ancient cities

globalizing capital and demographic trends, might
lead to new opportunities in developing countries
experiencing rapid urbanization.
Constantine E. Kontokosta
See also Real Estate; Suburbanization; Urban Economics;
Urban Planning
Further Readings
Fainstein, Susan S. 2001. The City Builders: Property
Development in New York and London, 1980–2000.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Miles, Mike E., Gayle Berens, and Marc A. Weiss. 2002.
Real Estate Development: Principles and Process. 3rd
ed. Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute.
Peiser, Richard B. and Anne B. Frej. 2003. Professional
Real Estate Development: The ULI Guide to the
Business. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Urban Land
Institute.
Rybczynski, Witold. 2007. Last Harvest: How a
Cornfield Became New Daleville: Real Estate
Development in America from George Washington to
the Builders of the Twenty-first Century, and Why We
Live in Houses Anyway. New York: Scribner.
Weiss, Marc A. 1987. The Rise of the Community
Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and
Urban Land Planning. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Di c k e n s, ch a r l e s
London is the protagonist of Dickens’s fiction, as
it defined his popular success. Even as a mature
writer Dickens continued to draw on the experience
of the young newspaper reporter who had
written Sketches by Boz (1836) in his spare time,
capitalizing on his walks through the city to outline
the different neighborhoods and their distinctive
inhabitants. “What inexhaustible food for
speculation, do the streets of London afford!” he
comments. We “have not the slightest commiseration
for the man who can take up his hat and
stick, and walk from Covent Garden to St. Paul’s
Churchyard, and back into the bargain, without
deriving some amusement—we had almost said
instruction—from his perambulation.” Throughout
his career as a novelist, journalist, editor,
Dickens, Charles
217
actor, and theatrical impresario, Dickens found in
London an inexhaustible source for the instruction
and amusement of his readers, including
Queen Victoria. Throughout his life he was a
walker in the city, a vagabond of the streets.
His close friend, John Forster, notes that for the
young Dickens to walk “anywhere about Covent
Garden or the Strand, perfectly entranced him
with pleasure. But, most of all, he had a profound
attraction of repulsion to St Giles’s.” Focusing on
the cognitive dissonance generated by the city, this
attraction of repulsion became his characteristic
London signature. “‘Good Heaven!’ he would
exclaim, ‘what wild visions of prodigies of wickedness,
and beggary, rose in my mind out of that
place.’” This part of the city always evoked his
childhood, and all those places in the neighborhood
of Warren’s Blacking Factory and Hungerford
Stairs are central to his writing: Covent Garden,
the Temple, St. Giles, Waterloo Bridge, the Strand,
and Temple Bar.
Like the Sketches, the humor of Pickwick
Papers (1838) illuminates the dark corners of the
city’s urban labyrinth and would continue to
inform his fiction. Published in serial form, either
in monthly or weekly installments, the 15 novels
he wrote map the city and its characteristic inhabitants.
Realism in Dickens’s time was magical, for
the city was a fairytale come to life: grim, exhilarating,
and transformative. To describe this urban
world was to create a new Bible, encompassing
heaven and earth, and all that lies between.
The first great practitioner of the detective
novel, Dickens created a linguistic universe that in
the energy, deftness, and surprise of its syntax
simulates the theatrical experience of life in the
modern city. As we read his writing we participate
in the modern theatrical project of urban life:
Modern identity has become staged identity.
Like the detectives of the London Metropolitan
Police, founded in 1844, whom he admired and
wrote about in Household Words, Dickens teaches
us how to decode that city world and navigate its
darker streets. His fiction trains us in keen and
swift observation, careful judgment, and wideranging
sympathy.
When Dickens was born, on February 7, 1812,
London was a city of horse-drawn carts and carriages,
which entered through city gates like Charing
Gate, NewGate (with its formidable prison), and