The Pandemic Has Revealed How Vulnerable Our Cities Truly Are
We made all our cities look the same, then Covid-19 hollowed them out
There’s perhaps no better time than now to read Metropolis, historian Ben Wilson’s new book about global urban development and the cosmopolitan existence. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic prompted many to flee cities for greener pastures, metropolitan migration had been stagnating. That’s a shame, Wilson argues, because cities offer the best of humanity: the bustle, the culture, the community. Looking at 26 different cities across the world, Wilson offers a sprawling account that acts as a showcase for the ingenuity that thrives in our skyscrapered incubators.
GEN spoke with Wilson about his inspiration to write the book and how the coronavirus reveals the empty husks our city centers have become.
GEN: How do you approach a subject as broad as what you’ve written about?
Ben Wilson: I started with what I saw at the time as the most exciting city—Shanghai. You could almost tell a history of the world through Shanghai from the 1850s until now. But then I got interested in the idea of global cities in general, and my curiosity took me to do the whole story of cities and to look at them through different angles than their histories.
