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S'està carregant… Cities : the first 6,000 years (2019 original; edició 2019)de Monica L. Smith
Informació de l'obraCities: The First 6,000 Years de Monica L. Smith (2019)
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"A revelation of the drive and creative flux of the metropolis over time."--Nature "This is a must-read book for any city dweller with a voracious appetite for understanding the wonders of cities and why we're so attracted to them."--Zahi Hawass, author of Hidden Treasures of Ancient Egypt A sweeping history of cities through the millennia--from Mesopotamia to Manhattan--and how they have propelled Homo sapiens to dominance. Six thousand years ago, there were no cities on the planet. Today, more than half of the world's population lives in urban areas, and that number is growing. Weaving together archeology, history, and contemporary observations, Monica Smith explains the rise of the first urban developments and their connection to our own. She takes readers on a journey through the ancient world of Tell Brak in modern-day Syria; Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan in Mexico; her own digs in India; as well as the more well-known Pompeii, Rome, and Athens. Along the way, she presents the unique properties that made cities singularly responsible for the flowering of humankind: the development of networked infrastructure, the rise of an entrepreneurial middle class, and the culture of consumption that results in everything from take-out food to the tell-tale secrets of trash. Cities is an impassioned and learned account full of fascinating details of daily life in ancient urban centers, using archaeological perspectives to show that the aspects of cities we find most irresistible (and the most annoying) have been with us since the very beginnings of urbanism itself. She also proves the rise of cities was hardly inevitable, yet it was crucial to the eventual global dominance of our species--and that cities are here to stay. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — S'està carregant… GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)307.76Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Communities Specific kinds of communities Urban communitiesLCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana:
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For example, there is a chapter called "The Harmony of Consumption", a chapter that discusses consumption, trash, waste and pollution both in ancient times and modern. She specifically talks about the Mesopotamian bevel-rimmed bowls and how it was the "ancient equivalent of the polystyrene cup" and that archaeologists have found millions of these bowls. They were easily produced out of clay, used for however long they lasted and then thrown away.
Archaeologists often have to dig through layers and layers of bowl shards in digs in the middle east in order to get to anything that is not one of these bevel-rimmed bowls (brb). Often they will have to abandon a dig in one area because there are so many broken bowls and shards. Digging and cataloging piles and piles of brbs can consume a whole dig season and the archaeologists are left with very little to show for it.
This was interesting to me because she also pointed out how most of what you see in a museum is the interesting and pretty stuff which is only a tiny fraction of what might be found at any given dig site. This was probably intuitive if I had thought about it but I had a bit of an a-ha moment when I read this.
I give this as an example because she later spends a lot of time giving her thoughts on human consumption and trash and I feel she glosses over the problem of human consumption and the ultimate disposal of what is consumed. She sort of dismisses the whole idea of recycling and describes human consumption and trash as something to celebrate..."While today the ecologically minded among us cringe at the quantity of trash that we seem to generate even when we attempt to adhere to a reduce-reuse-recycle mantra, we should instead view trash not as an embarrassment but as a celebration."
There is a lot of philosophical prose in this book regarding cities and the chapter I note above is not the only chapter where I felt she took pains to avoid the negative aspects of the growth of cities. She has obviously done a lot of reading in sociology, psychology, economics and other fields that are not necessarily her expertise. I don't necessarily disagree with all of her conclusions but there were many times while reading this book that I thought she was a bit full of shit. ( )