Earthopolis
A Biography of Our Urban Planet

A panoramic study of our Urban Planet that takes readers on a six-continent, six-millennia tour of the world's cities.

Carl H. Nightingale (Author)

9781108424523, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 June 2022

814 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 4.8 cm, 1.3 kg

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

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Urban & municipal planning [RPC], The environment [RN], Human geography [RGC], Urban communities [JFSG], General & world history [HBG]