The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) Read online

These commonalities can be seen in cities across the world today. Police forces, commercial centers, and religious establishments in East Asia or East Anglia or the vast suburbs of Los Angeles often operate in similar ways, occupy the same critical places in the metropolis, and even share common architectural forms. Then there is the visceral “feel” of the city almost everywhere—the same quickening of pace on a busy street, an informal marketplace, or a freeway interchange, the need to create notable places, the sharing of a unique civic identity.

  Many urban historians have identified this phenomenon with a particular kind of city—the densely settled, central urban area epitomized by New York, Chicago, London, Paris, or Tokyo. My definition is considerably broader and attempts to include as well many of the newer, sprawling metropolitan areas, such as my adopted hometown of Los Angeles, and also the many highly dispersed, multipolar metropolitan regions of the developing world. Although different in form from the “traditional” urban centers, these newer urban places all remain, in their essential characteristics, cities.

  This leads to a second generalization about what characterizes successful cities. Since the earliest origins, urban areas have performed three separate critical functions—the creation of sacred space, the provision of basic security, and the host for a commercial market. Cities have possessed these characteristics to greater or lesser degrees. Generally speaking, a glaring weakness in these three aspects of urbanity has undermined life and led to their eventual decline.

  Today, different cities in the world fulfill these functions with varying degrees of success. In the sprawling cities of the developing world, lack of a functioning economy and a stable political order loom as the most pressing problems. In many cases, people there still retain strong family ties and systems belief—whether ancient folk religions, Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism—but the basis of the material city has been undermined. This gives rise to a new historical phenomenon, the large city that grows without the familiar accrual of prosperity or power.

  The essential problems facing urban regions in the West, and increasingly the developed parts of East and South Asia, are of a different nature. Cities in these regions are frequently relatively safe and, when their suburban rings are included, remarkably prosperous by historical standards. Yet these cities increasingly seem to lack a shared sense of sacred place, civic identity, or moral order.

  Nothing better illustrates this than the rapid general decline in middle-class families in many of the world’s most important urban cores. Today, elite cities often attract tourists, upper-class populations working in the highest end of business services, and those who can service their needs, as well as the nomadic young, many of whom later move on to other locales. This increasingly ephemeral city seems to place its highest values on such transient values as hipness, coolness, artfulness, and fashionability.

  These characteristics, however appealing in their aspect, cannot substitute for the critical, longer-lasting bonds of family, faith, civic culture, and neighborhood. Nor can a narrow transactional or recreational economy play the same role as one based on a broad diversity of industries nurturing the ambitions of upwardly mobile families. Increasingly, these families seek refuge ever farther from the urban core, often in the periphery or in smaller towns outside the urban realm.

  These phenomena do not represent as severe a challenge as the miserable poverty and instability common to the cities of the developing world. Yet the study of urban history also suggests that even affluent cities without moral cohesion or a sense of civic identity are doomed to decadence and decline. It is my hope that contemporary cities—wherever they are located—can still find ways to perform their historic functions and thus make this century, the first where a majority of people live in cities, an urban century not only in demographic terms but also in more transcendent values.

  The reader may not fully agree with this analysis or many of my assertions. In some ways, that is not the critical issue. This book is designed primarily not as an analysis, but as a guide, luring the reader to explore further the fundamentals of the urban experience. Once introduced to this unfolding history, the reader will, I hope, more fully appreciate the complexity of the city experience that has so enriched my life and that of my family.

  INTRODUCTION:

  PLACES SACRED, SAFE, AND BUSY

  On November 8, 1519, Bernal Díaz del Castillo saw a sight that would remain fixed in his memory for decades to come. The twenty-seven-year-old Spanish soldier1 already had encountered signs of an ever intensifying urban civilization as he and his fewer than four hundred comrades marched from the humid lowlands of Mexico up into the volcanic highlands. And in a hint of what was to come, he noted “piles of human skulls,” arranged in neat rows, atop the provincial temples.2

  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.

  THE UNIVERSALITY OF THE URBAN EXPERIENCE

  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.

  THE SACREDNESS OF PLACE

  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

  THE NEED FOR SECURITY

  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

  THE ROLE OF COMMERCE

  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

  PART ONE

  ORIGINS: THE RISE OF CITIES IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

  CHAPTER ONE

  SACRED ORIGINS

  Long before the first cities rose in Mexico, China, or Europe, the essential patterns of urban life evolved slowly in the Middle East. Homo sapiens is said to have achieved its present basic physical evolutionary form twenty-five thousand to forty thousand years ago and spread throughout virtually the entire habitable planet, including the Americas and Australia, by around 8000 B.C.1

  With the end of the last Ice Age, stock breeding and agriculture spread and with them a more sedentary way of life. Small villages developed as centers of artisanal activities and trade. The most advanced, what might be called “proto-cities,” appear to have developed most rapidly in a wide region that spread across the Syrian steppes, in Jericho, Iran, Egypt, and Turkey.2

