This is a book about the population of London during the early modern period and a detailed book about the population of a European metropolitan city at that time. Much is now known about the historical demography of rural England, but very little is understood about the larger towns and cities. Roger Finlay applies new techniques in historical demography, principally family reconstitution and aggregative analysis of parish registers, to study the growth of population in London. He shows that parish registers are as reliable for the analysis of population trends in London as in rural England. The death rate was much higher in London than in the countryside, and this difference was not offset by a markedly higher birth rate, so the population would have declined but for migration. There were striking variations in both fertility and mortality between contrasting social areas of London.

Built on an estuary, New York City is rich in population and economic activity but poor in available land to manage the needs of a modern city. Since consolidation of the five boroughs in 1898, New York has faced innumerable challenges, from complex water and waste management issues, to housing and feeding millions of residents in a concentrated area, to dealing with climate change in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, and everything in between. Any consideration of sustainable urbanism requires understanding how cities have developed the systems that support modern life and the challenges posed by such a concentrated population. As the largest city in the United States, New York City is an excellent site to investigate these concerns. Featuring an array of the most distinguished and innovative urban environmental historians in the field, Coastal Metropolis offers new insight into how the modern city transformed its air, land, and water as it grew.

In a captivating tour of cities famous and forgotten, acclaimed historian Ben Wilson tells the glorious, millennia-spanning story how urban living sparked humankind's greatest innovations. “A towering achievement.... Reading this book is like visiting an exhilarating city for the first time—dazzling.” —The Wall Street Journal During the two hundred millennia of humanity’s existence, nothing has shaped us more profoundly than the city. From their very beginnings, cities created such a flourishing of human endeavor—new professions, new forms of art, worship and trade—that they kick-started civilization. Guiding us through the centuries, Wilson reveals the innovations nurtured by the inimitable energy of human beings together: civics in the agora of Athens, global trade in ninth-century Baghdad, finance in the coffeehouses of London, domestic comforts in the heart of Amsterdam, peacocking in Belle Époque Paris. In the modern age, the skyscrapers of New York City inspired utopian visions of community design, while the trees of twenty-first-century Seattle and Shanghai point to a sustainable future in the age of climate change. Page-turning, irresistible, and rich with engrossing detail, Metropolis is a brilliant demonstration that the story of human civilization is the story of cities.

This book explores key metropolitan management issues, presents practical principles of good governance as they apply to the metropolis, and unfolds cases of institutional and programmatic arrangements to tackle such issues.

A powerful analysis of demographic patterns in London over the 'long eighteenth century', concentrating on mortality but also including data on marital fertility, population structure and migration. The evidence indicates that mortality in London was generally much higher than in other settlements in England.

Beyond the Metropolis is an attempt to mend the lacuna that exists between large and small city studies in urban geography, especially in North America. It covers a wide range of topics organized around some of the most common themes that urban geographers have addressed in their study of large cities. In addition to a general introduction and conclusion, the book is divided into three parts. Part I focuses on the evolution and growth of small cities.

Two contrasting terms are joined to conjugate the traditional idea of metropolis with horizontality; to combine the center of a vast territory--hierarchically organized, dense, vertical, and produced by polarization--with the idea of a more diffuse, isotropic urban condition, where center and periphery blur. Beyond a simplistic center versus periphery opposition, the concept of a horizontal metropolis reveals the dispersed condition as a potential asset, rather than a limit, to the construction of a sustainable and innovative urban dimension. Around 1990, Terry McGee, an urban researcher at University of British Columbia, coined the term desakota, deriving from Indonesian “desa” (village) and “kota” (city). Desakota areas typically occur in Asia, especially South East Asia. The term describes an area situated outside the periurban zone, often sprawling alongside arterial and communication roads, sometimes from one agglomeration to the next. They are characterized by high population density and intensive agricultural use, but differ from densely populated rural areas by more urban-like characteristics. The new book The Horizontal Metropolis investigates such areas alongside examples in the US, Italy, and Switzerland. The study highlights the advantages of the concept and its relevance under economical, ecological, and social aspects. The concept reflects a vision of global urbanization that does no longer allow for “outside” areas and that will test the urban ecosystem to its limits.