To Begin
Is there any way to say when the phenomenon of “urbanization” began? Sometime in the past, certainly after pre-historic times, but when do historians consider the world to have begun to urbanize? There cannot be an urban without Man. Around the theme of Writing the City, in a similar fashion, who can be attributed with the personalities, reputations, and fabrics of the world’s most beloved cities? Michel de Certeau wrote,
People moving through the city at ground level write the "urban text" without being able to read it. The city is provisionally created as a patchwork quilt of individual viewpoints and opinions.
—Michel de Certeau, “The Practice of Everyday Life”
Looking at the histories of three main cities in the context of the urban imagination (Boston, Berlin, and Moscow), it becomes clear that without the people who inhabit each city, the question of how a city is shaped becomes nearly impossible to answer. While Boston, Berlin, and Moscow are all modern cities with a historical core, these cities owe a great deal to the individuals who have come to shape the city in their own writing of the urban narrative—without people, the cities become lifeless relics.