Cities: A Magisterial Exploration of the Nature and Impact of the City from Its Beginnings to the Mega-Conurbations of Today - Hardcover

A magisterial exploration of the nature of the city from its beginnings to contemporary Cairo, the largest city the world has known.

In his new book, an exploration of the city's functions and forms, John Reader grounds his work in broad-based research into the city's achievements and problems and makes extraordinary and thought-provoking connections as to the nature of cities, old and new.

From the ruins of the earliest cities to the present, Reader explores how they develop and thrive, how they can remake themselves, and how they can decline and die. He investigates their parasitic relationship with the countryside around them, the webs of trade and immigration they inhabit, how they feed and water themselves and dispose of their wastes. He focuses as much on Baron Haussman's creation of the Paris sewers as of his plans for the grand boulevards, on prostitution as on government, on human lives as on architecture, on markets as on cathedrals.

In this sweeping exploration of what the city is and has been, The Anatomy of the City is fit to stand alongside Lewis Mumford's 1962 classic The City in History.

John Reader is an author and photojournalist. He holds an Honorary Research Fellowship in the Department of Anthropology at University College London and is a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Royal Geographic Society.