Civilization and the City

John Reader - Cities

Forget Madonna. I don't just love New York, I just love cities. They are incredible manifestations of collective human life and energy on the scale of millions. To see them from afar the physical architectural form or to experience them from within, they are beautiful things (or they can be). To think about the millions of lives that intersect through these comparatively tiny regions is mind-blowing.

So when I spied this book on the shelves in the local Gleebooks I just had to flick through it's pages. It reminded me of all the times I played Civilization. Indeed, playing Civilization can sometimes feel like a history lesson, whereby ensuring the survival of your settlements requires you to know and implement all the things that cities have required to grow and prosper. So reading about how important the technology of Pottery was to the growth of the first cities was a familiar idea because it's certainly a Civilization technology that a player wants to discover early in the game. The book, though, gives a much more complete explanation of why it was such an important technology - that by helping women to boil a milk substitute for their babies they were able to wean them earlier thus allowing them to have babies at a faster rate thus accelerating population growth. At least now there is a real appreciation of the technology, beyond the thought that Pottery is important just because the structure of the game says it is.

There are some points of difference between the book and the game concerning the causes of the establishment of the first cities. The game suggests that cities are established because of favourable environmental conditions that enable settlers to have surplus food harvests. While the author doesn't argue against the importance of the environment, he writes that cities were established because they were gathering points for craft specialists; food surpluses came afterwards, necessarily, to ensure the survivial of the population. Instead, in the game, you begin with a Settler unit (that, later on, can be disbanded and exchanged for food) and quickly try to find the best spot to found a city.

In any case, the experience of playing the game and of reading the book are both enjoyable in distinct ways. Haven't finished the book, I'm up to the part where trade and commerce become important developments in cities in fourteenth century Europe.

Tags: Cities, John Reader, Book, Civilization, game.