Grandiosity aside,
by taking what could be called an "ancient" approach to urban
studies, Kotkin reminds readers of our collective urban roots. In the 21st
century, as cities become increasingly fragmented due to their immense
size and the rise of tele-communities, it's important to remember the
fundamental elements that caused them to come into being in the first
place. As in Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, The City suggests a call for
urban citizens to reevaluate their connection to local communities. In the
end, Kotkin argues, urban areas "must be held together by a
consciousness that unites their people in a shared identity."
Beyond its theories,
The City provides a handy resource for those looking for an introduction
to the history of cities. Chapters on ancient cities, classical cities in
Europe, "The Oriental Epoch", the industrial city, and the
modern city include pocket histories of places from Mesopotamia, to
Alexandria, Baghdad, Shanghai, and New York. Complete with a chronology of
urban history and a suggested reading list, the book is a useful reference
to the evolution, and vital organs, of cities.
* * *
Kotkin does not waste a word. You can read
The City in an afternoon, but if you are interested in cities, and the great debate about how to ensure their success, you will turn to it for reference again and again.
You will get your money’s worth.
—Owen McShane
Centre for Resource
Management Studies,
New Zealand
* * *
The City: A Global History
succeeds in relaying the lofty ambitions of its title by combining history
with Kotkin’s analysis. At the beginning of the book, he lays out a
seven-page chronology of the history of cities that alone provides a wealth
of information. Kotkin’s writing is concise, and every word seems to have
been chosen to convey knowledge. Aspiring urban scholars, former urban
scholars in need of a refresher course, and anyone with even a passing
interest in the urban built form will find The City: A Global History
to be a virtual encyclopedia of cities, packaged neatly in a compact book.
—Howard Kozloff
Urban Land
* * *
"A
most interesting and readable account of cities from ancient to
modern."
— Tom
Condon
Hartford Courant
* * *
"...Serves to
illustrate the background to one of the major problems of our time - and
contains important lessons for those who will have to manage our cities in
the future."
— The Financial Times
Sacred, safe, busy
By Crispin Tickell
* * *
What makes a great
city? Kotkin, author of an intriguing book, "The City: A Global
History," is big on solid infrastructure, good schools and a vibrant
middle class. Cities can't exist merely as cultural hubs filled with trendy
art galleries and funky restaurants. Sure, those features enrich
communities, make life interesting, but vibrant cities don't live on art
alone.
— Chicago Tribune
Sacred, safe and busy
Editorial
* * *
Joel Kotkin, an
internationally recognized expert on the economic, social and political
trends of cities, knows what makes cities grow, what makes them die, and
what it takes to make them worth living in.
— By
Bill Steigerwald
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
* * *
Over the course of
this breakneck survey of 5,000 years of urban history, Kotkin makes a
credible case for his ideas.
— Reviewed by Gary Krist
Washington Post
* * *
"The City informs us of
the universality of the urban experience."
— Philippe
Petit
The Times of London
* * *
"The City offers
fascinating insight into the ideologies that have created different city
designs, and into the natural human desire to gather together to live and for
commerce."
— Steven Greenhut
The Orange County Register
* * *
The book is taut, elegant,
informative and lots of fun to read. When I got to the end, I wished it had
been longer.
—Alan Ehrenhalt
Governing Magazine
* * *
Kotkin's is a bracing
book, one whose theses and arguments must be taken seriously and dealt with
by anyone who wishes to forecast the urban future, or even describe what is
going on today.
—Francis Morrone
New York Sun
* * *
In gentle rebuke to those who never saw the good side of a city,
urbanist and commentator Kotkin looks at the bright side, calling cities
"humankind's greatest creation."
