A compelling and informative tour of the history of cities that was way more fun than I anticipated.

Don’t be put off by the overly simplistic introduction. This one gets good fast after the initial summary at the beginning.

If you’ve got a decent history background there will be a fair amount of content that is already familiar to you, but loads of new information as well.

Wilson illustrates his points beautifully and shares just enough data to support his assertions without throwing too many numbers at you.

I was especially pleased to see the chapter on flâneurs. As someone who considers herself a modern day flâneuse, it was a treat to get Wilson’s perspective on this as it relates to his research on cities. It’s an underused topic that almost never comes up in nonfiction, and I was delighted to see it here.

His writing on Lisbon, Lubeck, and Los Angeles was also particularly exceptional.

A sweeping, magisterial travelogue through history to explore the development and nature of cities.

The author features specific cities in specific eras, beginning with Uruk around 4000 BCE and ending in Lagos in the modern day to exemplify the trends of cities in different times and places.

He describes the reasoning for coming together to form cities; the stigma of cities and sinfulness; the development of cosmopolitanism in the Mediterranean; the height of Rome; the center of science and food in Baghdad; how major cities developed in Europe on account of war, using Lubeck as the example; cities at the end of medievalism, comparing and contrasting Lisbon, Malacca, Tenochtitlan, and Amsterdam; the early modern city as in London; industrial cities like Manchester and Chicago; the tear down and rebuild of Paris; the skyscraper mania and its meaning in New York; the resilience of cities despite attempts at destruction with Warsaw; the expansion of urbanity to the suburbs with Los Angeles; and he looks at the megacities of the world in terms of modern Lagos.

He covers much ground and makes a robust defense for the city as a great innovation of humanity against its detractors. A great read.

~~ I received an ARC copy of Metropolis from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review ~~

Quarantine has made education difficult and the need for history books that bring relevance into the classroom is crucial. When stumbling upon Metropolis I was honestly excited to get a new book that could appeal to myself as an educator but that could be translated into the classroom, especially when Global history seems so intangible to students. Wilson's research and narrative create an interesting picture of the binding threads of cities throughout human history, finding the things that bind our humanity together even when distanced through time, space and politics.