City in history : Its origins. its transformations and Its prospects

This book opens with a city that was, symbolically, a world: it closes with a world that has me, in many practical aspects, a city. In following through this development I have attempted to deal with the forms and functions of the city, and with the purposes that have emerged from it; and I have demonstrated, I trust, that the city will have an even more significant part to play in the future than it has played in the past, if once the original disabilities that have accompanied it through history. are sloughed off.
\The City in History, incidentally, replaces the limited his torical sections of The Culture of Cities: parts of those four original chapters now lie embedded in the eighteen chapters of the present work, which is more than twice as long. If the reader occasionally stumbles upon a ruined portion of that earlier edifice, preserved under a quite different building, like a fragment of the Servian wall in Rome, let him not tax me with undue piety.