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 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?

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Map

City Narratives

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

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c. 25 BC | Rome

Blueprint

Building a better forum.More

1866 | Atlantis

The Character Remains

Stumbling across a lost civilization.More

1949 | Boston

Fare Hike

Trapped in the Boston subway.More

Charts & Graphs

Workforce

From a 1292 inventory of craftsmen in Paris.

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Novelist and psychiatrist Daniel Mason.

Classical bust of Thucydides.

American writer Theodore Dreiser.

American author and journalist Jamie James.

black and white photo of Groucho Marx wearing glasses and smoking a cigar from the side of his mouth

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

—D.H. Lawrence, 1908

Engraving of Roman author and administrator Pliny the Younger.

German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel.

Pliny the Younger & Georg Simmel

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