This is a superb, highly informative, examination of what a city is, where they came from and why, even when they are dirty, crime ridden and over-populated we still choose to live in them.

This book covers a whole range of cities, from Uruk one of the first cities, through Rome and Baghdad to present day mega cities this book delves into each with great insight.

The stories of how these cities came to be, what motivated people to move there, how they rose and fell would be enough, but it's the side tangents and asides that makes this book as good as it is. For instance whilst talking about Baghdad we get a fair bit around the street food of London (and other cities), in the opening chapters there is a bit about the Epic of Gilgamesh as it features Uruk, later we get swings into film and the underbelly of Los Angeles. These asides instead of feeling separate and distinct work perfectly, blending together to build a fascinating account of how cities come to be and why we are continually fascinated with them.

It's not a huge book in length, but it is heavy in terms of the sheer amount of information it has in it (it's clearly been very well researched) that never stops it being readable and enjoyable though, and anyone who loves learning new things will get a big kick out of this book. It's better read in digestible chunks then all in one go, but I really, really, enjoyed it.

This is a really impressive, comprehensive and wide-ranging history of global cities. I was delighted to see bathing, cleanliness and hip hop share space with trade, war, religion and other usual topics you’d find in a book on history of the city. Metropolis also properly spans the globe and isn’t weighted with Western cities and civilisation. And for a book that covers thousands of years of history, it also feels current, Wilson makes great use of recent specialist academic journals and articles on cities in the twenty first century.

The book is set out chronologically, starting with Uruk, Harrapa, Babylon, Athens, Alexandria, Rome and so on. With each city, Wilson also covers specific topics such as worship, entertainment, city planning and architecture, art and the above mentioned hip hop. There is a lot to take in and think about but Wilson writes engagingly and passionately, especially about local neighbourhoods and communities, building their cities from the bottom up, climate change and green cities. I would have liked to see a full bibliography at the end but perhaps the final edition will have it – I read an ARC.

My thanks to Vintage, Jonathan Cape and Netgalley for the opportunity to read Metropolis.

I dont read many non fiction books, but as I have always lived in cities, and love visiting them, I thought this would be an interesting read.
It is very scholarly but readable and the author is obviously a fan of cities throughout history and how people maintain and change them.
With covid-19 and an increasing number of people working from home rather than travelling into a city for work it will be interesting to read Mr Wilson's views on any changes in a couple of years.
thank you to netgalley and Vintage for an advance copy of this book.

Seven centuries and 26 global cities is no mean feat, in this bright and engaging history of the city. Focusing on turning points and key events, I would have perhaps liked more 'little people' history, but still learnt plenty along the way. I can see this working for both students of history, as I once was, and popular history readers due to the accessible way this is written and presented.

This is a big book about Big Cities. Ben Wilson's meticulously researched time is written on a vast scale covering thousands of years and literally every corner of the globe. It is written to academic standards but is still an engrossing subject matter for laymen like myself.
One sees the rise and fall of great empires through the cities at their heart; changing cultures and cosmopolitanism on a grand scale. Many of the great cities of the past are lost in the mists of time but in recent decades many archaeological discoveries have been made that have changed our history books.
Sometimes biblical; sometimes utopian or dystopian; the text never fails to fascinate and important questions are asked about our urban future in the wake of Covid-19.
An important book about the world in which we live and how we must change and adapt to survive.

This book is amazing. I have never read anything by Ben Wilson before so his accessible and engaging style was a pleasant surprise for a non-fiction book. Such an in depth study of cities; well researched, well written and containing so many interesting facts. My husband had a good portion of the book read out to him as I discovered fascinating fact after fascinating fact. It took me much longer to read than expected - my reading speed was cut to 50% of normal as I read and absorbed so much information about books, art, entertainment, music, traffic, construction and much, much more. And any book that includes 'higgeldy-piggeldy' always gets an extra vote from me - and this book has it twice! My only adverse comment is the need for a bit more close editing throughout and some finer proofreading in the latter half of the book - this could of course have been sorted out before publication as I read an e-ARC, for which thanks go to Netgalley, the publisher and Ben Wilson.

A fascinating and comprehensive guide to the rise and fall of various major cities in differening civilisation. The exploration of the reasons for the cities rise and decline. How their where and still is problems and issues of crime and prostitution. The foot fall and diversity of the population.

A great book for those who favour urban life and living in the city. I am fascinated by cities the world over and Wilson gives a clear account of who lives in them, the environment and their history. Even when pointing out negative factors about city life it is clear Wilson loves cities and all aspects of living there.

