Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention by Ben Wilson is an example of my favorite sort of history book — an overview of many different topics, not in-depth on any of them, but a good introduction to further reading. That said, some chapters were better than others; once Wilson got to modern history, the book shifted into perhaps more pop culture analysis than I would have cared for. In spite of that, I’m glad I read it. Here are some passages I highlighted.
On pessimism
One over-arching theme of the book is that people have historically been pessimistic about and critical of cities. Sometimes this has been for good reason (e.g. higher urban density led to greater spread of disease, and thus lower life expectancy), but other times seemingly as part of a moral panic about decadence, depravity and inauthenticity.
I’ve seen many pro-progress posts, e.g. this one, that seem to assume that early to mid-20th century US views on urbanism and progress represent a historical norm that’s desirable to return to. But if this thesis in Metropolis is correct, then perhaps that period is an outlier, over-emphasized because of its recency rather than its representativeness. Perhaps the current moment of pessimism is a mere reversion to the mean.
Additionally, Wilson goes through many examples of how people have striven to bring order to urban chaos. An example that stood out to me was Baghdad:
An admirer of Euclid, the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur decreed that his city be perfectly round. The circumference of the massive wall was pierced by four equidistant gates. Four perfectly straight roads led from these gigantic gates to the centre, a circular city within the circular city. The people of Baghdad could see the enormous green dome of the imperial palace and the Great Mosque within this round precinct. But they could not venture into this private zone, which was reserved for the caliph’s court, his family, guards and imperial bureaucracy. It resembled Beijing’s Forbidden City, a space of sacred sovereignty at the core of the city. By intention and design, Baghdad expressed geometric and urban perfection.
(One wonders if al-Mansur could have befriended Le Corbusier, had they lived contemporaneously.)
On pre-industrialization
While the book is mostly about the urban, and the pre-industrial world was largely rural, we still get some glimpses of what the world used to be like. For instance, a summary of what economic production and progress looked like over the centuries:
We know from shipwrecks discovered in the Mediterranean and the study of pollution in the Greenland icecap that levels of trade and metal production in the first and second centuries were at their highest level in Europe before the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
And other points of interest of the “ancient world was more interconnected than you may think” variety, about the Graeco-Bactrian Kingdom in about 170 BC:
Ai-Khanoum, in what is now northern Afghanistan, had a palace that blended Persian and Greek architecture, and temples dedicated to Zeus that were built on Zoroastrian models. Here, 2,500 miles from Athens, was an agora, one of the largest gymnasia in the ancient world and a theatre that could hold up to 6,000 people. Greek architecture and art influenced India, and to a lesser extent China. The very first representations of the Buddha were inspired by Greek sculptures of Apollo. The plays of Sophocles and Euripides were performed in Persia and the Indus Valley, while the Iliad helped shape early Sanskrit epics; Aristotle was read and debated across central Asia.
And a long while later in Baghdad, on cosmopolitanism:
The slave population was perhaps even more cosmopolitan [than the non-slave residents of Baghdad], made up of—among others—Slavic, Nubian, Ethiopian, Sudanese, Senegalese, Frankish, Greek, Turkish, Azerbaijani and Berber men, women and children.
I also appreciated this note on family structures in industrial vs. pre-industrial Britain:
In industrial urban Britain 90% of working-class homes included extended families and/or lodgers, much more than in the pre-industrial age when households were constructed around married couples and their children.
I feel like I’ve come across many critiques of nuclear family households that include the fact that this isn’t how people used to do things, but maybe we just don’t have a great sense of how people used to do things? My guess is that prior to industrialization the world would have been both less homogenous and less well-recorded, so perhaps many places had nuclear family hosueholds, while many others had multi-generational households, and it’s difficult to know which was more common.
