METROPOLIS
A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention
By Ben Wilson
In “Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention,” the historian Ben Wilson takes us on an exhilarating tour of more than two dozen cities and thousands of years, examining that invention’s good and bad effects. The bad effects (“harsh, merciless environments,” for instance) are produced not so much by roads and buildings but by what’s invisible. The city, as Wilson sees it, is less of a warehouse of architecture and more of an organism that shapes the creatures living inside. “I am more interested in the connective tissue that binds the organism together,” he writes, “not just its outward appearance or vital organs.”
Climate change has recently helped us rethink the 7,000-year-old ruins of Uruk, the fabled Sumerian city, and the planning of other ancient urban centers “as a way of aligning human activities with the underlying order and energies of the universe,” Wilson writes. In this regard, the cities that spread across the Indus Valley in today’s Pakistan were watery Edens: They had no temples or palaces but granaries, assembly halls and systems for sewage and water that may instead have been the sacred centers of the communities’ lives.
Hell was Babylon, or what it stood for — the “original Sin City,” rife with the unsavory aspects of urbanity decried since at least 2000 B.C. A line from the Hebrew Bible might easily have appeared in a recent political ad: “Woe to the city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims!” Ditto the 18th-century writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau describing the city as “depraved by sloth, inactivity, the love of pleasure.”
Pleasure, or more exactly sex, has always been a complicated element of any city’s P.R., alternately repelling (see William Hogarth’s 1731 painting series “A Harlot’s Progress”) and attracting (the sensuous lure of Uruk in “The Epic of Gilgamesh”). Anonymity facilitates expression, if dangerously, as noted in Hart Crane’s “The Bridge,” where the remnant of a subway tryst is “a burnt match skating in a urinal.” A constant in the history of cities is that only men are permitted to act as if they are always at the Roman baths.
Wilson’s chapters on the so-called classical civilizations — Athens, Alexandria and Rome — theorize on each polis’s creative production. Dinocrates of Rhodes imposed a grid of streets on the anarchy of the Greek public space, making Alexandria encyclopedic; irregular Athens, by contrast, was “spontaneous and experimental.” When Romans conquered the world, they brought their built environment with them, like a subdivision to the wilderness. Bathing, Wilson argues, made the barbarous clean, Roman and urban.
The author links Baghdad’s messier, more organic development with a dynamism that generated some of the ideas it took Europe centuries to comprehend. Synthesizing Baghdad’s collections of Greek, Babylonian, Persian, Indian and Chinese scholarship, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi laid the foundations for mathematical equations that would eventually send humans to the moon and land Jeff Bezos’ packages on your stoop (or thereabouts).
At the dawn of the 12th century, with Christian and pagan tribes fighting in the ruins of the Roman Empire, the eastern European frontier was like a disinvested 21st-century neighborhood when the chain stores finally pull out. Out of this bleak landscape rose Lübeck, chartered by Henry the Lion as the first of what would be hundreds of war-profiteering fortress cities that grew rich furnishing arms and supplies during Drang nach Osten, the Muslim-purging drive to the east. What became the Hanseatic League was in fact a cartel that relied on economic power and military might to make deals that the rest of Europe couldn’t refuse. Lisbon carried Lübeck’s model to Africa and Asia, its slave trade like high-octane fuel and its fierce gunships maintaining what Wilson calls an oceanwide “protection racket.” “It is unheard of,” one Muslim ruler said, “that anyone should be forbidden to sail the seas.”
Into the 1600s, Amsterdam made a kind of meta-trade of urbanization, with the government connecting corporations, banks and merchants to create the world’s first securities market and its attendant financial devices. Forwards and futures, hedges and margin-buying were inventions Amsterdamers classified as windhandel, or trading in the wind, as opposed to trading something tangible. The civic ethos was less about monuments and civic plazas and more about greater wealth kept private.
Wilson’s archetype for sociability is London in the 1700s, though its sociability was quickly eclipsed by exclusivity. Squalor is represented by Manchester, where immigrant workers from a British colony (Ireland) produced fabric with cotton grown and harvested by enslaved people in the American South. Friedrich Engels called Manchester’s poor neighborhood “Hell upon Earth.” Ideologues that came to be known as the Manchester School believed their free trade policies would lead to a world harmony that — spoiler alert! — has yet to arrive.
Wilson ends his tour in Lagos. Here is the metropolis of the future, in which cities have transformed from agoras into regions, gulping land and resources at an unfathomable rate. Inequality spreads, meanwhile, like a vast algal bloom.
“Metropolis” is a bold undertaking that makes for gripping reading, though, like most histories of cities, it puts Amerindians off to the side. Tenochtitlan, bigger than Paris in the 1500s, features mostly as a site of Spanish conquest. The racial geography at the heart of the European colonial enterprise is likewise underplayed. Crucial to Lisbon’s conquest of land and bodies were the papal bulls that granted Portugal the right to, in 1455, take slaves and then, in 1493, to “discover” land — lay claim, in other words, to territory inhabited by non-Christians. (Chief Justice John Marshall would cite this legal precedent in the 1820s and ’30s, when the United States was clearing away Native Americans, as would Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg more recently, in denying the Oneidas sovereignty over reservation land.)
Missing too from “Metropolis” is the history of 18th-century England’s financial engineering, the so-called deficit financing (pioneered by Robert Walpole, then fine-tuned by Alexander Hamilton) that is the crucial segue between British colonial conquests and U.S. empire building — though Wilson notes the ways the American war machine took domestic city planning into the nuclear age. The ranch houses promoted in postwar suburban development — “lily-white and segregated by class” — were part of a plan to spread out urban populations and thus “win” a nuclear war. Like the one-level home itself, venetian blinds, tested on blasted-out Paiute and Shoshone-Bannock land, were considered an attractive and effective defense against radiation.
Wilson’s swift prose makes its point in a chapter titled “Annihilation,” which compares Hitler’s destruction of Warsaw to the American bombing of Tokyo. In landscapes of horrific violence, the most damaged communities find creative ways to survive. It is a sad but brilliant way to underscore how much community means to our unspeakably violent species — and how traumatic actions can be countered by self-organized group responses. Tokyo experienced a kind of leaderless communal repair that brings to mind this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, in which tens of millions of people marched to highlight and heal their cities’ ripped-out connective tissue.
The future of cities as Wilson sees it is bleak: marshes filled in with money-laundering skyscrapers; robot-filled logistics centers supplying megacities with more cheaply produced goods; care workers with longer, more expensive commutes. The hope is that we start thinking of the city less as a technical invention and more in terms of that connective tissue, the intertwining of lives, experiences and bodies. We are already part of that tissue, whether we know it or not.
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Book Review: ‘Metropolis,’ by Ben Wilson - The New York Times
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