The Ideal City, attributed to Fra Carnevale, c. 1482. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

The Ideal City, attributed to Fra Carnevale, c. 1482. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

The City

Volume III, Number 4 | fall 2010

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Painting of a sunlit plaza with people and a bell tower.

Preamble

City Light

By Lewis H. Lapham

When it comes to the medieval cathedral and mosque, the modern skyscraper and the slum, world history is city history.

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Photograph of a crowd of people seated in bleachers and looking up.

Waiting for Goffman

By Michael Dirda

There are few better interpreters of modern metropolitan life than sociologist Erving Goffman.

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Map

City Narratives

The tumultuous histories of Algiers, Istanbul, Beijing, and Mexico City.

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c. 1835 | London

Never Can There Come a Fog Too Thick

Charles Dickens on mud, fog, and the law.More

325 | Constantinople

Divine Plan

Constantine builds a city in his own image.More

c. 1821 | Paris

Assaying a Crowd

Balzac gives an introduction to the world of necessary superfluities.More

Charts & Graphs

Welcome to Levittown

“The Most Perfectly Planned Community in America.”

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Photograph of English novelist Charles Dickens.

Portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky

Image of French writer Honoré de Balzac with hand on chest.

American food journalist and editor Frederick Kaufman.

Italian poet and scholar Giovanni Boccaccio.

Photograph of Italian writer Italo Calvino.

Great cities must ever be centers of light and darkness, the home of the best and the worst of our race, holding within themselves the highest talent for good and evil.

—Matthew Hale Smith, 1868

Engraving of Roman author and administrator Pliny the Younger.

German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel.

Pliny the Younger & Georg Simmel

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