Customer Reviews

The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

In this very short volume, Joel Kotkin outlines the 5,000 plus year history of the city and notifies us that what was fundamental to the cities of ancient Sumeria is still the case today: cities - to be successful - must be sacred, safe, and busy.

It seems a truism that a city needs some "socially important myths" to hold together large diverse groups of people. City planners today, according to Kotkin, do not take into account the sacredness of a place. How can they? Can you imagine a city planner calling for a more Christian city? or a more Islamic or Jewish city? or a more multiculural city? In these secular times, the latter is about the only thing they can attempt. But Kotkin considers multiculuralism a form of separatism. I say let the sacredness arise from the cultural ideas and pracitices of the citzens, not from the city planning office.

That a city needs security and a vibrant business community seems a truism so true that I won't belabor the point here.

The most interesting point made in the book concerns the impact of technology - especially telecommunications - on cities. For the first time in history global megacities no longer have the advantage of size and scale. With computers and telecommunications, businesses can now process and transmit information anywhere - the periphery of the urban centers, small towns, to places anywhere in the world. Moreover, businesses can locate anywhere in the world - anywhere they have skilled workers. The urban center is no longer necessary to operate a global business, in fact, it is no longer desirable.

The growth of the urban periphery and small towns as corporate centers has been called the rise of the "telecity." Anyone who has followed real estate prices of areas 30 to 50 miles outside of urban centers over the last 20 years is well aware of this trend. These areas are called "exurbs" and they are attractive to young people who want to start families and businesses. They are characterized by spacious single story industrial and office parks rather than densely packed skyscrapers. They are more affordable and more conducive to growth. A more lively account of the exurbs can be found in David Brooks' "On Paradise Drive." The exurbs are hot.

As corporations are moving their headquarters to the exurbs, megacities are looking for other sources of growth and revenue, and they are looking mainly at tourism and entertainment. San Francisco, New York, Rome, Paris, and London now consider tourism, entertainment, and other cultural activities as their most promising industries. Business and political leaders are promoting these cities as "cool." The goal is to attract artists, bohemians, and other hipsters in order to create new loft spaces, good restaurants, nightclubs, galleries, and museums.

Kotkin is not optimistic about the long-term economic health of cool cities. He calls them "ephemeral" cities, by pointing out that New York's Silicon Alley and San Francisco's Multimedia Gulch quickly died out after the dotcom boom of the 1990's. He also belittles the lifestyles of urban hipsters and cosmopolitans. These "empty-nesters" are nomads with no future prospects. For example, it is estimated that 10 percent of the population of Paris consists of modern-day urban nomads.

Today's demographic trends favor the exurbs and the small towns not only in America, but also in Europe and Japan. This is where young, skilled workers can afford to live and raise families. However, as these hot, new, and growing population centers achieve a certain level of wealth, density, and complexity, they too will become cool.

Normally, I don't mean to be harsh. I also hardly ever write book reviews, but Mr. Kotkin's the City was so disappointing I felt a duty to warn others.

I should have been tipped off by the book's short length, but I only thought that Kotkin would therefore leave out a lot in favor of threading together an interesting thesis. Kotkin goes the other route, trying to stuff in as much as possible and therefore actually saying very little.

The author seemingly attempts to discuss every major city in the history of mankind. The bibliography starts on page 161 so there is very little room to do so.

With the chapters so short and divided so frequently, Kotkin could have gotten the same effect by asking a bunch of high school students to do a short (but admittedly erudite) summary of a major city. Put those together and you have this book.

Terribly disappointing for someone hoping for depth and substance.

absurdly short given the subject. the thesis--that above all cities need religion or some sort of binding moral order, defense, and free-flowing commerce--is a bit odd. waste of money overall. read mumford or braudel instead.

The author advances that cities either thrive or die based on three variables: 1) their sacredness; 2) their safety; and 3) commerce. Sacredness seems like a very questionable driver of a city's success. Is Jerusalem or Mecca ever likely to be a more successful city than Dallas or Seattle? Unlikely. Also, safety does not seem like a differentiating variable but more like a necessity for a city. It is like saying you need to speak English to be a successful student at Harvard. You need a lot more than that. So, does a city need a lot more than to be safe to become a successful city. Finally, the third variable, commerce, is self-evident and appears the only valid one out of the three mentioned variables.

The present and future of a city most probably depend on a number of variables not well detailed by the author including:

1) Fiscal condition, or does a city has a healthy and growing tax revenue base that can suffice to cover its related cost of delivering public services and running city government?

2) Quality of municipal services including transportation, and most importantly education. For a city to thrive, it needs to deliver very strong secondary and post secondary educational services.

