Through Time and the City

<p><em>Through Time and the City: Notes on Rome</em> offers a new approach to exploring cities. Using Rome as a guide the book follows familiar sites geographies and characters in search of their role within a larger narrative that includes the environmental processes required to generate enough space and material for the city the emergent ecologies to which its buildings play host and the social patterns its various structures help to organize. </p><p><em>Through Time and the City</em> argues that Rome is made and unmade by an endlessly evolving chorus that has for better or worse gained geological legitimacy; that the city absorbs and emits countless artifacts in its search for collective identity; that the city is a platform for the constant staging of negotiations between agents (humans buildings plants animals pathogens goods waste water) that drive and are driven by the entanglements of climate and culture. This book provides textual and visual frameworks for identifying the material traces emergent patterns or speculated futures that expose a city as inseparable from its capacity to change. </p>