On American anti-urban policies
I had figured that the reasons for lower density in the US was mostly geographical or bottom-up. Explanations I’d heard before is that urbanization happened later than in Europe because of more available land, so it wasn’t as large a part of national culture. On top of that, many European immigrants who arrived in the US wanted to get away from dirty, crowded cities and own land. But Wilson suggest to the contrary, that individual decisions favoring suburbs were shaped by US Federal policies:
House-hunting couples might have believed they were making free choices, but the path guiding them towards suburbia was predetermined at the highest levels. The American suburbs, with their distinctive look and feel, were not the manifestation of national taste or individual choices; they were largely the creation of the state. Founded in the wake of the Great Depression, the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) provided billions of dollars insuring the mortgage market. Before the 1930s if you wanted a loan you had to provide a deposit of around 50%, and the mortgage was payable within ten years. The ginormous safety net for investors provided by the FHA changed everything…
But the FHA was not going to insure any old house. It gave priority to detached new-built houses on wide streets and cul-de-sacs. It mandated that houses be set back at least fifteen feet from the road and be entirely surrounded by garden. The FHA approved of homogeneous housing developments and disapproved of mixed-use districts, where there were shops or commerce. It preferred expansiveness over density, and disapproved of rental properties or the presence of old housing stock, believing that such things would “accelerate the tendency to lower-class occupancy."
Oh, England
In a chapter on London, I learned many silly and delightful things about early London urbanism. For instance the preponderance of men’s clubs around the early to mid-1700s:
There was the Farting Club, the Ugly Club, the Little Club (for men under five feet), the Tall Club, the Fighting Club, the Fat Men’s Club, the One-eyed Men Club, clubs for people with long noses, and so on.
Some streets also had delightful names:
Medieval Southwark [in London] had streets with names such as Sluts’ Hole, Cuckold Court, Codpiece Lane and Whore’s Nest. Elsewhere in London there were several streets named Gropecunt Lane, as there were in the centres of numerous other English cities and market towns.
Sodomites Walk, a dark narrow path in London’s Moorfields, was so called because it was where men cruised for casual sex with men who worked in the “rough trades” of the city.
I wonder if someone forgot the apostrophe when they were naming Sodomites Walk. Personally my favorite though is Gropecunt Lane — grab them by the pussy, indeed.
I was also unaware that the origins of the London Stock Exchange started in coffee houses. The context for the following quote is that people would trade stocks in coffee shops, some people wanted to close off coffee houses so you needed to pay a membership fee in order to trade, and this provoked court cases:
Tested in the courts, the Lord Chief Justice stated that a coffee house was a free and open market and ruled against the stockbrokers. In response the brokers built their own coffee house-cum-exchange, New Jonathan’s on Sweetings Alley. It was soon renamed the London Stock Exchange, open only to those who paid sixpence a day. In 1801 all but bona fide members of the club who paid an annual subscription were excluded. In parallel moves, the underwriters of Lloyd’s Coffee House decamped first to their own coffee house, then to the upper floor of the Royal Exchange in 1773.
(Yes, Lloyd’s Coffee House is the progenitor of that Lloyd’s.)
On the origin of species
I hadn’t realized the extent of some genetic adaptations of animals to cities:
The London Underground mosquito is an entirely new species that has evolved recently in subterranean areas rich in human blood. It has continued to do so: mosquitos on the Piccadilly line are genetically different from those on the Bakerloo. The urban heat-island effect allows blackbirds to remain over winter rather than migrate. They are becoming a separate species to the forest They are becoming a separate species to the forest blackbird, mating earlier, developing a shorter beak because the city provides an abundance of easily obtainable food, and singing at a higher pitch to be heard over the traffic. Natural selection is favouring birds with shorter wings that can avoid traffic, smaller mammals, fatter fish, and larger insects capable of travelling farther in search of fragmented food sources. In Tucson, Arizona, house finches are evolving longer and fatter beaks because their main food source now comes from garden birdfeeders. In Puerto Rican cities, lizards’ toes have evolved to grip bricks and concrete.
I’m unsure whether anything could make me more pessimistic about cities than the development of new species of mosquito.
On cuisine
Hard to believe, but is the following true?
According to the monk Yijing, Chinese food had for generations been bland and uninspiring. The discovery of Indian cuisine and ingredients [in around 825] had revolutionised Chinese cooking and in so doing kick-started a trade bonanza.
And regarding English street food:
That was until the second half of the nineteenth century when the oyster beds that had sustained generations of Londoners became exhausted by the demands of the megacity’s 3 million population; the mollusk became a luxury thereafter, and people switched allegiance to the most British of street foods, fish and chips.
This made me wonder whether there are other examples of expensive foods that were once poor man’s food. An online search gave me the following list: lobster, quinoa, garlic, sushi, caviar, snails, salmon, brisket, portobello mushrooms, eel. I used this source; keep in mind that I’m not sure if it’s the most reliable.
Another note that the repertoire of London street food seemed to have contained pea soup. Oh, England.