High Density Living, 2000 Years Ago: Inside the Roman Apartment Building

The earlier stories are mostly independent (the last few in the series build on previous stories). I would recommend starting with the first book, The Silver Pigs because there is a romance that starts and continues. The central character is what today we would call a "private eye".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Pigs

It's been several years since I read them, but I think starting with the first book is good. It's not quite as polished as the others, and I think not quite with the same tone, but it introduces the characters that will be throughout the series. My memory is the series is more lighthearted in general than the first book is.

You make me think I should reread, and I will start at the beginning here too.

>but at least you don’t have to share a wall with another human!

If you ban loud bass I don't think I'd mind. Until then, no thank you.

The murder risk in cities like Baltimore, NYC, and Chicago have nothing to do with cars.

Its very much everywhere you have large swaths of people pasding through. I distinctly remember my aunt complaining that in the student dorms back in the day, two students bought a whole pig and roasted it in the iron bathtub

It isn't that simple. The most important thing about a city is the streets and blocks. Manhattan and Barcelona are good examples of cities that have been designed in a way that make them walkable and high density.

Zoning is useful for keeping people from building apartments right next to paper mills, pig farms, and superfund sites because those places tend to become slums. Building height restrictions and density limits provide people with the ability to see the sky and get sunlight. They improve air quality. They're pretty useful around places like airports. They can help improve safety and limit the damage resulting from disasters like fires and earthquakes. It's important to strike a balance between over-restrictive zoning and dystopian people-warehouses in perpetual shadow.

Modern cities have a lot of buildings that are sparsely populated. 500 years ago, major Italian cities had ~15k people / square km, which is similar to Brooklyn. Paris had 35k to 50k people / square km, making it more densely populated than Manhattan.

2000 years ago, Rome had similar population density to Paris 500 years ago.

Historically, urban people wanted to live inside city walls, if possible. When the population grew, most of the growth turned into higher density inside the walls. There was always some urban sprawl outside the walls, but that was mostly poor people and those who didn't have the right to live in the city proper. Major cities occasionally built a new set of walls surrounding a wider area, but that didn't happen every century.

You are mixing up a lot of different factors.

3-4 story apartment buildings gives a net residential density of 30-100 units per acre. Typical 20th century urban development is 3-10 units per acre, with suburban "urban sprawl" at the low end of that. See [1] for examples.

Yes towers exist now, and downtown areas have much more intensity and square footage. But outside of NYC (861 of the top 1000 densest census tracts) and a very short list of other parts of other US cities[2], residential density is much lower almost everywhere than it was in 1950, including in cities. Units per acre and especially people per unit have steadily and dramatically dropped. The drop in NYC population density is dramatic even as built square footage has increased[3].

But for every 40 story tower out there, there are hundreds of square miles of car-centric suburban development.

[1] https://mrsc.org/stay-informed/mrsc-insight/april-2017/visua... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFB5YooSo5M&t=936s [3] https://urbanomnibus.net/2014/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-manhat...

You have it the wrong way round: In the US the slave owners lived on the farms. The bustling cities were in the free states.

that seems like a reductive truth in the other direction, i'd even say it's largely false.

the wealth explosion in the high middle ages and significant rise in standard of living was fully accompanied by (and maybe precisely because of) the flourishing of urbanity as well. there were great jobs in the city. proto industry and cottage industry, specialized trades, guilds, ... would you rather be a farmer, subject to the whims of your lord and the weather, or instead weave cloth at a more individualized pace, as a band of brothers?

that city was also a much more calm and verdant atmosphere than we now image as well. gardens, high intensity cultivation, markets, plazzas, all within city walls, not to mention a very accessible country side outside in walking distance ... no noise pollution from cars. i think people tend to forget this aspect a lot more, because they imagine the crowded industrial city. that machine-environment wasnt the norm for the hundreds of years preceding it. we should image bruges in 1370 here as the norm, not manchester in 1870.

sure, the city could be filthy, but farmlife was miserable in its own ways. and sanitation was bad in the city, it was just as bad as on the farmstead.

Serfdom existed to prevent peasants from leaving those farms, people wanted to move to cities were wages and jobs were better but nobility wanted to force them to stay on those farms.

There are discovery tours for the other modern AC games too included if you own the base game.

I don’t understand why folks mention AC games first when this kind of thing is brought up, KCD is not perfect but much better for historical accuracy.

I wish there was a "camping mode" for Breath of the Wild. Would be fun just to fish and hunt and camp.

Hm is that any good if i'm an old Caesar/Pharaoh player?

It's not as widely promoted, but if you're genuinely interested, there are more of those histories written then you'll ever have time to read yourself.

There's a classic five volume series "A History of Private Life" that works through a breadth-first survey over time. It can make for a great starting point, and is a bit like an encylopedia in the way you can engage with it as essays on certain times and topics instead of being expected to read it through serially.

You might enjoy Patrick Wyman's (Fall of Rome, Tides of History) new podcast "Past Lives":

https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/new-history-podcast-past...

That is what the source material is. We have to read between the lines to figure anything else out. That means we often have to guess.

> bringing refuse facilities into the home

Well spotted. India is apparently going through that, and they have a joke - older people complain that new generations are lost: "They dine outside and shit inside!"

> top floors were the least desirable. Poorer residents occupied the upper story.

This remained true in Western cities until elevators became widespread in the late 1800s. In New York city, for example, buildings didn't reach above 6 floors because even the poorest people would not walk up more stairs. Street level was frequently retail space, next floor up might be office space, everything higher was residential. Until Otis showed how to make a safety brake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Otis