Wilson, Ben. Metropolis: a history of the city, humankind’s greatest invention. New York, Doubleday, 2020.
“ … a colourful journey through 7,000 years and twenty-six world cities that shows how urban living has been the spur and incubator to humankind's greatest innovations … Ben Wilson, author of bestselling and award-winning books on British history, now tells the grand, glorious story of how city living has allowed human culture to flourish. Beginning in 5,000 BC with Uruk, the world's first city, immortalized in The Epic of Gilgamesh, he shows us that cities were never a necessity, but that once they existed, their density created such a blossoming of human endeavour, producing new professions, art forms, worship and trade, that they kickstarted civilization itself.” (excerpted from the publisher’s summary).
I’m a city person at heart. Today I live in what most would call a medium size city (~ 500,000), though to me it has overtones of the big city, but with some of the charms of a small town. Ah … definitions. In any case I like the things one can find in a city, the history, people, coffee shops, bookstores, restaurants, concerts, architecture, historic districts, and such. There are other, more subjective, eminently less tangible, pulls of the urban: the mystery and glamour of a city, and indeed its flip side, danger and sordidness. Aside: this might go a long way toward explaining the fondness for my favorite cinematic genre, film noir, with its rather uneasy combination of the romantic and the criminal in an urban milieu [1]. By the way Wilson doesn’t neglect the dangerous and sordid aspects of cities in Metropolis, far from it. But I’m running ahead of myself.
Getting back to my preference for (mostly) all things urban, no surprise then that I’m just not much of a rural or small town guy. I grew up in a small midwestern town of – on a good day – 3,000 residents, actually to be technically correct in an even smaller town, village really, on the outskirts of said small town. Anyhow this might explain it. I’m essentially a private sort who prefers the low keyed and low profile to the flamboyant and heart-on-sleeve. Thus the anonymity of the big city is one of its attractions. In any event when I spotted Wilson’s Metropolis on the new book shelf at the library it piqued my interest and I scooped it up right away.
For the most part Metropolis lived up to its somewhat ponderous subtitle: “a history of the city, humankind's greatest invention,” and indeed there are juicy tidbits and a wealth of detail on just about every page. However, such an all-encompassing survey will of necessity be selective, and as a result the emphases may seem arbitrary. Some of my favorites – Berlin, San Francisco, Mexico City – receive rather short shrift while others get, arguably, more attention than they deserve [2]. Indeed, nothing gets an enthusiast’s back up when favorites are passed over or minimized. There are other things that might inspire a quibble or two. The detailed, user-friendly index is a plus, but the tightly scrunched, squint inducing ‘Notes’ section, for all its admirable content, does the reader no favors. There’s also the conspicuous absence of a general bibliography, which would have been welcome. Moreover, Wilson’s obvious infatuation with the material sometimes results in a tendency to wander and get over-wordy.
But now to the considerable merits of Metropolis. With the exception the aforementioned lack of a general bibliography, it has all the usual suspects that bespeak of academic patina: maps; well-chosen illustrations with detailed credits; thorough index; and a blizzard of footnotes. Broadly speaking, Wilson employs a chronologic approach in which each chapter discusses mostly self-contained aspects as they apply to one or a few cities of similar size, setting or historical era. Still, for all its factual density, Metropolis reads beautifully. Wilson writes in an eminently user-friendly style that’s a pleasing combination of the erudite and the popular.
The well-turned introduction in particular describes most of the issues to be covered within and contains some of the best prose nuggets of the entire book. Indeed some of the text reveals the touch of the poet and poet-philosopher in its smoothly flowing eloquence. One of my favorite passages is:
“Cities are, for all their successes, harsh, merciless environments. If they offer the chance for higher incomes and education, they can also warp our souls, fray our minds and pollute our lungs. They are places to survive and negotiate as best we can – cauldrons of noise, pollution and nerve-shredding overcrowding … city life is overwhelming; its energies, ceaseless change and millions of inconveniences, big and small, push us to our limits. Throughout history, cities have been seen as fundamentally contrary to our nature and instincts, places that nurture vice, incubate diseases and induce social pathologies … in their beauty and ugliness, joy and misery, and in the inordinate, bewildering range of their complexity and contradictions, cities are a tableau of the human condition, things to love and hate in equal measure.”
In similar fashion throughout the book, Wilson is honest about the downsides of urban life, symbolized for Christians since time immemorial as Babylon. Likewise, and especially compelling, is the description of the total destruction that cities have experienced during times of war, especially the unvarnished accounts of the saturation bombings during World War II. A surprising emphasis was the approach Wilson takes to Rome, in which he devotes considerable space to the city’s thermal bathes and their central place in the calculus of what a civilized city should be.
[1] I was delighted to see two, albeit fleeting, references to noir in Metropolis.
[2] To be sure Wilson does give some coverage (about three pages) to Tenochtitlan, the Aztec city that eventually metamorphosed into modern day Mexico City.
