horrified them with human misery. They grew with frightening speed, birthing new technologies and new ways of living. While impoverished rural people flocked to the smog-wreathed metropolises in search of factory jobs, living conditions proved a rude awakening. This rapacious expansion came at immense human cost, as the swelling ranks of city residents endured squalid, hazardous conditions – fertile breeding grounds for disease.
In the year 1854 alone, Chicago lost 6 percent of its population to cholera. And in industrial-revolution Manchester, life expectancy plummeted to as low as just 26 years.
The scenes of wretchedness and vice repelled middle-class observers. Eight or more residents crammed into single rooms. In the streets, gutters ran with blood and offal from nearby slaughterhouses. Young girls labored in inhumane textile factories. Meanwhile, slums encircled business districts like armies laying siege. Some observers took an apocalyptic view. Was this the future – bleak metropoles sacrificing humanity on the altar of commerce?
But these slums weren’t one-dimensional cauldrons of misery. In fact, they were often places of tight-knit communities that quickly led to social innovation. Formerly rural folk clung to their identities, forming clubs and mutual aid societies. Women’s groups campaigned for better sanitation. Ambitious working people saw cities as gateways from rural deprivation, and embraced new opportunities.
This urban density also created novel occasions for solidarity and political engagement. Manchester and Chicago were incubators of radical politics. Socialists rubbed shoulders with suffragettes and middle-class reformers. These included a young German firebrand named Friedrich Engels, who cataloged conditions in the slums of Manchester, and Chicago’s Jane Addams, who pioneered settlement houses that offered social services to the poor.
Although change happened gradually, both Manchester and Chicago had been utterly transformed by the end of the nineteenth century. With rising wages, the working class was spending their hard-earned pennies on more than just survival. They hungered for leisure and delight, pouring into pubs, music halls, pleasure gardens, and parks on their day off.
As real wages grew, businesses formed to cater to this class. Soccer and baseball teams emerged from church, union, and factory associations – funded directly by fans. Sports became a central bonding force, the realm of urban tribalism. Their stadiums would go on to symbolize the secular cathedrals of a new twentieth century.
While some might have seen industrial cities as irredeemable – Babylon incarnate – residents displayed a determination to lift up both themselves and their surroundings. Manchester and Chicago’s examples suggest that, given a chance, cities can be transformed from infernos into havens.
Lagos
What will the city of the future look like? A glittering, high-tech metropolis powered by big data and artificial intelligence? An overcrowded, chaotic megacity ringed by slums and shantytowns? Perhaps neither?
Lagos, Nigeria is a twenty-first century metropolis of great complexity. Its population of over 20 million grows at a dizzying pace as migrants flood in seeking opportunity. Lagos has no shortage of problems: paralyzing congestion, unreliable electricity, and rampant crime. Yet the city also bursts with optimism and success. Young people flock there to tap into its vibrant nightlife, fashion scene, and tech startups. In scale and complexity, Lagos represents a certain kind of pinnacle of the 7,000-year urban experiment started with the world’s first city, Uruk.
Like Uruk, Lagos adapted to a changing landscape and ecology. Lagos grew through informal networks, with locals sometimes improvising solutions in lieu of centralized infrastructure. Creativity flourishes in the city’s ad hoc repair yards, computer markets, and slums clinging impossibly to swampland. Officials disdain these informal networks, preferring centralized urban planning and development plans. But Lagos inherently possesses a kind of productive complexity verging on disorder – messy human ecosystems interwoven with nature.
Cities have historically thrived through fruitful interplay between the formal and informal – between top-down infrastructure and services, and bottom-up improvised solutions that organically emerged to meet communal needs. For today’s rapidly urbanizing world, the future lies not in imposing utopian visions but in fostering the resilience, adaptiveness, and creativity inherent in the imperfect reality of urban life.
The city must be reimagined as a metabolic system in flux, an evolving ecosystem responding to climate change and dwindling resources. This could mean increasing density and favoring pedestrians over cars. For a planet nearing peak population, a green and sustainable future requires making vibrant urban villages rather than abandoning cities for suburbia.
We are an urban species. The city shapes us, even as we reshape it. Old Uruk endured an unstable climate for millennia. Emerging megacities will likewise need built-in resilience to withstand increased climate instability – a resilience that springs from the shared ingenuity welling up within diverse and inclusive human ecosystems.
Lagos, for all its chaos, hints at that promise. The city’s immediate future lies inside Computer Village’s humming repair shops, not the polished towers of its newer planned developments. In these bustling streets, we glimpse the crowded, messy, vibrant, and creative urban world to come.
Conclusion
Cities represent humanity’s boldest experiment in reorganizing life. From ancient Uruk onward, urban centers achieved exponential progress by concentrating talent and ideas. But with size came stratification – cities foster injustice almost as much as innovation.
Today, climate change and migration are increasingly testing cities. Amid these global challenges, sustaining the dynamic human ecosystems requires balancing top-down planning with ground-up improvisation and grassroots creativity.
The coming century will determine whether the metropolis lifts humanity toward new heights together – or leaves many behind.
About the Author
Ben Wilson