Author: Peter J. Taylor File Type: pdf The founding father of the famous Globalization and World Cities Research Network and think-tank on worldwide links between cities presents this fascinating overview on cities in geohistory. By moving cities to the centre stage, Peter Taylor proposes that concern for states tell only part of the macro-social story of humanity. Cities have been, and are, the engines of innovation. This impressive new book provides new insights into why cities succeed or fail. The book is in the class with broadminded presentations like Jared Diamonds book Guns, Germs and Steel. - Christian Matthiessen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark and President, International Geographical Union s Commission on Urban Geography This is a big book by Peter Taylor. It tells of the extraordinary world-making powers of cities across the ages, it explains why a state-centric social science has constrained recognition of these powers over the last two centuries, and it outlines a new indisciplinarity to help us make sense of a human condition increasingly forged out of the urban. Anyone troubled by the social sciences as we know them, ought to read this book. - Ash Amin, Cambridge University, UK and author, Land of Strangers Accepting that cities are extraordinary, this book provides an original city-centered narrative of human creativity, past, present and future. In this innovative, ambitious and wide-ranging book, Peter Taylor demonstrates that cities are the epicenters of human advancement. In exploring cities as sites through which economies flourish, by harnessing the creative potential of myriad communication networks, the author considers cities from varying temporal and spatial perspectives. Four stories of cities are told the origins of city networks the domination of cities by world-empires the genesis of a singular modern creative interval in which innovation culminates in todays globalized cities and finally, the need for cities to act as centers for human creativity to produce a more resilient global society in the current crisis century. Providing a long-term view through which to consider the role of cities in attending to incipient crises of the twenty-first century, this closely argued thesis will prove essential for students and scholars of urban studies, geography and sociology, and all those with a professional interest in, or personal fascination for, cities. Contents Preface Part I Setting Down and Setting Up 1. A Cities Perspective 2. Conceptual Toolkits Part II Narrative I Beginning Conjectures 3. City and State Beginnings Western Asias Great Creative Interlude 4. Geographies of Beginning Creative Interludes Part III Narrative II World-systems 5. Normal History 6. Making the Modern World-system Western Europe s Great Creative Interlude Part IV Narrative III Prospective Conjectures - Where Are We and Where Are We Going? 7. Working in an Urban World 8. Towards Green Networks of Cities for the Twenty-first Century References Index **Review In this intellectually far-reaching, all-encompassing, thoroughly researched, methodologically rigorous archaeological account, Taylor sets out myriad arguments that support his notion that cities (all cities) are exceptional. He offers a city-centric analysis of macro-economic change and in so doing disabuses readers of the idea that the state, typically considered the driver of economic change, is in charge. Indeed, he points to the impotence of the state, were it not for the city. In so doing, he masterfully breaks the mold and departs from tradition... Taylor engages in an archaeological dig of mammoth proportions never before witnessed in the study of cities. An incredible work... Essential. -- - R. Sanders, Choice About the Author Peter J. Taylor, FBA Professor of Human Geography, Northumbria University, UK

Author: Andrew Wallace-Hadrill File Type: pdf Few sources reveal the life of the ancient Romans as vividly as do the houses preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius. Wealthy Romans lavished resources on shaping their surroundings to impress their crowds of visitors. The fashions they set were taken up and imitated by ordinary citizens. In this illustrated book, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill explores the rich potential of the houses of Pompeii and Herculaneum to offer new insights into Roman social life. Exposing misconceptions derived from contemporary culture, he shows the close interconnection of spheres we take as discrete public and private, family and outsiders, work and leisure. Combining archaeological evidence with Roman texts and comparative material from other cultures, Wallace-Hadrill raises a range of new questions. How did the organization of space and the use of decoration help to structure social encounters between owner and visitor, man and woman, master and slave? What sort of households did the inhabitants of the Roman house form? How did the world of work relate to that of entertainment and leisure? How widely did the luxuries of the rich spread among the houses of craftsmen and shopkeepers? Through analysis of the remains of over two hundred houses, Wallace-Hadrill reveals the remarkably dynamic social environment of early imperial Italy, and the vital part that houses came to play in defining what it meant to live as a Roman.**