Metropolis: A History of Humankind’s Greatest Invention by Ben Wilson covers the vast history of cities, from the earliest city, Uruk, through the ages, looking at different cities and how cities have impacted humans and the world around us.

The way Ben Wilson tells the story is really enjoyable, with a city being focused on for a certain period, and highlighting a certain feature.

There is a little mention of Coronavirus at the beginning of the book, which was obviously added as many people are moving out of cities currently, trying to escape the close proximity with others who could spread the disease.  But the push and pull of people in cities is covered in this book.

I enjoyed the way it's written, and how Ben Wilson brings the history and cities to life.

 Metropolis: A History of Humankind’s Greatest Invention  was published on 24th September 2020, and is available to buy from  Amazon ,  Waterstones , and your  local independent bookshop. 

I'm afraid I couldn't find a link for you to follow Ben Wilson!

I was given this book in return for an unbiased review, so my thanks to NetGalley and to  Vintage .

This is a great sweep of a book, swinging across the urban world westwards from the Middle East to Europe and on to Africa, America and the Far East - nearly back to where it started. Does that hint that the rule of the metropolis is moving westwards as cities rise and fall ? Except that while ancient and mediaeval cities seem to fall just as they rose, there is not much to suggest that the life of the modern metropolis might not be as assured as they would like to think.

I enjoyed the regular sound bites - urban populations growing at the rate of 200,000 a day, 1 in 4 city dwellers living in slums (would you really want to advertise that ?) and the anonymity of city life as a precondition of cultural development. I must confess, though, that I rather dreaded the arrival of the lists that seemed to crop up early in the description of each city.

Perhaps the book has the same effect as cities do - first impressions are exciting and convincing, but closer acquaintance becomes more nuanced. If the metropolis is the model for community progress, I wonder (as a village dweller) why so many Londoners who visit our part of rural Dorset speak so longingly about escaping the exciting creativity that they keep calling the “rat race”.

This history through time to the present day and the Covid19 pandemic, demonstrates the cyclic nature of the emergence and evolution of urban development driven by the inherent nature of survival when humans coalesce. The author takes us from the original mega-city in Mesopotamia some 4000 years ago through its gradual destruction and the appearance of similar cities as populations increase and trade routes expand in the centuries that follow.
The history lesson continues throughout the book giving the reader an in-depth explanation of the reasons behind the rise and fall of these Metropolis cities leading up to our world today and sharing with us a view as to where our future may lie. Suggestions are also made as to possible solutions to the inherent issues created by an exponential population expansion and the point is made that, in order to survive and not exhaust our limited resources, action has to be taken in the immediate future to avoid an inevitable catastrophe.
A thoroughly enjoyable book that should be read by all involved in Urban Strategic Planning.

Having lived in London all my life, I am a definite city dweller, and city lover. The countryside has never appealed and I cannot see myself ever being enticed by a quieter life. However, if you are not a fan of urban living, you may find this a difficult read, as, even when discussing the negative points of living in cities, Wilson sounds secretly enthusiastic. If you do prefer pavements over paths, this will be an intriguing look at how cities function.

We begin at the dawn of city life, in Uruk, in Mesopatamia – now Iraq – in 4000-1900 BC and take a whistle stop tour to modern day Lagos. Along the way, Wilson takes in Babylon, Rome, Baghdad, Lubeck, London, Manchester, Chicago, Paris, New York, Warsaw, Los Angeles, and many other cities. Each city begins with a theme, so Rome centres on Roman Baths, before leading to a discussion of urban swimming pools, lidos and swimming generally. London (1666-1820) starts with the first European coffee shop, then evolves – the threads sprawling like city streets – into debate, news, business and finance, social distinctions and male, urban fashion.

From skyscrapers, through the suburbs, to organised crime, this is a fascinating look at how the city changes people and how they change the city. Ever growing, expanding and changing. From the Industrial Revolution to war, I found this a fascinating read. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

Magnificent! A sweeping history of the Metropolis spanning 2600 BC to the present day. Reading this will undoubtedly make you a more informed person as to why cities matter and why they appeared in the first place. Filled with intriguing facts such as the city where every house had a shower and flushing toilet - in 2600 BC! Which city grew the fastest and why. Which cities just faded away. Which city has been built to a template where technology and communication is centralised. You can even buy the "kit" for it, of the shelf, and build your own.
But there is a great deal more in Ben Wilson's book. He guides us through city architecture and city layouts. How these have evolved and why constant change is essential. He even tells us how "fish and chips" came to London!
Definitely a book for those working in city design and development but, I would argue, this is also a book for the curious everyday reader. Once read you shall have countless fascinating facts and anecdotes with which to regale your friends. I was totally absorbed.

