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The City: A World History tells the story of the rise and development of urban centers from ancient times to the twenty-first century. It begins with the establishment of the first cities in the Near East in the fourth millennium BCE, and goes on to examine urban growth in the Indus River Valley in India, as well as Egypt and areas that bordered the Mediterranean Sea. Athens, Alexandria, and Rome stand out both politically and culturally. With the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, European cities entered into a long period of waning and deterioration. But elsewhere, great cities-among them.

ABSTRACTExamination of writings about British cities that appeared in Germany between the mid-1830s and 1914 runs counter to emphasis either on German anti-urbanism or on growing hostility among Germans to their neighbours across the North Sea. Although it takes into account strong disparagement of flaws and failings that had, in the view of critics, resulted from the chaotic nature of urban growth in Britain, it points to increasing recognition – particularly after mid-century – of efforts to ameliorate conditions about which critics had complained. Much of what was singled out for commendation involved voluntary efforts by men and women who sought to improve working-class life via philanthropic uplift. During the 1850s and 1860s, the conservative social reformer Victor Aimé Huber sang the praises of the co-operative movement, both from an economic and from a moral standpoint. Later on, other observers, such as the liberal economist Gerhart Schulze-Gävernitz, lauded the most famous of the British settlement houses, Toynbee Hall in East London, on account of the activities it promoted in the area of adult education. Favourable commentary on municipal government rounded out a picture of the urban scene as a sphere in which local forces exemplified a spirit of civic-mindedness that ought to inspire admiration rather than enmity.

Readers of English can currently refer to only two works that offer synthetic overviews of the history of European cities from the period of classical antiquity into the twentieth century. We have long had the powerfully argued and highly readable book by the architectural critic, Louis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformation, and Its Prospects (1961). Beginning with the earliest settlements in the Near East and continuing through the rise of the suburbs in the United States, Mumford's volume tells a dramatic story in which urbanity at its best (as exemplified by such communities as Athens and Amsterdam) gave way to a succession of assaults, whether in the form of Baroque planning, rampant industrialization, oversized 'megalopolises' or automobiles. Continuing in the vein of many earlier critics, Mumford saw the modern big city as a depressing departure from earlier norms of urban beauty and human solidarity, and his view of the future was bleak indeed. Nearly four decades later, Sir Peter Hall offered a similarly large-scale but otherwise very different view of the broad sweep of the urban past, in his Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order (1998). He constructed his book not as a narrative but instead as clusters of case studies, in which sixteen cities appear as scenes and agents of various types of exemplary achievement. Focusing on Europe, but not restricting himself to it, Hall presented not only Athens, Florence, Paris, Vienna, London, Manchester and Berlin but also New York, San Francisco and Tokyo as 'places that [have] ignited the sacred flame of intelligence and human imagination' (p. 7). It is primarily for this reason that, in Hall's view, the history of great metropolises is inseparable from the history of civilization itself.