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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1889 | Chicago

Job Search

A small-town girl meets big-city life.More

2008 | New York City

Waste Management

A journey through New York’s cesspool system.More

1850 | Washington, DC

Body Politic

Henry Adams surveys life on the Hill.More

Charts & Graphs

Town Meetings

Where to see and be seen.

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Painting of François Rabelais.

English economist and demographer Thomas Malthus.

American Canadian author William Gibson.

Classical bust of Thucydides.

American writer, editor, and translator Eliot Weinberger.

French novelist Gustave Flaubert.

Portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky

Photograph of Colin Dickey standing in front of a brick wall.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

—Aldous Huxley, 1934

Engraving of Roman author and administrator Pliny the Younger.

German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel.

Pliny the Younger & Georg Simmel

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