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

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.

More

Map

City Narratives

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

View

c. 1936 | New York City

Blowing into Town

F. Scott Fitzgerald takes a bite of the Big Apple.More

1877 | United States

Vanity Fair

The inherent vice of city life.More

1708 | London

Burial Grounds

Christopher Wren requests a graveyard shift.More

Charts & Graphs

The gangs of New York.

Turf Wars

The gangs of New York.

View

Black and white image of Greek biographer and writer Plutarch.

Black and white photograph of German-language writer Franz Kafka.

Italian poet and scholar Giovanni Boccaccio.

American poet and novelist Helen Hunt Jackson.

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

Image of French writer Honoré de Balzac with hand on chest.

French novelist Gustave Flaubert.

Black and white photograph of historian and man of letters Henry Adams.

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

—John Berger, 1987

Engraving of Roman author and administrator Pliny the Younger.

German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel.

Pliny the Younger & Georg Simmel

Purchase