Olympiodorus provided his students in Alexandria in the sixth century with a handy summary of political science which I discuss and develop in Chapter 14. The following themes are introduced: the domain of political science (the realm of praxis, the life of soul in the material world, in the state or city, where political science directs other subordinate expertises); law (the primacy of law in an ideal city for humans); practical wisdom (its use of theoretical wisdom and difference from it); the goal (‘political’ happiness, involving the political virtues and preparing for a higher life); earthly and heavenly cities; the place of the philosopher in the city; Platonist texts concerning political science.

Why are states evil? In Chapter 17 I approach this question in relation to Plato’s analogy between soul and city, as this analogy was interpreted by Platonists in Late Antiquity. I indicate first that individual souls belong originally, according to the Platonists, to a transcendent, intelligible community, a city of souls where they enjoy an ‘intelligible love’, a ‘divine friendship’. However, souls, in their presence in the material world, can become alienated by this world, alienated from their original community and from each other. I show that a relation is made between Plato’s account of successive stages of degradation in political constitutions in the Republic Books VIII and IX and stages of moral alienation in souls. Corrupt souls produce corrupt states and corrupt states can corrupt souls.

How does culture interact with cities – their growth, their beauties, their imaginaries – in recent times (mid-nineteenth century to the present)? How do writers represent cities in both narrative and poetic texts? How do visual artists depict them in paintings, drawings and photography? And what happens when cities are presented by both text and image at the same time?

Beyond representation, cities are also a playground for artists, a stage and a place to challenge the urban imaginary. The city is a dream topic and a dream place for illustrated books, magazines and hybrid works of art such as movies and performance, but also for street art. It is also a proper character of both visual and textual representations. What if it is considered as an intermedial object per se?

This chapter emphasises the imaginary dimension of the city, showing in particular how the city has been considered by writers and artists as the paragon of modernity since the mid-nineteenth century. Each of its five sections focuses on one issue of the urban experience in art and literature and on a particular genre of art.

Cities are not a mere backdrop to historical events; rather, they stimulate a range of felt experiences, defined as the way we feel in and about places and the felt relationships we have to and within them. Cities provoke emotional responses, foster emotional attachments, shape emotional communities and the norms that govern them, and influence how and why decisions about the urban are made. This chapter examines the role of felt experiences in urban history scholarship and calls for more engagement with the emotional dimensions inherent in people–place relations. To achieve this, the chapter examines three foundational themes within urban history: experiencing, planning and remembering through the lens of the felt and the emotional.

This chapter explores the stories of urban and rural protesters, female boycotters and spinners, Black rebels and runaways, and Indigenous combatants who engaged in protests, boycotts, and mob action to assert their political and personal legitimacy on the eve of the American Revolution. The study of material culture demonstrates that the quest for liberty became central to American life through things; objects ranging from the mundane to the elite made the lofty, abstract goals of political protest tangible to men and women throughout the British colonies. Physical artifacts – whether built spaces, printed visuals, homespun fabrics, seized cargo, or tokens of war – illustrated a convergence of material culture and collective action in the 1760s and 1770s. The material culture and performance of protest played an important role in fueling the social and political unrest that pushed the colonies toward revolution.

This chapter traces British American cities as distinctive political spaces that helped pioneer the concept of citizenship, a term that originally meant a city resident, and stood at the forefront of much of the political protest leading to the war for independence. However, from their inception, most American cities were subordinated to their provincial legislatures which were dominated by rural interests. Meanwhile the concept of citizenship came to be associated more with a set of actions rather than a place people lived. All the largest cities were occupied during the war, forcing residents to make difficult decisions and heightening the distrust leveled against them after the war. After the war, most urban residents remained minorities subordinated to the interests of mostly rural polities. Once the cradles of citizenship, most cities were not further empowered as polities by the American Revolution, but continued to be or were more sharply constrained by rural elites after the war concluded.

This chapter focuses on the urban engines of the Revolution, America’s cities. Exploring the whole panorama of urban life provides a proper understanding of the role towns played in setting the Revolution in motion. Towns were anchors of an Atlantic world in which, as dynamic and expanding places, they were a source of novelty, tension, and disorder. The question is, therefore, why and how did this dynamic fuel a revolutionary movement in the thirteen colonies of mainland North America but not in the cities of the British Caribbean or indeed Britain itself? To address this conundrum is to understand better the part played by towns in the development of an American Revolution. More specifically, it helps historians grasp the settlements’ importance not only as towns, but as colonial towns.

The relationship between states, cities and international organizations is a useful prism to assess broader trends of the development of the international system. Engaging with sub-national actors like cities and their networks adds a level of complexity to the question of how independent an organization is and how it relates to the preferences of its member states. This chapter provides historical context to this current debate. It looks at how a conceivable international role of cities became an issue in the interwar era. In particular, it looks at how the ‘Union Internationale des Villes’, founded in 1913, sought some form of formal recognition from the League of Nations, but also fostered more modest ties with the International Labour Organization (ILO). This historical episode might not equip us with straightforward ‘lessons’ for today. But it might help us to adopt a more nuanced and informed perspective on current debates about international institutional reform and the promise that cities and their associations and networks can play in this regard.

