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If humankind can be said to have a single greatest creation, it would be those places that represent the most eloquent expression of our species’s ingenuity, beliefs, and ideals: the city. In this authoritative and engagingly written account, the acclaimed urbanist and bestselling author examines the evolution of urban life over the millennia and, in doing so, attempts to answer the age-old question: What makes a city great?
Despite their infinite variety, all cities essentially serve three purposes: spiritual, political, and economic. Kotkin follows the progression of the city from the early religious centers of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China to the imperial centers of the Classical era, through the rise of the Islamic city and the European commercial capitals, ending with today’s post-industrial suburban metropolis.
Despite widespread optimistic claims that cities are “back in style,” Kotkin warns that whatever their form, cities can thrive only if they remain sacred, safe, and busy–and this is true for both the increasingly urbanized developing world and the often self-possessed “global cities” of the West and East Asia.
Looking at cities in the twenty-first century, Kotkin discusses the effects of developments such as shifting demographics and emerging technologies. He also considers the effects of terrorism–how the religious and cultural struggles of the present pose the greatest challenge to the urban future.
Truly global in scope, The City is a timely narrative that will place Kotkin in the company of Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, and other preeminent urban scholars.
From the Hardcover edition.
- Sales Rank: #577840 in Books
- Published on: 2006-10-10
- Released on: 2006-10-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .50" w x 5.20" l, .42 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
From Publishers Weekly
With this slim text, Kotkin offers his readers a history of the city from the first urban centers of the "Fertile Crescent" in 5000, B.C., all the way to post-September 11th New York City. At the same time, Kotkin argues that three key factors distinguish successful cities: commerce, security and power, and the "sacredness" of urban space. Such an ambitious dual project would prove daunting for any work, and this brief, occasionally terse attempt often falls short of its lofty goals. Kotkin, a senior fellow with the New American Foundation and the author of five previous books, including Tribes and The New Geography, is certainly a fine, engaging writer. His discussion of the rise of Rome as the "first megacity" efficiently covers vast historical ground while consistently bringing that history back to his central argument. But Kotkin spends far less time analyzing contemporary megacities such as Mexico City and Sao Paulo. And in those over-hasty moments, the book reveals its wider gaps, biases and shortcomings. Kotkin's book may serve as an accessible general introduction to the history of urban life, culture and spaces. But readers seeking the global history the text purports to offer may be better served by the "suggested further reading" that follows this sketchy narrative.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Startlingly brief for such an ambitious title, Kotkin's evolutionary narrative is less an examination of individual urban centers than a strategic, accessible narration of urbanism in general from ancient Mesopotamia to the present. As places "sacred, safe, and busy," cities rise and thrive by their ability to become and remain concentrated, effective sites of worship, security, and commerce. But, as Kotkin's gently functionalist comparative analysis shows us, cities struggle when they fail to cultivate a sense of community and common identity among their diverse inhabitants. Whether threatened by barbarians or suburbs, he continues, a city's health depends upon its ability to keep the centrifugal forces of politics and economics from dispersing its sacred urban space. A rejoinder to Guns, Germs, and Steel? Perhaps. Also a bold synthesis of urban historian Jane Jacobs and -anthropologist-theologian Mircea Eliade. Some readers may find each stop on Kotkin's whirlwind tour too brief, albeit nimbly presented. Luckily, he includes an excellent bibliography. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Advance Praise for The City
“A compelling and original synthesis that belongs on the urbanist’s bookshelf with Lewis Mumford, Peter Hall, and Fernand Braudel.”
–Witold Rybczynski, Martin & Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism, School of Design, professor of Real Estate, Wharton School
“No one knows more about cities than Joel Kotkin, and has more to teach us about them. In The City, Kotkin takes us on a brisk and invigorating tour of cities from the Babylon of ancient times to the burgeoning exurbs of today. It is impossible not to learn a lot from this book.”
–Michael Barone, senior writer, U.S. News & World Report, and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics
“If you want to understand why the future of American and European cities is mixed at best, if you want to understand why George Bush won the 2004 election, you need to read Joel Kotkin’s account of how and why cities have developed and declined.”
–Fred Siegel, author of Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life, senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute
“Unique and powerful insights into urban life . . . This book is a great read.”
–Bob Lanier, Mayor of Houston, 1992-1998
From the Hardcover edition.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Good read
By Anthony Spallone
This was a good read on the history of cities. I appreciate how the author talked about the importance that religion has played in the development of cities from the earliest civilizations. His conclusion was excellent on talking about how important it is to have a shared moral vision in cities in order for them to thrive.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Easily overview of city development accross history
By Fernando Gonzalez
I really enjoyed reading it. The author is capable of taking the reader for a walk through history without emphasizing too much on a very specific stage of city development. Great overview of how our true global cities became what they are now.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Save the Bibliographic Note, Pitch the Text
By Paul Frandano
That's the long and the short of it. I found Kotkin's little essay on "suggested reading" useful - as were many of the sources he cited - but the text? Hardly at all. Full disclosure/truth in lending would have required Kotkin to entitle his book, "The City: A Thin Schematic Outline That Raises More Questions Than It Answers Before Ending Discussions Abruptly." For this is indeed simply an outline.
Fine: it's a short book, a mere 160 pp of text, plus almost 40 pp of notes (a good thing), and the 7 pp of suggested readings. I suppose the Modern Library's "Chronicles" format - "featuring the world's great historians on the world's great subjects," all at less than 200 pp - should have tipped me off, but there was the offsetting kudos of Witold Rybczynski: "A compelling and original synthesis that belongs on the urbanist's bookshelf with Lewis Mumford, Peter Hall, and Fernand Braudel." Yes, Prof. Rybczynski, I suppose so, but perhaps only as the first book to pull off that shelf for kindling when the cabin grows cold. Kotkin really doesn't deserve this bonbon from Rybczynski; nor does he belong in this seminal company. His book doesn't seem to contain much that's original; it seems mostly derived from the insights of others. (I suppose that's why it's a "synthesis.") For the most part, much of it - and surely its central thesis that cities are built on sacred, security, or commercial foundations - is in Mumford and Hall, much else, particularly on the rise of commercial cities, may be found in Braudel, and in the later chapters more contemporary writers like Daniel Bell, Saskia Sassen, Manuel Castells, Kenneth Jackson, and Joel Garreau, are among the many authorities who show up. Throughout, the discussion is cursory and in places absolutely superficial, as though lists of observations and authorities had been cobbled together into paragraphs that often end with a clunk.
On the Third World city Kotkin struck me as almost wholly without a clue, although I surmise that, had he written closer to the present time, he would have been able to cull a few interesting and relevant ideas from the World Bank's World Development Report 2009, in which the Bank turns a major corner on developing-economy cities, finally seeing them as potential developing-world engines of growth. Kotkin didn't himself divine any of this at the time of his writing, for the most part reheating accounts of the many pathologies of developing-world urbanization, misunderstanding, among other things, the pull of primate cities in an otherwise bleak,largely subsistence agrarian landscape - "cities = the promise of a better life for millions" - the structural role of informal economies in developing countries, and quite a bit more.
But the little "suggested reading" essay is extremely worthwhile. For this, and for the Robert Ezra Parks quote on "the city as a state of mind," two stars.
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