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

Purchase

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.

More

Painting of a boat with two shrouded figures approaching a rocky island at night.

Necropolis

By Colin Dickey

The corpse has proved to be a bedeviling problem for the city—how do we live with our dead?

More

Map

City Narratives

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

View

c. 1835 | London

Never Can There Come a Fog Too Thick

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

1850 | Washington, DC

Body Politic

Henry Adams surveys life on the Hill.More

1708 | London

Burial Grounds

Christopher Wren requests a graveyard shift.More

Charts & Graphs

Welcome to Levittown

“The Most Perfectly Planned Community in America.”

View

Black and white photograph of E. B. White sitting at his typewriter with his dachshund.

German architect and Nazi official Albert Speer.

American novelist and journalist John Hersey.

Image from Codex Manesse depicting a tournament of knights.

American composer George Gershwin.

Engraving of the medieval Arab traveler Ibn Battuta.

Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.

English architect Christopher Wren.

Today’s city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.

—Martin Oppenheimer, 1969

Engraving of Roman author and administrator Pliny the Younger.

German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel.

Pliny the Younger & Georg Simmel

Purchase