The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) (3 page)

Then, suddenly, a city of almost unimaginable scale appeared, built high in the mountains on lakes crowned by a circle of volcanic peaks. He viewed broad causeways filled with canoes, and avenues upon which every kind of produce, fowl, and utensil was being sold. He saw elaborate flowerdecked homes, large palaces, and temples rising bright in the Mexican sun:

Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know what to do or say, or whether what appeared before us was real, for on one side, on the land, were great cities; and in the lake ever so many more, and the lake itself was crowded with canoes, and in the Causeway were many bridges at intervals, and in front of us stood the great City of Mexico. . . .
³

The memory of “these sights”—penned forty years later by Bernal Díaz as an old man living in Guatemala—are like those that have inspired human beings ever since they began to construct great cities. Díaz’s reaction could have been shared by a Semitic nomad first encountering the walls and pyramids of Sumer five thousand years earlier, a Chinese provincial official entering Loyang in the seventh century B.C., a Muslim pilgrim arriving by caravan to the gates of Baghdad in the ninth century, or an Italian peasant in the last century spying from a steamer the awesome towers of Manhattan island.

Humankind’s greatest creation has always been its cities. They represent the ultimate handiwork of our imagination as a species, testifying to our ability to reshape the natural environment in the most profound and lasting ways. Indeed, today our cities can be seen from outer space.

Cities compress and unleash the creative urges of humanity. From the earliest beginnings, when only a tiny fraction of humans lived in cities, they have been the places that generated most of mankind’s art, religion, culture, commerce, and technology. This evolution occurred most portentously in a handful of cities whose influence then spread to other centers through conquest, commerce, religion, and, more recently, mass telecommunications.

Over the five to seven millennia that humans have created cities, they have done so in myriad forms. Some started as little more than villages that, over time, grew together and developed mass. Others have reflected the conscious vision of a high priest, ruler, or business elite, following a general plan to fulfill some greater divine, political, or economic purpose.

Cities have been built in virtually every part of the world, from the highlands of Peru to the tip of southern Africa and the coasts of Australia. The oldest permanent urban footprints are believed to be in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. From those roots sprang a plethora of successive other metropolises that represent the founding experiences of the Western urban heritage—including Ur, Agade, Babylon, Nineveh, Memphis, Knossos, and Tyre.

Many other cities sprang up largely independent of these early Mesopotamian and Mediterranean settlements. Some of these, such as Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in India and Chang’an in China, achieved a scale and complexity equal to any of their Western contemporaries.
⁴
Indeed, for many centuries following the fall of Rome, these “Oriental” capitals were among the most advanced and complex urban systems on the planet. Rather than largely a Western phenomenon, with one set of roots, urbanism needs to be approached as having worn many different guises, though reflective of some greater universal human aspiration.

The primary locus of world-shaping cities in each region of the world has shifted over and over again. In the fifth century B.C., the Greek historian Herodotus noted the often rapid rise, and fall, of great places. As he traveled to cities both great and small, this incisive early observer noted:

For most of those which were great once are small today; And those that used to be small were great in my own time. Knowing, therefore, that human prosperity never abides long in the same place, I shall pay attention to both alike.
⁵

By Herodotus’s time, some of the greatest and most populous cities of his past—Ur, Nineveh—had declined to insignificance, leaving little more than the dried bones of what had once been thriving urban organisms. Cities such as Babylon, Athens, and Syracuse were then in their glorious prime; within a few centuries, they would be supplanted by even greater cities, notably Alexandria and Rome.

The critical questions of Herodotus’s time still remain: What makes cities great, and what leads to their gradual demise? As this book will argue, three critical factors have determined the overall health of cities— the sacredness of place, the ability to provide security and project power, and last, the animating role of commerce. Where these factors are present, urban culture flourishes. When these elements weaken, cities dissipate and eventually recede out of history.

Religious structures—temples, cathedrals, mosques, and pyramids— have long dominated the landscape and imagination of great cities. These buildings suggested that the city was also a sacred place, connected directly to divine forces controlling the world.

In our own, so much more secularly oriented times, cities seek to recreate the sense of sacred place through towering commercial buildings and evocative cultural structures. Such sights inspire a sense of civic patriotism or awe, albeit without the comforting suggestion of divine guidance. “A striking landscape,” the historian Kevin Lynch suggested, “is the skeleton” in which city dwellers construct their “socially important myths.”
⁶

Defensive systems also have played a critical role in the ascendancy of cities. Cities must, first and foremost, be safe. Many cities, observed the historian Henri Pirenne, first arose as places of refuge from marauding nomads or from the general lawlessness that has characterized large portions of the globe throughout history. When a city’s ability to guarantee safety has declined, as at the end of the western Roman Empire or during the crime-infested late twentieth century, urbanites have retreated to the hinterlands or migrated to another, safer urban bastion.
⁷

Yet sanctity and safety alone cannot create great cities. Priests, soldiers, and bureaucrats may provide the prerequisites for urban success, but they cannot themselves produce enough wealth to sustain large populations for a long period of time. This requires an active economy of artisans, merchants, working people, and, sadly, in many places throughout history until recent times, slaves. Such people, necessarily the vast majority of urbanites, have, since the advent of capitalism, emerged as the primary creators of the city itself.

CHRONOLOGY