J.Konstapel,Leiden,27-10-2026.
The book asks a single question — what is a city for? — and follows the answers across 7,500 years, from a mud-brick room on a sand dune in Eridu to a Rome shared with participants that have no bodies. Its ambition is not encyclopaedic but argumentative: twenty chapters, each with the same five-part anatomy (the idea, the builders, the art, the measured curve, the lines forward), converging on a comparative synthesis (chapter 19) and a proposal (chapter 20).
I. The return, not the foundation
The book’s first and most quietly radical claim is that the original act of urbanism was not building but returning. Eridu, founded around 5400 BCE on a rise where river, sea and groundwater met, was for two millennia a sequence of eighteen temples, each raised on the ruins of the last. The first city, in Konstapel’s reading, was not a wall, a market or a king, but “a place that is returned to” — the house of Enki, god of the deep fresh water, built and rebuilt by generations who left no names. The measured evidence is thin and honestly presented as such: nine floor plans growing from a room the size of a human body (7.8 m²) to a building the size of a house (~200 m²), read as a “word of steps” — rises, standings, falls — that the author treats as data rather than decoration.
From this beginning the book draws a line that sustains its entire architecture: the idea of the city travels. In the Sumerian myth of Inanna and Enki, the gifts of civilisation are carried off from Eridu to Uruk; in historical fact, Uruk then grows into the world’s first megacity and invents writing to administer itself. Chapter 2’s most elegant observation is that during Uruk’s demographic pause (c. 3300–3000 BCE) the number of proto-cuneiform tablets multiplied sixteen-fold. “The standing was not a rest: it was the time the city built its memory.” The plateau, elsewhere a demographic statistic, becomes here a category of urban creativity.
II. The curve as method
The book’s signature instrument is the “measured curve.” For each city, Konstapel assembles a population or size series (often from the standard compilers, Chandler and Modelski, sometimes from excavation reports) and reduces it to a word of steps — + + 0 +, 0 0 – ×8 0 0 0 0 + ×8 for Rome — using a fixed rule: a change of less than roughly 11 per cent in the relevant measure counts as “standing.” Chapter 19 lays the curves side by side and extracts five regularities, of which three deserve an intellectual reader’s attention.
First, cities that serve one centre turn on the spot: Thebes, Chang’an, Versailles and Baghdad rise and fall with the arrival or departure of a court, a dynasty, a caliphate. Second, cities that last turn only through plateaus: Rome’s population curve moves in century-long standings, and the standing city — not the growing one — is what kept the place alive for a thousand years. Third — the finding with the flavour of a law, though the author carefully calls it an observation — a long rise ends in a standing in the cities that lasted, and in a direct fall in the cities that broke. A recurring figure of about 30,000 (Athens’ citizenry, Amarna, medieval Rome, Howard’s garden city of 32,000, Letchworth’s 34,000) surfaces as the size at which cities have repeatedly stood.
The methodological candour of the “How firm is this?” section is the book’s intellectual credit. Konstapel concedes that most pre-1800 series are estimates from two compilers who disagree, that the 11 per cent rule is a choice (Rome’s word holds only between 7 and 20 per cent), and that the cities were chosen for the history of an idea, not as a sample. A real test, he notes, would fix the rule in advance and apply it to every city with a measured history — an open question that the book itself lists as the beginning of the next one.
III. Art as evidence
A third current, unusual in an analytical history, is the use of art not as illustration but as argument. The plastered skulls of Jericho show ancestors kept in the house; the Babylonian Map of the World shows a city with the ocean ringing it like an amphitheatre; Bruegel’s Tower of Babel converts a ziggurat into the permanent image of a city that cannot finish; Lorenzetti’s Good Government (1338–39) is called, without irony, “still the best picture of what any city, with or without bodies, is for.” The art sections enact the book’s thesis that a city is a shared idea before it is a built object — each chapter’s images show what the city meant to those who drew it.
IV. The oldest new idea
It is on the strength of these curves that chapter 20 makes its proposal, and it is here that the general reader should attend most closely. The city of the future, Konstapel argues, is not a new city on empty ground — every placed city in the book (Amarna, the Round City of Baghdad, Palmanova, Brasília, Masdar, The Line) either emptied within a generation or grew somewhere other than planned. Instead it is an old city that has learned to stand: written over an existing one (the book chooses Rome, the only city to have passed through rise, fall and standing and remained), divided into many centres rather than one court (81 units of roughly 34,000 each — the standing size), designed for standing as its normal state, with water infrastructure closed first, and deliberately never complete.