In the coming decades, cities and other local governments will need to transform their infrastructure as part of their climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. When they do, they have the opportunity to build a more resilient, sustainable, and accommodating infrastructure for humans and non-humans alike. This chapter surveys a range of policy tools that cities and other local governments can use to pursue co-beneficial adaptations for humans, non-humans, and the environment. For example, they can add bird-friendly glass to new and upgraded buildings and vehicles; they can add overpasses, underpasses, and wildlife corridors on transportation systems; they can reduce light and noise pollution that impact humans and nonhumans alike; they can use a novel trash policy to manage rodent populations non-lethally; and more.

This chapter examines the critical role of renewable energy and energy efficiency in circular economy liveable cities. As cities account for the majority of global energy use, transitioning to renewable energy and improving energy efficiency are essential for achieving climate goals and sustainable urban development. The chapter emphasises how circular economy principles can enhance energy systems by promoting the use of renewable energy, reducing resource consumption, and minimising waste. Areas of focus include the integration of renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, and waste-to-energy systems, into urban infrastructure. The chapter discusses innovative technologies like smart grids, energy storage solutions, and shared mobility systems that can optimise energy use and reduce environmental impacts. It explores energy-efficient practices in the built environment, such as green building design, retrofitting, and modular construction, which help minimise cities’ energy footprint. The chapter highlights case studies from European cities that have successfully implemented circular energy systems, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining renewable energy with circular economy practices. It concludes by addressing the challenges and opportunities for cities to foster sustainable energy transitions, emphasising the importance of policy support, public–private partnerships, and community engagement in achieving long-term energy efficiency and renewable energy goals.

Postmodernity is characterised by a thoroughgoing alteration in the ways in which space is both experienced and conceived. During the post-war period, social and spatial relations were substantially transformed by the far-reaching effects of economic globalisation, neo-imperial conflicts, new transport and communications technologies, mass migrations, political devolution, and impending environmental crisis. Concurrently, space and geography have become existential and cultural dominants for postmodern societies, to an extent displacing time and history. Given such a spatio-temporal conjuncture, this chapter explores the significance of space for British postmodern fiction and describes some of its characteristic geographies, focusing upon three distinctive kinds of spaces: cities; non-places; and regions. Among the texts discussed are novels by J.G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Christine Brooke-Rose, Angela Carter, Maureen Duffy, Alasdair Gray, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Iain Sinclair, Zadie Smith, Graham Swift, Adam Thorpe, and Jeanette Winterson.

This chapter introduces a new model to represent the heterogeneity of the Italian civitates. The model is based on the abundant archaeological evidence of the inhabited areas of their administrative centres, using it as a proxy for various economic and socio-political aspects of the civitas. This new variation model surpasses previous ones by being continuous (rather than categorical) and by formally incorporating the uncertainties associated with missing data.

Local politics are dominated by older residents, who vote and participate at rates very disproportionate to their share of the population. At the same time, local government has been assigned responsibility for functions featuring inherent generational divides: most pointedly, public education, but also infrastructure development and land use regulation. This combination raises concerns about democratic distortion and local government’s continued ability to invest in the future. If predictions of substantially longer lifespans come true, these concerns about the local political economy will only be heightened. This chapter identifies this tension and reviews how local governments currently manage age-based political conflict. It then describes the limitations of these mechanisms and offers a schematic for the strategies that local governments will have to adopt as they navigate the fault lines of age moving forward: by better aligning the preferences of older and younger residents, by equalizing patterns of political participation, or by reassigning functions that implicate age away from the local level.

In the Pounds parable, a nobleman, disliked among his people, goes abroad, and returns to prove himself a good administrator, though one with harsh standards, as is Jesus in the parable in regard to his enemies. In Genesis, Joseph, disliked by his brothers, had gone abroad to Egypt and proved there to be a good administrator in the time of the famine, but one who, for a time, treated his brothers harshly.

Chapter 1 raises the question of whether there was a decisive break in the nature of the city between Classical Antiquity and the post-Roman world of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. It is suggested that treating ‘the ancient city’ as typologically different from cities before or after obscures both the real degree of continuity and the perceptions of contemporaries of continuity. The chapter explores the historiography of the idea of the ancient city as a distinct type that goes back to Fustel de Coulanges, and has been identified by different schools of thought as religious, economic, political, and physical. Rather than thinking of ‘decline and fall’, or even ‘transformation’, a new approach is offered through resilience theory, that sees a continuous process of drawing on memories of the past and, through them, adaptation.