Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet

by Carl H. Nightingale

Overview

This is a biography of Earthopolis, the only Urban Planet we know of. It is a history of how cities gave humans immense power over Earth, for good and for ill. Carl Nightingale takes readers on a sweeping six-continent, six-millennia tour of the world's cities, culminating in the last 250 years, when we vastly accelerated our planetary realms of action, habitat, and impact, courting dangerous new consequences and opening prospects for new hope. In Earthopolis we peek into our cities' homes, neighborhoods, streets, shops, eating houses, squares, marketplaces, religious sites, schools, universities, offices, monuments, docklands, and airports to discover connections between small spaces and the largest things we have built. The book exposes the Urban Planet's deep inequalities of power, wealth, access to knowledge, class, race, gender, sexuality, religion and nation. It asks us to draw on the most just and democratic moments of Earthopolis's past to rescue its future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781108424523
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	06/09/2022
Pages:	814
Product dimensions:	6.18(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.89(d)

About the Author

Carl Nightingale has taught urban history and world history for 25 years as a Professor at the University at Buffalo and the University of Massachusetts. He is Coordinator of the Global Urban History Project, a network of over 500 scholars working in this new hybrid field. His book Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (2012) was co-winner of the Jerry Bentley Prize from the World History Association.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Our Urban Planet in Space and Time; Prologue: Before and Beyond: Big Things in Tiny Places; Part I. Cities of the Rivers: 1. Making Politics from Sunshine, Earth, and Water; 2. Igniting Empire; 3. Wealth for a Few, Poverty for Many I; 4. Wealth for a Few, Poverty for Many II; 5. How Knowledge Became Power; 6. The Realm of Consequence; Part II. Cities of the World Ocean: 7. Bastions, Battleships, and Gunpowder Cities; 8. Wealth from the Winds and Waves; 9. Consuming the Earth in Cities of Light … and Delight; Part III. Cities of Hydrocarbon: 10. Chimneys to Smokestacks; 11. Planet of the People I: The Atlantic Cauldron; 12. Planet of the People II: Feminists, Abolitionists, and los Liberales; 13. Weapons of World Conquest; 14. Capitalist Explosions; 15. The Pharoahs of Flow; 16. Planet of the People III: An Urban Majority Takes its Space; 17. Lamps Out; 18. The Labyrinths of Terror; 19. Gathering Velocities I: Tailpipe Tracts and Tower Blocks; 20. Gathering Velocities II: Liberation and Development; 21. Greatest Accelerations I: New Empires, New Multitudes; 22. Greatest Accelerations II: Shacks and Citadels; 23. Greatest Accelerations III: Pleasure Palaces and Sweatshops; 24. Greatest Accelerations IV: Maximal Hydrocarbon, Maximal Waste; 25. 2020 Hindsight … and Foresight?; Acknowledgements; Notes; Index.

Editorial Reviews

‘Majestic in scale, full of fascinating detail about stones, bricks and systems of segregation, this book is charged with an urgency to create a new epic for our times. It is nothing less than a new human history. Carl Nightingale will change how you think about where we come from, the places we live in, and the resources we consume from this planet and its sun.' Jeremy Adelman, author of Worldly Philosopher: the Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman

‘There's an exhilaration that comes with reading history written on this scale – much of our life that seems elusive or unconnected begins to make sense. And history is merely prelude to the future: on a planet of cities, our survival depends on seizing some of the clues this book contains.' Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out

‘Ours is the first century in which the majority of humankind lives in cities. Nightingale in this sprawling, imaginative, and clearly written book explains how we reached this point by exploring the political and ecological roles of cities in world history from ancient Mesopotamia to modern megalopoli.' J. R. McNeill, author of The Webs of Humankind

‘Offer[s] a unique point of view that includes many valuable insights about cities …' David R. Conn, Library Journal

From the Publisher