The first city networks were as old as the first cities. The mud brick metropolises of the fourth millennium were built to accelerate a burgeoning regional trading system. Settlements were linked, for example, through the alpha city of Uruk. This chapter also explores the later Babylonian and Ur “world systems.” These were effectively knowledge-based global cities at the heart of robust trading networks. With the advent of the city came the first bureaucratic administrators finding advantages in large concentrated forms of living in a hitherto decentralized world. The strange new idea was hardly normal. Cities were labor intensive, dangerous places that exacted high demands on their populations. With their invention came new social hierarchies. The movement of unprecedented global resources through cities required seminal bureaucratic breakthroughs—not least of which cuneiform writing. This increased the power of a privileged few, extracting exorbitant tribute and labor. Cities were in reality systems of concentrated power and global resource management whose walls functioned to keep their populations in, rather than simply to repel invaders.

Rome’s was a politics of all five senses. It was a city of noise, of refuse and bodies in the street, of massive crowds, of massive construction, and a size and opulence not equaled in Europe again for more than a millennium. In maps and inscriptions, Rome was the center of the world. How did Rome become this way? This chapter looks to intercity relations to resolve this puzzle. The Roman Empire was in effect a network of cities in the core–periphery mode – the ultimate “consumer city” supplied by vast hinterlands. Lacking the perfect local environment, Rome imported the commodities – and people – needed to construct an alpha city. The city grew as haphazardly and violently as the Empire itself. The greater the resources of the Empire, the larger the foundation for Rome’s growth. This hit crisis point in the Late Republic, as an increasingly dispossessed agrarian peasantry migrated en-masse to cities alongside inhabitants from across the world. In short, the context for Rome’s growth was a hitherto unparalleled age of globalization in the first and second centuries CE.

Chapter 1 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet elaborates on both the myth of Inanna’s chaotic riverboat journey to Uruk and the vision of the goddess’s ordered urban state depicted on the Warka Vase to meditate on the many birthplaces and birthdates of cities and their surrounding “urban worlds.” It identifies river valleys (and other Sun and Earth-delivered sources of fresh water) as crucial to our ability to harvest enough energy from the Sun and Earth to build cities and it discusses the importance of “energized crowds” that arise in large, proximate, specialized, diverse, and anonymous settlements. Ultimately, though, the chapter argues that urban political communities and the especially powerful institutions of state required to govern them best account for cities' ultimate indefinability: their sheer variability and the sheer unpredictability of their human uses, ranging from immense acts of creation to immense acts of destruction. Cities, it concludes, are places where we harvest enough energy from the Sun and Earth, through water, to engage in the ambitious and dangerous human-directed practice of city-enabled politics – the polis of Earthopolis, the only Urban Planet we know of.

Earlier studies have examined manifold connections between the city of Tarquinia and other parts of Italy and the Mediterranean. This chapter adds to these with a rich holistic analysis of the ‘monumental complex’ and the Ara della Regina sanctuaries, drawing out the cultural and religious attitudes of the community at Tarquinia that may have shaped their adoption and adaptation of external stimuli. Connections between the buildings on the plateau, the city they served, and the natural world around them are explored in ways that yield new potential insights into Etruscan rituals and the buildings that supported them. In arguing for the embeddedness of architecture in local and religious contexts, the chapter emphasizes the importance of returning to the lived experience of buildings, and in so doing raises important issues concerning the interplay between the local and the international in architectural design.