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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Painting of people and carriages in the road next to a park.

Urban Scrawl

By Jamie James

The city novel begins with a young person arriving from the provinces—and the world rising up to greet them.

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Map

City Narratives

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

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1898 | London

Mixed Media

Ebenezer Howard and the marriage of town and country.More

1883 | Los Angeles

Ancien Régime

Looking at the remnants of old California.More

1849 | San Francisco

Mud and Mules

William Tecumseh Sherman’s adventures in California.More

Charts & Graphs

Workforce

From a 1292 inventory of craftsmen in Paris.

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Swiss traveler and writer Nicolas Bouvier.

American civil war general William Tecumseh Sherman.

Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés.

Danish author Hans Christian Andersen

German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel.

French novelist Irène Némirovsky.

Does anybody really want to attend to cities other than to flee, fleece, privatize, butcher, or decimate them?

—Jane Holtz Kay, 1992

Engraving of Roman author and administrator Pliny the Younger.

German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel.

Pliny the Younger & Georg Simmel

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