By Bob Chambers
I.
Cities have been around for a long time. As ancient, entirely rural populations grew and became more complicated three millennia ago, people increasingly banded together for security and economic reasons. The earliest such gatherings would be largely unrecognizable to us today, but cities pretty much as we know them were established fairly early on in China and Europe, primarily to provide protection against marauding armies and to offer central places of trade and interaction. As they expanded, they became more complex and naturally developed both benefits and costs. Among the benefits were reduced transport expense, the exchange of ideas, the sharing of natural resources, the provision of local markets, and, later on, such amenities as sewage disposal and running water. The costs of expanding cities included rising crime rates, higher living expenses, pollution, and, in time, the replacement of the bicycle and buggy by the automobile and alarmingly dangerous high-speed traffic.
With the creation and growth of cities inevitably came the need for organizing and managing them – and thus the necessity of political systems with all their divisions, jealousies, and corruption. Bad as these could be, though, they also became the stuff of art, literature and written history. Just as The Eternal City inspired Gibbon to pen The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire and as eighteenth century Paris and London led to Dickens’ A Tale Of Two Cities, so, in our own time, cities have spawned an industry of political fiction and historical investigation.
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Posted on July 23, 2012
