Metropolitan Metaphors

Throughout history, time and civilization have been measured through the lens of the city. From democratic Athens to imperial Rome, from Crusade-afflicted Jerusalem to revolutionary Paris, cities have been used as metaphors to tell the story of a people or culture as a whole.



The 20th century saw the world become more interconnected than ever before. New advantages in technology have changed the way humans understand time: our attention spans grow ever shorter with new media, and for the 20th century, the decade became the dominant measure of a population's interests and actions ("The 60s, the 70s, the 80s", etc.).



With that in mind, one can see how the world navigated a decade by focusing on one city:



1910s - ST. PETERSBURG - A city in which civil unrest, nationalist pride, and intellectual ideas dreamt up by those who has successfully avoided war leads to bloody conflict and the total destruction of the old order. This applies not only to the communist-provoked civil war in Russia but to Woodrow Wilson's forays into Mexico and the Great War.



1920s - CHICAGO - While the United States threw one of history's craziest parties, Europe struggled to cope with the aftermath of an unprecedented situation and the bad guys began to find ways to maximize their influence. These unsavory characters included not only Benito Mussolini of Italy and the leaders of the Nazi Party, but Lucky Luciano and Al Capone. Not that it should be compared with the horrors of the Great War, but America's flirtation with prohibition upset the established order and opened lucrative channels for career criminals.



1930s - BERLIN - The uneasy tension brought about by the increasing power of monsters like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, combined with the complete failure of the League of Nations was felt throughout the world, but no place was this more prevalent than in the capital of the Reich.



1940s - BERLIN - The world went from being at war to being divided between the two most powerful victors.



1950s - LOS ANGELES - Hollywood became the center of culture for over half of the world, yet due to segregation, half of the city was essentially shut out of the full experience. An arms race of epics began, with Cecil B. DeMille and a host of other directors competing over who could make the greatest film.



1960s - LONDON - Swinging counterculture, the rise of recreational drugs, and American blues and rockabilly given a decided English twist. The Austin Powers movies reflect an exaggerated version of this, but only slightly. From Americans like Jimi Hendrix making London an unofficial home to politicians like Harold Wilson desperately attempting to fit in, London became the axis around which the world turned, even if the four men most responsible for that development hailed from Liverpool.



1970s - BAGHDAD - The OPEC oil embargo placed the entire Middle East onto the world's center stage, but embargo would never have happened without the forceful backing of Iraqi Vice President Saddam Hussein, who (ironically) acted as the Dick Cheney to his aging, somewhat figurehead boss. With the rest of world decaying and stagnating, Hussein attempted to return Baghdad to its 10th century peak and nearly succeeded before pissing away all of his accomplishments beginning in 1980.



1980s - TOKYO - The 80s were an unashamedly capitalist decade, and while the rise of Solidarity in Poland, Margaret Thatcher in Britain, and Ronald Reagan in the USA, combined with the fall of Mao Zedong in China, sent those nations into a frenzy of deregulation, nowhere was this embrace of the market more prevalent than in the technological center of the world. By the 1980s, the Japanese dominated the automobile, communication, and real estate markets, and even the US was worried about a coming Japanese decade.



1990s - NEW YORK CITY - From a concrete Wild West to an urban Disneyland, perhaps no city changed as much in the course of ten years as the home of the Yankees. The 90s were a time where it seemed that everyone was doing well, and the problems others suffered were pushed out of the spotlight, leaving the center of the empire as a fantasy island. From Belgrade and Rwanda to Brooklyn and The Bronx, the cries of those on the fringes did not affect those in their own little worlds.



2000s - DUBAI - A house of cards that fell when it was exposed that the books were cooked and nothing was real. Enron, the Iraq War, the ownership society, the economic might of China, the Obama stimulus - all of these and more could fit in the luxury suites of the Burj Al Arab.