And the rail capacity wasn’t fit to manage small villages, I could never play SC4 without mods that increased the rail capacity (due again to poor path finding meaning one would always be vastly overused, right fucking next to one that was empty).Ģ011 went to far the other way, traffic management was far far to easy, all you have to do is make sure you have a few big roads and plenty of interchanges, and you can pretty much manage any size of city, with just a few bad bit’s at junctions being all you would see.Īnd whilst you could lay down bus and subways, even if they were used, they didn’t actually seem to affect the business of the roads, and so they just seemed so pointless in XL 2011. SC4 was just fucking irritating, build anything resembling a city, and you suddenly find yourself building everything in grids, because the traffic path finding was just non existent. In his concern to give population figures Botero reveals unsparingly just how small a share of the globe’s.What I really liked about it at first was that it streamlined traffic, but later I came to hate it for this. In a development that distinguishes him from Machiavelli while taking him further along the same road, numbers now matter. Religion figures in a relatively small way: the largest cities are in China. Magnificence, long troublesome for theologians since it came riskily close to luxuria and was a virtue no poor man could exercise, pertains here unproblematically to cities, not persons. Thus the grandezza, or “greatness,” of the title refers to a city’s size, not its intrinsic superiority. Botero, like his precursor Machiavelli and like his contemporary Francis Bacon, preferred to study what Aristotle had called “efficient” and “material” causes, while excluding or bracketing out what he had called “final” and “formal” causes. The “causes” of his title are studied in terms of their effects, not their presumed, intended goals. Yet here in his book on cities, as indeed throughout his writings, Botero demonstrates the remarkable degree to which, willing or not, he belonged to Machiavelli’s intellectual world. He also writes, “In truth we Italians are too fond of ourselves and are too much the uncritical admirers of our own ways.”īotero, who had a complicated relationship with the Jesuit order and a close connection with Saint Carlo Borromeo, is best known for his influential book On Reason of State, which attacked Machiavelli for teaching that statecraft is best exercised in the absence of Christian morality. The Chinese have an “herb from which they obtain a delicious juice … that keeps them safe from those ills caused among us by the excessive consumption of wine.” Probably this was tea. At Cairo, “he plague is hardly ever absent.” The Spanish king knowingly suffers great losses from the trade of Mexico with the Philippines in order to draw the idolatrous Mexicans “to the bosom of the Catholic Church.” The cannibals of Brazil like to roast human fetuses. The book’s considerable charm, enhanced by Geoffrey Symcox’s careful English translation and commentary, lies chiefly in its details. Book 1 discusses the siting of cities (along rivers, as ports, in a fertile region), while book 2 treats the factors that can attract a population (serving as a political or religious centre, urban pleasures, a resident nobility, a university). Rather, he lists the various reasons why some cities had thrived. What was it that made some cities successful, so that they continued to attract and support large populations? Botero offers no theoretical explanation, and certainly no simple answer. Yet cities still had a huge, if subordinate, role to play in the world of nation-states, empires, and trading nexuses that was taking shape in the later sixteenth century. Earlier treatments of cities in the Western literary tradition had focused on a city’s potential for territorial expansion and rule – could it become another Rome? – or on the ways in which a city’s street plan and monuments, in conforming with a harmonic aesthetic ideal, might make it morally and politically superior to other cities. He looked honestly at Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as well as his own Europe. Botero was hardly the first person to ask what makes some cities thrive while others fail, but he was the first to ask the question in a mostly impartial way that was global in its perspective. He thus stands at the head of a line of distinguished writers that include Max Weber, Jane Jacobs, and, most recently, Katherine Boo. When, back in 1588, Giovanni Botero published this intriguing little book about what makes the world’s cities large and splendid, he initiated a literary genre, as well as the field of investigation that accompanies it and continues to flourish, known as urbanism, or, more broadly, the study of the life and death of cities.
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