3) An innovative business and cultural environment. Is the city a nest of creativity resulting in a high rate of innovation within commerce, but also the arts, and other domain? Does the city develop other related competitive edges associated with specialized network of professionals? New York benefits a great deal from the huge human capital concentrated in "Wall Street." San Francisco and San Jose benefit greatly from being within close reach of both Silicon Valley and venture capitalists

4) A strategic location. Is the city located at a gateway of domestic or international trading routes? Is it located near a coast, an airport, and a major harbor so it is quickly accessible from around the World?

5) A strategic virtual location. How connected is the city? Does its information infrastructure measure up to other World-class cities?

6) Economic demographics of its residents. What is the educational level and per capita income of its residents? What is the level of homeownership? Business ownership?

Obviously, many of these variables are interconnected. And, many are associated with what the author calls commerce. However, he did not drill down on many of these related variables. Even though such variables would allow you to truly differentiate in a statistically meaningful and analytically insightful way between cities.

Meanwhile, the author offers just vague platitude devoid of much insight on the subject. The model he proposes based on his three variables explains a bit about distant history, but much less about the future.

This book was especially disappointing given that the same author has written one of the most original and insightful books I have read. Indeed, back in 1994 he wrote an excellent book called "Tribes" that does an excellent job of differentiating the culture and behavior of many of the World's most interesting clans or ethnic groups. He also maps out what such cultural and behavioral features entail in terms of the present and future success of these different demographic clans (clustered by either religion, race, or nationality). Thus, the author was able to deliver much insight about the various clans of the human race. Unfortunately, he delivered nearly none regarding cities.

Thus, I strongly recommend you skip "The City" and read "Tribes" instead.

A more appropriate title for this book would be The City Through History, A Brief Synopsis. I would also downplay the central thesis to more of a whimsy on the authors part as it is never sufficiently developed and carried through to the end. I also did not find the thesis to be very descriptive of the city I live currently in or see living in in the next 50 years. Why would an author even try to present a 'Global History' of cities in 170 pages and then on top of that try to bolt on some grand scheme for how cities develop and operate?

What the book does offer is a very fast and readable sprint through 8-10 thousand years of urban history from Jericho to Los Angeles, mostly deferring details and finer arguments to other authors. If one takes the book as a brief introduction on the subject then it is capable of that especially given the many references and suggested reading chapter and these ultimately are the most valuable part of the book.

In this short book, Kotkin explores two central points: 1) that the urban experience is universal, transcending space, culture and time; and 2) that what characterizes successful cities has remained unchanged from the earliest times, namely the creation of sacred space, the provision of basic security, and the hosting of commercial markets. He then provides a vast and rapid sweep through millennia of urban history.

As the author clearly states, this text was intended as an introductory guide rather than an analysis, and he very much succeeds in setting readers on the footpath of further study. While it is true that every subject is handled on a superficial level, what Kotkin chose to discuss was well-distilled and demonstrates his vast knowledge of the field. He supplies readers with a chronology and, more importantly, a suggested reading list. Anyone interested in approaching urban history should begin with this book.

That's the long and the short of it. I found Kotkin's little essay on "suggested reading" useful - as were many of the sources he cited - but the text? Hardly at all. Full disclosure/truth in lending would have required Kotkin to entitle his book, "The City: A Thin Schematic Outline That Raises More Questions Than It Answers Before Ending Discussions Abruptly." For this is indeed simply an outline.

Fine: it's a short book, a mere 160 pp of text, plus almost 40 pp of notes (a good thing), and the 7 pp of suggested readings. I suppose the Modern Library's "Chronicles" format - "featuring the world's great historians on the world's great subjects," all at less than 200 pp - should have tipped me off, but there was the offsetting kudos of Witold Rybczynski: "A compelling and original synthesis that belongs on the urbanist's bookshelf with Lewis Mumford, Peter Hall, and Fernand Braudel." Yes, Prof. Rybczynski, I suppose so, but perhaps only as the first book to pull off that shelf for kindling when the cabin grows cold. Kotkin really doesn't deserve this bonbon from Rybczynski; nor does he belong in this seminal company. His book doesn't seem to contain much that's original; it seems mostly derived from the insights of others. (I suppose that's why it's a "synthesis.") For the most part, much of it - and surely its central thesis that cities are built on sacred, security, or commercial foundations - is in Mumford and Hall, much else, particularly on the rise of commercial cities, may be found in Braudel, and in the later chapters more contemporary writers like Daniel Bell, Saskia Sassen, Manuel Castells, Kenneth Jackson, and Joel Garreau, are among the many authorities who show up. Throughout, the discussion is cursory and in places absolutely superficial, as though lists of observations and authorities had been cobbled together into paragraphs that often end with a clunk.

