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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1883 | Los Angeles

Ancien Régime

Looking at the remnants of old California.More

c. 1936 | New York City

Blowing into Town

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

1520 | Tenochtitlán

Nothing Is Equal

Cortés extols the splendor of the Aztecs.More

Charts & Graphs

When in Rome

Statutes still on the books.

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Statue depicting Roman orator and historian Tacitus.

Black and white photograph of Mencken looking over his shoulder at the camera

Photograph of Jorge Luis Borges

Greek dramatist Sophocles.

Novelist and psychiatrist Daniel Mason.

English diarist and naval administrator Samuel Pepys.

The more men are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of overcrowded cities.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762

Engraving of Roman author and administrator Pliny the Younger.

German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel.

Pliny the Younger & Georg Simmel

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