Cities are the fulcrum of civilization.

Urbanist Joel Kotkin in his book

The city: A global history creates interest in the origin and history of
world cities from the oldest cities to the modern post-industrial cities. He
examines the evolution of cities and urban life over thousands of years.
He gives an introduction about the social context and urban geography
and the history of urbanity in his writing. He started his writing in
chronological order describing about the each in a detailed way
introducing cities. He covered the earliest major cities from Mohenjo-Daro
to contemporary developing megacities like Mumbai and shanghai. But he
is only giving a brief introduction of each of these cities and the trends
and factors affecting each citys development. Despite this wide-breadth
in temporal and geographic scale. 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 breath-taking
account of the human achievement itself.
Kotkins framework is summarized in the title of the first chapter
Places Sacred, Safe, and busy. Joel Kotkin argues that a citys
prominence is due to three factors that determine the overall health of
citiesthe sacredness of place, the ability to provide security and project
power, and last, and the animating role of commerce. When these factors
are present, a city can be great, when they are not the city can wither
and fade. The first three chapters comprising the first section devoted to
the ancient cities and how they set the standard of all cities being a place
of sacredness, security and commerce. He primarily focused on the cities
in Mesopotamia which is a progenitor to the modern civilizations. He
explains the city and its further development into his framework of sacred,
safe, and busy with ancient examples.
Part two three and four deals with classical and renaissance
civilizations. Here he explains the development of the cities from the great
Greek civilization starting from the collapse of roman empires and the
destruction of the classical city.in part three he shifted the focus to the
other cities of the east like china and India along with the Islamic
civilizations. But he had done his job effectively by highlighting the
changes in terms of social and economic that happens in the dark ages of
Europe following the fall of Rome. In part four, Europe reasserts its
primacy as the hub of urbanity.

Chapter nine Opportunity Lost sets the stage for part four. In this
chapter e pointed out Prosperity as the culprit of Asian and Islamic
stagnation and furtherly leading to its decline. He pointed out the ethno
centric attitude that evolves out in the century of political, economic and
social denomination. He describes about the limits of control of each king
and the autocracy among kingdoms which helped the European traders to
easily start their entrepreneurship in the cities. He describe the rise of
power of the merchant at this stage where urban merchants and the
artesian classes were effectively counterweights to the elite political
peoples and influenced in making policy
In cities of Mammon and in fifth part he describes about Europes
imperial cities, Venice, Amsterdam and London through to industrialization
and the creation of high rise cities.kotkin explains the industrialization of
UK and US as primary case study which counterbalances other nations like
imperial japan, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. He point out the
mistake of Western industrial cities as they overemphasis the
industrialization with the commercialism. He explains of the industrial
cities changed the nature of the city in terms of environmental and social
degradation. He argues that the Soviet Union stripped cities of their
sacred function. When industrialization destroy the sacred religions and
moral order of the west. Soviet Union created cities with a destitute urban
legacy.
The final section talks about the rush to suburbia and the population
loss majorly of whites that happens in the western cities throughout the
century. Kotkin points to the automobile, mass transportation (to a certain
extent), the fear of crime in the inner city, and prevailing cultural
preferences for a six room house with a big yard. Of course, the ultimate
manifestation of this kind of city is Los Angeles. While suburbanization
gripped the West, the former colonies and imperial territories of Africa
and Asia grappled with their colonial legacies. In this chapter, Kotkin
highlights the impact that Europeans had on the urban landscape of
conquered territories (often creating capitals despite an existing
infrastructure elsewhere, like Calcutta instead of Delhi). Importantly,
Kotkin also discusses the dualistic nature of many former colonial cities.
This dualism is in the relative affluence for a small proportion of the
population, often very visible in social and international media (think of
Mumbai and Cairo) and the near destitution and poverty afflicting the vast
majority of the rest of these urban dwellers. In the concluding section to
this chapter he describes these socially stratified cities in the Middle East
and Africa (in particular) as social time bombs.

He concludes by giving a brief description of the preceding chapter.