On the Third World city Kotkin struck me as almost wholly without a clue, although I surmise that, had he written closer to the present time, he would have been able to cull a few interesting and relevant ideas from the World Bank's World Development Report 2009, in which the Bank turns a major corner on developing-economy cities, finally seeing them as potential developing-world engines of growth. Kotkin didn't himself divine any of this at the time of his writing, for the most part reheating accounts of the many pathologies of developing-world urbanization, misunderstanding, among other things, the pull of primate cities in an otherwise bleak,largely subsistence agrarian landscape - "cities = the promise of a better life for millions" - the structural role of informal economies in developing countries, and quite a bit more.

But the little "suggested reading" essay is extremely worthwhile. For this, and for the Robert Ezra Parks quote on "the city as a state of mind," two stars.

The City by Joel Kotkin is a very short (about 160 pages of text) and to the point survey of the history of cities in all areas of the world.

Overall, I liked the book, but it left me wanting more AND wondering why Kotkin just didn't provide it to his readers. There were about 45 pages of notes (really just giving the reference citations with very little footnote type text) and suggested readings FOR A BOOK WITH ONLY 160 PAGES OF TEXT!! Was there a paper shortage or something? He did a lot of research and seemed to have very little to say about it. The book ends up coming off as very superficial in many spots.

Kotkin's thesis (seemingly a reasonable one to me) is that cities must remain somehow sacred, safe and busy in order to survive and thrive. He does not do a great job of "pushing" his thesis in the book as one might expect though. He makes a good effort when discussing some earlier cities, but does not carry this forward all that well later. I think that the issue of the sacred in the modern city was something he really could have explored much more.

It is almost like the book was a detailed working outline for a more complete text that he never got around to writing. A real shame, as I think he would have done a pretty good job if he had expanded it some more before publication. His writing style was pretty good, but it seemed so compressed that it made it hard to get through the book quickly even given its short length.

Kotkin does point out many issues that face modern cities that maybe many people do not fully consider. They might be summarized as relevance, at least for cities in the developed world. With the appearance of the internet, telework and all that, are cities as necessary as they have been in the past for "progress"? I guess one could then ask, can great cities survive, just because we like them, even if they are unnecessary?

One point that I noticed made several times in the book was the apparent importance of diversity in the development of cities - BUT this was diversity not for its own sake, but where the minorities really brought something to the table. Think the Greeks in Rome NOT the Visigoths.

Kotkin also brought up how city life is very important in Islam and how this led to development of some very great cities; he presents some ideas on what may have gone wrong later. He also made interesting points about other cities in many other cultures as well.

In any case, I would recommend the book as a starting point for people interested in the topic, but probably only that.

I generally find Joel Kotkin a great read. I loved The New Geography. I don't always agree with him, but I'm honored that the Los Angeles Times is his home newspaper and I look forward to seeing him on the op-ed pages. I'm also aware that the books in the Modern Library Chronicles are supposed to be short introductions - primers - on a given subject. Given all of that, The City: A Global History is not the book it could have been. Kotkin, usually a dynamic writer, gives us a somewhat bland history of the city. Towards the end of the book, the colorless recitation of history gives way to a more dynamic read, but many readers probably aren't going to give the book that much of a chance. And even though he sets the reader up with a decent hypothesis about why cities succeed - sacred, safe, and busy - he doesn't tie up all the empirical evidence well enough for evaluation purposes. The word "sacred" is a big problem. Kotkin defines sacred and the city in the introduction, but his use of the word throughout the book zigs and zags between multiple meanings. I went on a trip to Washington, D.C. with students from my high school last fall. We toured the city and ultimately sang in Constitution Hall on September 11. Most of my students are very religious and I'm not, but I think most of the folks who went on that trip would say that Washington, D.C. fits the definition of "sacred." After reading The City, I'm not sure what Professor Kotkin would think. Since I can't give fractional stars, I'm rounding up my 3.5 star rating to 4 stars. I learned a lot of history from The City, but given Joel Kotkin's written record, I was hoping for a lot more.

Cities are the fulcrum of civilization. In this short, authoritative yet winningly informal account, urbanist Joel Kotkin examines the evolution of cities and urban life over thousands of years. He begins with the religious roots of urbanism in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China, and takes us to emergence of the Classical City; Byzantium and the cities of the Middle East; the rise of Venice and subsequent commercial city-empires; theindustrial city (from London to Shanghai to Detroit); and on to the post-industrial, suburban realities of today. He concludes with a shrewd diagnosis of the problems and crises facing cities in the 21st-Century.

Unlike other books on cities, Kotkin's is truly global in scope (even Lewis Mumford confined his vision to the West). For Kotkin, cities are not merely "machines for living" but embodiments of the highest ideals: how we can live, cooperate and create together. In looking at the history of city life as a continuous whole, THE CITY is nothing less than a breathtaking account of the human achievement itself.