JFor years Sigmund Freud had been looking forward to his first visit to Paris in 1885. But his exhilaration quickly evaporated, and he almost cried in loneliness and disappointment in the huge crowds on the boulevards. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, raved about her forays into London in 1927: “When we step out of the house, we shed the ego and become part of that great republican army of anonymous wanderers whose company is so pleasant after the solitude of one’s own room.”
Freud’s loneliness and Woolf’s liberation are two exemplary big-city experiences that the British publicist Ben Wilson uses to illustrate how people have reacted to the huge growth of European metropolises since the nineteenth century. At that time, writers developed subjective city topographies in order to defend themselves against the superiority of the building masses. And in response to the frenzied saturation of perception, townspeople accelerated their eye movements to the pace of the brushstrokes of Impressionist painters.
The world history of cities has been written many times, from Lewis Mumford’s community-oriented architectural sociology to Leonardo Benevolo’s grandiose pictorial and map work with an emphasis on the history of form. Ben Wilson’s book “Metropolen” also wants to tell about six thousand years of urban development far beyond Europe as a large, full chronicle, which the author researched on trips around the world and with a lot of specialist reading.
Illicit sex and ungodly desires
Half of his presentation deals with the early and middle ages from Uruk to Lisbon and the other half with modern times from London to Lagos. However, the author is unable to develop a common thread or even a consistent historical theory. The only leitmotif is his consistent and consistently meritorious cultural optimism that cities form the supreme form of human existence through all natural, epidemic and war catastrophes and that urbanization also means enormous progress in civilization in the mega-cities of the Third World.
However, one is hesitant to trust an author who initially reconstructs life in Uruk, the first known city, not only from the Epic of Gilgamesh, but also extracts too much color and everyday life from rudimentary archaeological cuneiform finds. He is even more imaginative in Babylon, where he pursues “illicit sex and ungodly desires” to the furthest corners of temple prostitution. After all, Wilson rightly states that all modern criticism of the city is shaped by the almost three thousand year old biblical imagery of Babel.
