| Contents |
Our urban planet in space and time -- Making politics from sunshine, earth, and water -- Igniting empire -- Wealth for a few, poverty for many 1 -- Wealth for a few, poverty for many 2 -- How knowledge became power -- The realm of consequence -- Bastions, battleships, and gunpowder cities -- Wealth from the winds and waves -- Consuming the earth in cities of light... and delight -- Chimneys to smokestacks -- Planet of the people. 1, The Atlantic cauldron -- Planet of the people. 2, Feminists, abolitionists, and los liberales -- Weapons of world conquest -- Capitalist explosions -- The pharaohs of flow -- Planet of the people. 3, An urban majority takes its space -- Lamps out -- The labyrinths of terror -- Gathering velocities. 1, Tailpipe tracts and tower blocks -- Gathering velocities. 2, Liberation and "development" -- Greatest accelerations. 1, New empires, new multitudes -- Greatest accelerations. 2, Shacks and citadels -- Greatest accelerations. 3, Pleasure palaces and sweatshops -- Greatest accelerations. 4, Maximal hydrocarbon, maximal waste -- 2020 hindsight... and foresight?. |
| Abstract |
"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." -- book jacket. |