The sixth proposal is the book’s boldest and, by its own argument, its oldest: participants without bodies. Against the obvious reading that this means software agents, Konstapel shows that the first city was already built for a bodiless resident — Enki in the waters beneath the temple — and that Rome, China and Japan each institutionalised guardian participants at the scales of house, crossing and city, complete (in the Chinese case) with accountability: a city god who failed to bring rain could be punished. The step the future city takes is “from stand-in to participant,” with Rome’s three scales supplying the form and Shannon Mattern’s A City Is Not a Computer (2021) supplying the counter-voice the book expressly endorses: these participants are not a control room.
The final move converts demographic decline from tragedy into design. Rome’s population curve now reads + + + + 0, and the last three steps “close only with a fall” on the axis of bodies. The proposal is to let the window close on several axes at once: fewer people and less matter on one axis, more memory, more crossings and more bodiless participants on the others — “the standing that follows is a standing the city chose.”
V. Judgment
The book’s weaknesses are those of its method, and it states most of them itself. The curves rest on estimate-heavy compilations; the 11 per cent rule is untested outside Rome; the sample is argumentative, not statistical. One may add that the five-part chapter anatomy, for all its clarity, flattens some cities into their idea more briskly than a historian would allow, and that the twenty-chapter arc from Eridu to AI agents occasionally asks antiquity to carry more futuristic freight than it can bear.
But these are the honest limits of a book that does something rare: it makes the history of the city testable. Its findings are stated so that they could be wrong, its sources so that they can be checked, and its proposal so that it can be drawn — the closing line forward asks whether the 81 units can in fact be laid on Rome’s real ground, along its water. For the intellectual reader, The History of the City offers not a pageant but a hypothesis: that the city is above all a place that returns to itself, that its pauses are its memory, and that its future — as in its beginning — will be shared with residents who have no bodies. It is an argument of unusual discipline and considerable ambition, and it deserves to be argued with.
Annotated reference
Konstapel, J. (2026). The History of the City: From Eridu to the City of the Future. Leiden: Constable Research. 47 pp., 20 chapters (0–20), manuscript dated 19–27 October 2026.
Genre and audience. Neither a conventional chronicle nor a planning manual: a structured, source-annotated argument in the history of ideas, aimed at a general intellectual readership, with an apparatus (per-chapter source lists, a “How firm is this?” section) that invites verification.
Structure. Every chapter repeats a five-part anatomy — (1) the city and its idea, (2) the builders, (3) the art, (4) the measured curve, (5) the line forward — which makes the twenty cases directly comparable and drives the synthesis of chapter 19 and the proposal of chapter 20.
Core thesis. A city is an answer to the question “what is a city for?” The answers form a single travelling idea (Eridu → Uruk → … → Rome), and their measured curves reveal that lasting cities turn only through plateaus, while cities built around a single centre turn on the spot and break.
Method. Comparative curve analysis: demographic and size series reduced to “words of steps” (+ / 0 / –) under a fixed standing rule (~11 per cent); sources are named per chapter (Wikipedia, Livius, ETCSL, excavation reports, Chandler and Modelski, census data after 1800, UN projections), with the author’s own Curves in the Vacuum.Net and The Path of Rome (2026) supplying the method and comparison baseline.
Key findings. (i) The plateau is not stagnation but memory-building (Uruk’s writing boom during its demographic pause); (ii) a recurring standing size of c. 30,000 people across very different eras; (iii) no placed city filled as drawn — Amarna, Baghdad’s Round City, Palmanova, Brasília, Masdar, The Line all emptied or grew off-plan; (iv) urban falls come from water infrastructure or from the departure of a single centre, never from smallness.
Distinctive claim. Chapter 20’s “city of crossings” with “participants with and without bodies,” argued as the return of the oldest urban idea (Enki at Eridu; Roman lares at house, crossroads and city; Chinese chenghuang; Japanese ujigami) rather than a novelty of the AI age — with Mattern’s A City Is Not a Computer (2021) as the endorsed counter-voice against the computational city.
Reliability. The author flags his own limits: pre-1800 series are estimates from disagreeing compilers; the 11 per cent rule is calibrated on Rome alone; the city sample is chosen for the history of the idea, not as a statistical sample. A pre-registered test on all cities with measured series is proposed as future work.
Use. Best read as a hypothesis-generating synthesis of urban history: valuable to historians of the city for its comparative tables, to planners for its anti-places-city evidence, and to anyone thinking about AI in urban life for its long prehistory of bodiless urban participants.