Cities concentrate not just people but also energy, talent,
and wealth. Kotkin adds to these the element of sacredness: Ancient cities,
he observes, were dominated by religious structures, suggesting "that
the city was also a sacred place, connected directly to divine forces
controlling the world." Accidents of geography and history dictate how
cities will rise, flourish and fall. Interestingly, Kotkin ventures that
monoculture is one recipe for collapse. Carthage, he writes, was a mere
commercial center, though it began with all the cultural values of its
Phoenician ancestors; absent "any broader sense of mission or rationale
for expansion other than profit," it fell under the weight of
unenlightened self-interest. Readers will remember that Rome had a hand in
Carthage's end, and Kotkin does a fine job of showing how the Romans
instilled civic virtues and engineered their way to greatness in their own
metropolis. Carthage's example looms as Kotkin turns up other instances of
cities done in by greed, such as Athens and Constantinople. Even Amsterdam
of the Golden Age might have benefited, he suggests, from some of
Elizabethan London's drive toward the "democratization of culture"
and, he adds, some of its moral fiber: Otherwise the Dutch might have fought
a little harder to hold on to New York, soon to become a city of world
importance. Artificial cities like the ones the Nazis planned usually don't
work, Kotkin notes, but more-or-less planned cities such as Pudong and Abuja
are springing up everywhere, changing the face of the developing world.
Kotkin closes his already useful, literate essay by pondering the future of
the urban order, with the hope that the Islamic world, "having found
Western values wanting, may find in its own glorious past . . . the means to
salvage its troubled urban civilization."
A thoughtful survey, of interest to students of urban
affairs and of world history alike
—Kirkus Reviews
* * *
Kotkin, a senior fellow
with the New American Foundation and the author of five previous books,
including Tribes and The New Geography, is certainly a fine, engaging
writer. His discussion of the rise of Rome as the "first megacity"
efficiently covers vast historical ground while consistently bringing that
history back to his central argument.
—Publishers Weekly
* * *
Kotkin's evolutionary narrative is less an examination of
individual urban centers than a strategic, accessible narration of urbanism in
general from ancient Mesopotamia to the present. As places "sacred, safe,
and busy," cities rise and thrive by their ability to become and remain
concentrated, effective sites of worship, security, and commerce. But, as
Kotkin's gently functionalist comparative analysis shows us, cities struggle
when they fail to cultivate a sense of community and common identity among
their diverse inhabitants. Whether threatened by barbarians or suburbs, he
continues, a city's health depends upon its ability to keep the centrifugal
forces of politics and economics from dispersing its sacred urban space.
—Booklist
* * *
"readable and pithy"
—Susan Barnes-Gelt
Denver Post
* * *
"an elegant paean
to a form of living so many of us complain of while we reap its benefits."
—Kelly Jane Torrance
The American Enterprise
* * *
“Unique and powerful
insights into urban life… This book is a great read.”
—Bob Lanier,
Mayor of Houston, 1992-1998
* * *
"If you want to
understand why the future of American and European cities is mixed at best;
if you want to understand why George Bush won the 2004 election, you need to
read Joel Kotkin's account of how and why cities have developed and
declined."
—Fred Siegel,
author of Prince of the City: Giuliani's New York and the Genius of American
Life, senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute
* * *
“A compelling and
original synthesis that belongs on the urbanist's bookshelf with Lewis
Mumford, Peter Hall, and Fernand Braudel.”
—Witold
Rybczynski, Martin & Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism, School of
Design, Professor of Real Estate, Wharton School
* * *
"No one knows more about cities than Joel Kotkin, and has more to teach us about them. In The City, Kotkin takes us on a brisk and invigorating tour of cities from the Babylon of ancient times to the burgeoning exurbs of today. It is impossible not to learn a lot from this book."
—Michael Barone, Senior Writer, U.S. News & World Report and co-author of The Almanac of American
Politics
* * *
Kotkin is an eminent L.A.-ologist, and the author of The City: A Global History, a synoptic history of cities coming from Random House next month that I quite admire. As a big-picture guy, comparing the Chinese and European cities of the year 1000, Kotkin is nuanced and authoritative.
— Harold Meyerson
LA Weekly
ities 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. 
history of all the major cities of the world, from Jericho to Los
Angeles, in 200 pages? The work of Joel Kotkin, renowned author and
frequent columnist on urban issues, is certainly ambitious and, for
the most part, it works. Inevitably, covering so much ground in so
little space spreads some content thin, but this fast read succeeds
most with Kotkin as storyteller, flying through time and around the
world to weave so many disparate histories into one urban tapestry.
Kotkin theorizes that there has been a universality of urban
experience since the beginning of civilization, primarily due to three
critical functions performed by cities: the creation of sacred space,
provision of basic security, and hosting of commercial marketplaces.
When one or more of these functions are absent, problems can arise.
Indeed, "even affluent cities without moral cohesion or a sense
of civic identity are doomed to decadence and decline."
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