This book is a paean to the urban metropolis. It is the seedbed for social and political developments, and freedoms. Its practice of gathering, mixing and innovating is taken as a virtue and dozens of variations on this theme are played out. Urbanisation constantly produces new problems, but bad as these may be to live through (cholera, rioting, class-based xenophobia) these tend to be opportunities in disguise - or, rather growing pains necessary for bigger solutions.

The gathering, mixing and innovating is very much the format of the book itself. The chapters tend to list a few cities that are really gathered by theme - so London is mainly a means to discuss coffee shops and street culture (urban sociability); Chicago is the basis of immigration and social mixing; a good chapter on Compton (LA) shows it as part of a larger process of social churn - from downtown to suburban. The chapters are laid out in historical sequence, but the thematic study in each chapter can range back and forth in time. So, the coffee shop is considered as an agent of social culturalisation in modern South Korea as well as in C17 London.

The style of the book is also a hybrid mash-up of several great books on urban history. In its chronological focus, it reminded me very much of Mumford’s The City in History (a book I loved) but up-dated so that it expands beyond the development of the Western city. At other times it reminded me of Peter Hall’s global epics, Cities in History and Cities of Tomorrow - in each chapter a city is chosen to give a study of a new urban feature: entertainment, transport, industrialisation and post-industrialisation, &c. Other chapters reminded me of Mike Davies’ City of Quartz, identifying cultural and financial drivers behind our apparently free choices. The final chapter on Lagos seems to echo ideas from Rem Koolhaas' investigations of that dynamic city. Several chapters were really opportunities for mini-histories, such as the chapter on Warsaw’s sorry fate during WWII.

This expansion to bring in the free-trade muliticultural state that existed before and outside the European fortress state is well-managed and is integral to the book, not a fashionable bolt-on. The interlinked but distinct trajectory of Asian cities is given fair space and is a strong-point of the book, though there could have been even more on this. There is a kind of conservativism in the belief that all ground-up control is good and all top-down planning is bad. The final chapter on Lagos suggests that Wilson’s preferred solution is for planners to give resources to local neighbourhood initiatives as these will be more dynamic and pioneering. I’m not sure how this fits with his desire for ecocities - the things he likes such as rail infrastructure, waste disposal, and urban greening are better done at the city or even regional level - and this is likely to run counter to neighbourhood plans. But, the value of the book does not really hang on this point.

Overall, this is what I expect from Ben Wilson - a book full of fascinating information, but delivered through human stories and pen portraits, striking a happy balance between stuff I know with stuff I didn’t know. it is intelligent and engaging, and as usual, it will send me down all sorts of rabbit holes.

Interestingly, after completing Metropolis, I picked up Remote by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, which talks-up home/remote working. Early on in that book, they predicted the working from home movement (greatly accelerated by Covid19) would result in the decline of cities - people would choose to live in cheaper, larger properties out of the city. Being a city person, I disagreed with this statement, and after reading Ben's Metropolis, I realised why.

It's easy to label cities as dirty, violent, over-priced, etc, but that's missing the point. They provide means of collaboration of ideas and resources, social opportunities and much more. Throughout history, cities like Uruk (six thousand years ago) have drawn people to them - to the point now where the majority of people live within them.

This well researched book does have it's flaws. There are a few odd transitions which seem shoe-horned in, and a few chapters really could've used a trim (repeated discussions on the benefits and troubles of walking in a city, too many film plots explained) but otherwise this is an excellent book that I can see myself dipping in and out of in the future.

This is undoubtedly a book which is wearing its heart on its sleeve: '... the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention' - but then I'm a born and bred Londoner so I'm there with Wilson! It's just worth bearing in mind that if you're not a city person, the endless enthusiasm for urban life might not suit.

I'd situate this book as a crossover that is not really academic, even though it is certainly well-read and wide-ranging. Wilson has an enthusiastic way of writing and while the book is packed with fascinating facts and anecdotes (I have nearly 200 notes on my Kindle!), it's always lively, entertaining as well as informative.

In some ways, it's almost a mini history of the world through cities: so we range from Uruk as mentioned in [book:The Epic of Gilgamesh|617495] from 4000-1900 BCE through to the quasi-futuristic 'smart city' of Lagos today, taking in a panorama en route.

Wilson has organised his material with great verve: so we travel through the cities in chronological order but each chapter also has a theme e.g. sex and the city in the chapter on Babylon, cosmopolitanism and city politics in the chapter on Athens and Alexandria, street food and immigration in the chapter on Baghdad. He has also mastered the fine art of organised digression: so what starts as an excavation of the public baths in ancient Rome morphs into an exploration of leisure facilities and public spaces in later cities from the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in London to lidos and swimming pools.

