World Cities: Yesterday And Today

World Cities: Yesterday And Today

Synopsis

World Cities Yesterday and Today shows, by way of maps and current satellite photographs, the remarkable growth of world cities since the first printed maps of the fifteenth and sixteenth century showed the extent of urbanization. Of course cities have been with us for much longer than that-some 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and around the Indus, tigris and Euphrates. By the end of the first century BC, Rome's population was over a million. Maps, too, have been a large part of the human story for a long time (maybe 8,000 years-nobody knows exactly).The earliest known map to date is a wall painting of the ancient Turkish city of A atal Huyuk which has been dated to the late 7th millennium BC-but it wasn't until the invention of printing that technology advanced to the stage that it became possible to produce more than just one copy of any document, thus opening up map making and owning to more than the very rich.And maps were big business-in 1478 an edition of Ptolemy's Geographia appeared with 27 maps. By 1508 maps started to include the NewWorld and the first modern atlas (although the term atlasA was not used until Gerardus Mercator coined it around 1578) was published in Strasburg in 1513 by MartinWaldseemuller. The first volume of the Civitates Orbis Terrarum-cities of the world-was published in Cologne in 1572. Since then, city maps have developed in accuracy and invention until satellites and telescope technology allowed us to see images of our cities from space-and not just ordinary photographs but a whole range of effects from infrared on. What the maps from Civitates onward show is the movement of world populations slowly away from the land to the cities.This process speeded up throughout the nineteenth century: today, mankind is a city-dwelling creature.

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