  MESOPOTAMIA

  This region—extending from the west coast of Palestine to the Nile Valley in Egypt to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers—constitutes what is called the “Fertile Crescent.” In the earliest period of recorded history, the farther one gets from this region, observed the German historian and archaeologist Werner Keller, “the deeper grows the darkness and signs of civilization and culture decrease. It is as if the people on the other continents were like children awaiting their awakening.” 3

  The alluvial basin between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in contemporary Iraq, proved an ideal environment for a precipitous leap to urbanism. Here, in the area later known to the Greeks as Mesopotamia, the arid desert was broken by reedy swamps, with waters overflowing with fish, and banks teeming with wildlife. Here, too, sprouted native grains, wheat and barley, which could be cultivated into reliable crops, rewarding the Neolithic farmer with the critical surpluses upon which the beginnings of urban civilization depended. 4

  The early city builders also faced many critical challenges in this fecund environment.5 Minerals, building stone, and timber were scarce. Rain was sporadic, and the rivers did not naturally, as in Egypt, inundate the large areas of dry land around them. As a result, the settlers in this region were forced to develop complex systems to irrigate their land.6

  This huge effort required a moral and social order allowing for the intricate regulation of society and for a more dominating relationship toward nature, a major step away from the familial and clan relationships that had conditioned traditional village life for millennia. These earliest cities arose as the command posts for the carrying out of these functions. By modern or even classical standards, these urban agglomerations, the earliest of which can be traced as far back as 5000 B.C., were very small. Even by the third millennium, the powerful “metropolis” of Ur may have been no more than 150 acres and accommodated roughly twenty-four thousand people.7

  The priestly class emerged as the primary organizers of the new urban order. It fell to them to articulate the divine principles placing man over nature, inculcate systems of worship, and regulate the activities of a large number of often unrelated people around complex communal tasks.

  It is difficult, perhaps, to imagine in our current secular era the degree to which religion played a central role during most of urban history. 8 Like the Catholic Church, or Buddhist, Muslim, Aztec, and Hindu priesthoods later on, the Sumerian ecclesiastics provided these ancient urban centers with a critical sense of order and continuity. Priests set the calendars that determined times for work, worship, and feasting for the entire population. 9

  Given the primacy of the priestly class, it is not surprising that temples celebrating the gods dominated the earliest primitive “skyline.” One of the earliest of these ziggurats, the shrine at Ur of Nannar, the Moon God, towered seventy feet over the flat Mesopotamian landscape. 10 The high temple, suggests Mircea Eliade, constituted a “cosmic mountain” connected directly to the cosmos.11

  The temple dominated what might be called the “inner city” of early Sumerian urban civilization. Within this area’s walls, the temple rose alongside the palace of the rulers and the homes of the principal citizens. These structures lent the whole district a sense of divine protection and security.12

  The construction of these temples stimulated the commercial growth of early cities. In addition to slaves, ordinary workmen and skilled artisans participated in the construction of these first great structures, and many remained to service the needs of the priestly class. It was here as well, by roughly 3500 B.C., that the first recognizable systems of writing emerged, for both religious and commercial reasons.13

  The priesthood held powerful sway over the material world. They controlled, on the gods’ behalf, much of the land in the community. The “divine household” was in charge of maintaining the canals as well as the storage and dist
ribution of the all-important agricultural surplus. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the origins of which go back to Sumerian times, speaks of the “sacred storehouse” that is the “seat of Ishtar, the Goddess.”14

  The temple also served as the first urban “shopping center,” offering in an open setting a vast array of goods ranging from oils and fats to reeds, asphalt, mats, and stones. The temple even owned factories that manufactured garments and utensils.

  Regimes and dynasties would come and go, but only catastrophic change would sweep away the religious institutions. The shrines of Ur, for example, were repeatedly restored by those who conquered the city. The hierarchy of gods or ways of worshipping might shift over time, but the centrality of the religious function remained for millennia.15

  This pattern also persisted well past the heyday of the Sumerians. Virtually all the successor societies that emerged from the region—from the Babylonians and Assyrians to the Persians—envisioned their cities as essentially sacred places, with intimate ties to the divine. Babylon, the greatest of the Mesopotamian cities, was called Babi-ilani, or “the Gate of the Gods,” the place from which the divinities were believed to have descended to earth.16

  EGYPT

  It is not clear whether or not Mesopotamia directly shaped the early Egyptian civilization, but the latter may well have been, as the historian Grahame Clark has noted, “fertilized from Sumerian seeds.”17 As in the early Mesopotamian cities, the first Egyptian conurbations rested economically on the critical agricultural surplus. The average Egpytian peasant produced, according to some estimates, three times as much food as he needed. 18