Is it easy to be a city dweller? How Antiquity and the Middle Ages laid the rules of life in cities

An engaging book about how the first cities were formed and how their perception changed among residents: from closed fortresses to communities without clear boundaries.

The city is always viewed as an integral system, where one element complements another, becoming a whole: city + power + residents + money + land +… These are not just puzzle pieces put together because the city is a multidimensional structure where time, space, history, people, and… the game of life interact. What seems compulsory and familiar to us now arose from hundreds of years of polishing not so much walls as human relationships, and this story is still being written.

- Were there cemeteries in ancient cities?
- What could get someone exiled from a city in Ancient Egypt?
- Why were gold coins in Ancient Greece a sign of hard times?
- How did medieval hospitals become labor exchanges and why were the poor divided into "theirs" and "others"?
- How did the Teutonic Knights invest in urban development?

Since people began to gather more densely, they felt the need to establish special principles of behavior to make cohabitation clearer and more manageable. It was necessary to agree on a common regulation to protect private interests while not contradicting public ones, not violating others' boundaries, and not creating inconvenience, so that the interests of your neighbors were respected as much as your own. Of course, politics, economics, culture, and society also had their influence.

This book will tell how modern megacities were formed, when living in them became considered a privilege, and what it actually means to be a city dweller: both in the Middle Ages and in our time.

The author of the book is a graduate student at the Department of Architecture of Residential Buildings at the Moscow Architectural Institute, an associate professor at the Department of Architectural Fundamentals and Artistic Communications at the Moscow State University of Civil Engineering, and a member of the Union of Architects of Russia, Irina Grin. Each chapter is accompanied by sketches by the author.