Reviews for Cities and markets

The average rating for Cities and markets based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-08-26 00:00:00 Margaret Brown John Reader's Cities is more of a collection of essays about different aspects of urbanism than it is a coherent statement about the city in history. The fact that you don't, by any means, need to read this one cover to cover from front to back to get into it was a pleasant surprise. Things learned: the economic centrality of small-scale urban gardening in Cuba due to trade embargos, Nairobi is sinking because it was built on a river bed, Stockholm's utopically planned suburbs have actually offered more collectivity than its inhabitants have desired.... Reader's text is interesting and, while its heavy on the data and statistics, it's extremely readable. But, it is most pointedly NOT a history of "the city" (as some amazon reviewers were quick to point out and completely miss the point of the book). True, Reader starts in Mesopotamia, dabbles a bit in greece and rome and then moves on to more modern stories about cities, but each chapter or essay in the book remains a discrete statement about aspects of urbanism studied in different contexts: urban food economies, urban housing, migration into cities, the relationship between the urban and the rural, city planning, cities, contagation and disease, etc. And this approach underlies well one of Reader's main points: that the city is an ancient and integral part of human habitation, that it is by no means a "new" formation, and that we should not see our booming metropolises of today as some sort of apex of the development of urbanism.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-02-13 00:00:00 Christopher Godfrey I only read a few chapters of this book. What I read was interesting but I didn't think I could ever complete reading this book. I was interested in this subject matter but apparently only on the surface. This book is about cities of the world. How they were formed, why, and how they declined. I discovered that the first world city was Catal Huyuk which was founded some 9000 years ago in what is now southern Turkey. I found the life of the Sumerians fascinating. They lived 4000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Archeologists have discovered writings on tablets about Sumerian life. Their lives were similar to ours except for the technology. There was one tablet from a father to son about how disappointed he was for his son to be loitering in the streets. They also found a math word problem that was worked in the schools. They knew of Pythagorean equation before Pythagorus was even born. It took me a couple years to read the 4 chapters and I barely touched the meat of this book so I knew I would never finish it.