CITIES UNDER SIEGE
When we think of the great cities of the world, we tend to see them as permanent fixtures like mountains. Although they’re constantly changing, they seem somehow immoveable, even eternal. Athens, Rome, Cairo, Paris, London, Tokyo, Beijing – it’s almost impossible to imagine the world without them. But doubtless people once thought the same about Uruk.
Five thousand years ago, Uruk was the greatest city on Earth, with a population of between 50,000 and 80,000 people. Nowadays it’s a series of excavated mounds in the desert between Baghdad and Basra. Or there’s Balkh, one of the finest cities of late antiquity, which was razed in 1220 and today amounts to little more than a few dusty streets in an obscure part of northern Afghanistan.
Both these vanished cities bring to mind Ozymandias, Shelley’s haunting meditation on the transience earthly power: “Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.
” Both Uruk and Balkh make appearances in Metropolis, Ben Wilson’s magnificent history of what he calls “humankind’s greatest invention” – namely, the city. They are timely reminders that there’s nothing necessarily inexorable about urban growth. And at this present moment, it’s fair to say that cities the world over, if not perhaps in New Zealand, are suffering from the kind of self-doubt that qualifies as an identity crisis. If offices are closed, theatres are closed, bars and restaurants are operating under conditions of “social distance” and transport systems are places of anxious concern, what exactly are cities for? What’s the point of living in them?
Wilson is well aware of the threat to urban life that Covid-19