Here he examines the growth and success of the eastern cities like
Singapore and Hong Kong. He deals with the future of urbanity,
particularly in the United States. Three points he coined here is
Destruction distance,Tele-commuting and Tele-working. With the
discovery of these the concept of city as a center of commerce and work
is decreasing as with these facilities one will be able to do work at home
or wherever he lives. Obviously, this sort of phenomena is primarily
oriented to service-based economies in the West, rather than
manufacturing centers elsewhere. This destruction of distance also
threatens the megacities of economically developing countries, which
have outrun their colonial infrastructure. In the West, it is becoming
apparent that it is no longer necessary for humanity to congregate in an
area to maintain an economically viable enterprise.
In response, Kotkin sees cities everywhere becoming ephemeral
and relying on their cultural industry to set trends and to become places
for tourism and wonder. Perhaps most interestingly, Kotkin sees a limit to
gentrification by wealthy youths and relative social elites. As middleclass urban families are priced out and banished to the suburbs, Kotkin
sees a loss of economic and social vitality characteristic of urban
stagnation and decline. A word here on gentrification as Kotkin sees it,
rather than urban revitalization by young families; he references older
affluentwealthy cosmopolites' seeking to convert cities from
economic centers to residential resorts. The final threat is the lack of a
common moral vision to hold cities together. Kotkin points to the lack of
religion or any other binding force in contemporary cities as a serious
problem to the lack of stable communities. Most interestingly in this
regard, he notes that academics and planners rarely discuss the lack of a
powerful moral vision. In quoting Daniel Bell he says that the fate of
cities still revolves around a conception of public virtue.'
Joel Kotkins The City provides a brief introduction to the geography
and history of humanitys urbanity. Using a framework emphasizing the
city as sacred, secure, and commercial places, he not only highlights the
myriad cities that came to dominate the surrounding landscape
(sometimes the known world) but also provides useful insight into their
eventual decline. The book is important as, we tend to learn much more
from our failures, than our successes.
Moving beyond the city's functional aspects of politics, security, and
economics, Kotkin focuses on his theme of the city as a powerful moral
and spiritual ethos to explain the rise and fall of particular urban cultures.

By focusing on the city's cultural and ethical dimension, Kotkin gives

readers a powerful lens for understanding the lifespan of historical cities
and urban cultures, and perhaps a tool to forecast the city of the future.
While Kotkin describes the story of urbanity Lewis Mumford in his
book The city in history describes the social history, it deals expansively
with the form and function of the city in western civilization from ancient
times down to the present. Although the Mumford is concerned in the
larger sense with the city as a citadel of law and order, he is not
concerned in the narrower sense with the legal structure that lies behind
planning and other municipal functions.
Mumfords ideas are blurry at times even though he describes about
the order of a city and the organic factors that must take into account his
major theme is not so clear. He is into modern metropolis and prefers the
intimacy of the medieval town. Throughout the book, Mumford makes
much of the necessity of limits on city sizes. He feels that there are
necessary organic limits to the size of any city, beyond which gigantism is
the result and decay sets in. He clearly deplores the overgrowth of the
American megalopolis, which he considers to be a formless mass beyond
redemption.
He describes in details about the pros and cons of baroque and
medieval period planning. He says that in a baroque planned city the new
plan distinguished itself from the older medieval informality by the use of
straight lines and regular block units as far as possible of uniform
dimensions. Washington DC is cited as a classical example. The planner of
the Washington DC didnt sacrifices the other functions of the city to
space, positional magnificence and movement.
With the growth of capitalism and the speculative order in
commercial life came another disturbing influence the speculative ground
plan. Although the gridiron plan had ancient origins and may have once
served religious rather than speculative functions, gridiron lot and block
design in recent times has been closely associated with the commercial
exploitation of the city. Mumford has a divesting section on the destructive
impact of the gridiron system. What a grid iron pattern was supposed to
full fill was the standardized lot and block but what happen actually is
traffic streets becoming too small and residential street becoming too
large and was waste due to a general overdose of paving.
Mumfords comments on the uniform dimensions of the baroque
order and the standardizing effects of the gridiron plan fit interestingly
with legal notions of fair play that are enshrined in the equal protection
clauses of our federal and state constitutions. Equal protection means

equal treatment. As applied to the zoning and land use planning. Without
questioning the basic premise of equal protection clause, the argument
could be made that diversity rather than uniformity is needed in the urban
environment. Mumford suggests as much in his section on the Hellenic
city and Jane Jacobs has made a strong plea for diversity in her book the
death and life of Great American cities.
Mumford himself offers no solution to the urban design problems.
But his bias against the grand and the formal is clear. While we cannot
recreate the medieval form which Mumford does seem to prefer, we can
perhaps adapt some of its commendable features. Like integrated
neighbourhoods in which one can live near his work like in London.
Mumford also sees hope in the assembly of large aggregates of land for
unified development as similar to the garden cities of Ebenezer Howard.
Mumford observed that the most successful urban plans have been
executed at one time by persons having control of the whole entity.
Mumford puts his preference for growth restriction on more than a
liking for medieval form. He sees to feel that any social organism is
innately subject to growth limitations. Mumford accepts Ebenezer theory
that every city, every organ of the community, indeed every association
and organization has a limit of physical growth and every plan to overpass
that limit must be transposed into an etherealized form.
Mumford clearly prefers an urban environment in which growth
controlled communities are associated n a regional grid. These
communities would reflect internally the functional decentralization and
close informality of the medieval town.
In short when Joel Kotkin talks in general about the different cities of
east and west in terms of their origin with a strong religious centers and
its development in time with the protection of a security force or a
administration as a medieval time and its changes that happen due to the
industrialization in general. When Mumford is describing the conditions
and evaluating his ideas focusing to medieval cities.