World Cities Yesterday and Today: With Over 250 Historic Maps and Satellite Images

New York: Fall River Press - Barnes & Noble, Inc., 2009. First Printing . Hard Back. Very Good/Very Good. 10" x 14. 256 Pages Indexed. This is the 2009 Edition with over 250 Historic Maps and Satallite Images. Dust jacket has a two inch repair at the top spine area. The date "17 July 10" is written on the top of t he front endpaper. The changing face of the world's cities. The history of more than fifty of the world's most famous cities from New York to Tokyo, Cairo to Copenhagen, told through maps from the 16th century to modern satellite photographs. World Cities Yesterday and Today shows, by way of maps and current satellite photographs, the remarkable growr of world cities since the first printed maps of the fifteenth and sixteenth century revealed the extent of urbanization. Of course, cities have been with us for much longer than that-they started some 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and around the Indus, Tigris and Euphrates. Some of the cities of antiquity reached a great size: by the end of the first century B.C., Rome's population was over a million. Maps, too, have been a large part of the human story for a long time (maybe 8,000 years-nobody knows exactly). The earliest known map is a wall painting of the ancient Turkish city of Catal Huyuk which has been dated to the late 7th millennium B.C.-but it was not until the invention of printing that technology advanced to the stage that it became possible to produce more than just one copy of any document, thus opening up map making and owning to more than the very rich. And maps were big business-in 1478 an edition of Ptolemy's Geographia appeared with 27 maps. By 1508 maps started to include the New World and the first modern atlas (although the term "atlas" was not used until Gerardus Mercator coined it around 1578) was published in Strasburg in 1513 by Martin Waldseem Liller. T he first volume of the Civitates Orbis Terrarum- the first atlas to concentrate on the cities of the world-was published in Cologne in 1572. Since then, city maps developed in accuracy until satellites and telescope technology allowed us to see the reality: images of our cities from space. What the maps from Civitates onward show is the movement of world populations slowly away from the land to the cities. This process speeded up throughout the nineteenth century: today, mankind is a city- dwelling creature. World Cities Yesterday and Today presents a selection of beautiful maps that are often works of art themselves. They provide a window on an older world where cities were confined by fortified walls and were much smaller than today. The maps are accompanied by modern satellite imagery that demonstrates how these older cities have sprawled outward into the huge urban landscapes we know today.