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 riverbank with shanties.

Dickens in Lagos

By George Packer

In Nigeria, modernity hasn’t yet begun to solve the problems of people thrown together in the urban cauldron.

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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

1708 | London

Burial Grounds

Christopher Wren requests a graveyard shift.More

1844 | Manchester

Among the Best

Disraeli marvels at the glory that is Manchester.More

Charts & Graphs

When in Rome

Statutes still on the books.

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Black and white photograph of a young F. Scott Fitzgerald sitting at a desk.

Greek dramatist Sophocles.

Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés.

English diarist and naval administrator Samuel Pepys.

English architect Christopher Wren.

A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t go.

—Alexander Woollcott, c. 1935

Engraving of Roman author and administrator Pliny the Younger.

German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel.

Pliny the Younger & Georg Simmel

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