The City in the Making

Product Description


The planet is urbanizing at an accelerating pace. More than half of the world’s population now lives in metropolises. By 2030, that proportion is expected to increase to 60%. Even though many cities are unhealthy, the urban habitat seems destined to become the dominant way of life across the globe. What are the reasons for this rapid urbanization? What does it mean for architecture, society and culture? Originally published in French as La ville qui vient, The City in the Making is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary attempt to understand the nature of the urban phenomenon. Starting with the origins of the first known city, it explores the logic of its millennia-long formation in order to understand its contemporary upheavals, ongoing reconfiguration and future. The book engages with archeology, architecture, economics, philosophy and politics to explore the development of the contemporary cityscape and imagine its future development.


Review


Marcel Henaff’s work on the future of cities is excellent, ground breaking in its ability to bridge between anthropology, philosophy, and urbanism, and highly accessible to a broad readership. Highly recommended as a publication. (Hashim Sarkis, Dean School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)


[The book] explores the making of the future city. In doing so it bridges the fields of anthropology, philosophy and urbanism, whilst providing a poetic read. (
Environment & Urbanization)


About the Author





Marcel Hénaff is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. He is best known for his work Le Prix de la Vérité: Le don, l’argent, la philosophie (2002) which won the Grand Prize for Philosophy from the French Academy and the Philosophy Prize from the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, Paris and has been translated into five languages.Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon is Associate Professor and Director of the Institute for Humanities at Simon Fraser University. She is an experienced translator, most notably of several works by Michel Serres.








Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.


The City in the Making

By Marcel Hénaff, Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.


Copyright © 2008 Editions de l'Herne
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-526-0




CHAPTER 1
Monument: The City as Totality and as Image of the World

According to archaeologists, the appearance of cities goes back ten or even more millennia, which is a lot on the scale of our civilization but very little when compared with the emergence of Homo sapiens. The urban phenomenon appears independently in different places on the planet and during very different times. We have no evidence that the cities that first arose in the Fertile Crescent were the origin of the urban phenomenon in the valley of the Indus or in China. It is also clear that the formation of cities in Mesoamerican civilizations (Olmec, Toltec, Mayan, and Aztec) owes nothing to any other civilization outside the Americas. The fact that it is a sui generis phenomenon clearly indicates that it is linked to specific conditions that enable its emergence. Nevertheless, it is not a universal occurrence: there are still some civilizations today, although few, that have not experienced it. We need to ask the question again: why cities? Why did people who for tens of millennia had learned to live and survive perfectly well together in many different ways — as hunter-gatherer societies and then much later, as farmers or nomadic cattle breeders (or according to mixed forms such as in itinerant horticulture) — why did they, in some places of the planet, start to live together in restricted spaces, to erect monuments, and build imposing or modest dwellings made of clay, wood, bricks, or stones?

THE CASE OF THE FIRST KNOWN CITIES: THE FERTILE CRESCENT, MESOPOTAMIA

As of today, the oldest and best attested case