There are some overriding themes and key-points: that cities are clusters of knowledge, innovation and reinvention; that migration and multiculturalism have always been part of city life and contribute to their vitality and robustness; that the history of cities embraces world history and that cities have both supported and been supported by global moves towards exploration, trade, finance, and the transmission of ideas. Wilson restrains himself from making the obvious Brexit connection when discussing the Hanseatic League and other international economic unions/trading blocs but they're there subliminally.

My only tiny criticism is that this is so overwhelmingly positive about cities that it almost erases some of the negatives: for example, Wilson almost airbrushes out the fact that amongst all the positives of the Athenian city-based democratic experiment, women were completely excluded as they were never given citizen status. I'd also suggest that some of the periodisation is a bit old-fashioned now - academic historians don't use the term 'Dark Ages' now, generally because it turns out they were actually pretty vibrant and not 'dark' at all!

Still, those are nit-picks in what is, overall, a wonderfully immersive, enthusiastic and wide-ranging history.

This is a long book but a worthwhile read. It tells the history of cities from the first ones in Mesopotamia to the sprawling megacities of today. It brings out the energy and inventiveness that cities generate. It also shows the importance of trade. Nearly all the major cities have been at the centre of major trade routes. Cities are always changing and reinventing themselves, for example, Tokyo, Warsaw and Lubeck were totally rebuilt after their destruction in the Second World War. Another theme is the importance of transport. Improvements in shipbuilding, the invention of railways and building of motorways have all had their effect on how cities develope. This may make the book sound worthy but dull but Ben Wilson writes in highly readable style, peppered with interesting examples and anecdotes. I enjoyed reading it and would recommend it to others.

I don't think I have ever enjoyed a non fiction book more than Ben Wilson's Metropolis. It is an un-put-downable, lights still on until the early hours cornacopia of fascinating facts. This is a beautifully written summary of mankind's rise from the hovels and caves of his early beginnings to the soaring peaks of modern New York and Dubai. The author takes us from the beginnings of civilization in the fertile plains of the Euphrates river and the fabled early kingdoms of Arak, Adab and Kish then Babylon, Jerusalem and the Greek and Roman cities Athens, Troy, Rome and Constantinople to the modern day. These very names evoke the fascination of the story and as the narrative unfolds we are treated to regular nuggets of curious and wonderful facts. Did you know for example that New York's famous skyline came about because in 1916 the local administration were concerned that too little light was filtering down to street level and ordered that the roof line had to be staggered? Did you realize that the world leading power of the London financial markets was built in informal coffee shops in the 17th century? You may have thought that the Imperial Romans were a clean bunch because of their famous baths but possibly you might think again if you knew that they rarely changed the water! I absolutely loved this book and it will be my Christmas gift for my friends. Any chance of a discount for volume?!

A wide-ranging fascinating history of mankind's gravitation towards communal living and how that has driven development from pre-historic times. Humans have developed by standing on the shoulders of preceding generations as well as deriving inspiration from each other's experiences. Cities, typically built on major crossroads in world trade, helped language to develop to convey increasingly complex information and concepts and the proximity of people with diverse experiences and knowledge fuel technological and social development.

Not a quick read but a fascinating one!

It’s a skill to make fact-filled non-fiction readable. Ben Wilson has it in spades: an easy narrative style that’s engaging without being facile. Far from delivering a straight, dry history, he weaves myth, art and literature into the city story. Unafraid to draw parallels between ancient and modern, Metropolis does not simply recount events but also meditates on ideas and customs. As much as it’s about cities, it’s about humanity: cities are places where people live, work, trade and innovate. Cities have always changed and evolved and it has never been more timely to acknowledge that they play a crucial part in the world.
The chapters are loosely chronological according to the heyday of their headline cities but there are pleasant meanderings off the timeline. The description of the street food available in Baghdad in the first millennium would revive even the most deadened appetite. I liked nuggets such as the quintessential English dish being thought up by a teenage Ashkenazi Jewish refugee in Victorian London.
I like the mixture of place- and theme-based writing; stories are naturally intertwined rather than artificially separated. It seems obvious that rather than rising and falling in isolation, cities and civilisations interacted with others, some far away even thousands of years ago, but reading some histories you’d be forgiven for thinking that was the case.
I enjoyed reading Metropolis but at times thought it could have been a little more concise. It’s a fascinating and engaging read, one I think would be enhanced by being enjoyed in the print version with illustrations. I found myself compelled to look at a map to accompany my reading, especially for far-flung trading routes. I’d not come across this author before but I see he’s written other books; I look forward to choosing my next one.