The London that Johnson meant is the London he found when he moved from the countryside in the mid-1700s. It was a place we’d start to recognize as a modern metropolis — nearly a century since the Great Fire leveled the medieval city; nearly a century until it would become the largest city in the world. It was, most importantly, a center of empire and a place of huge innovation. Wealth from around the world poured in, and that wealth then became even more wealth thanks to the development of sophisticated financial tools, stock exchanges, credit systems, and all the other trappings of a modern economy. Intellectuals of all walks of life — economists, tradesmen, scientists — gathered at the coffee houses around the banking district to debate and argue and change each other’s thinking.

That’s the first thing. A successful city is always, without question, a pressure cooker. It brings people together in densities that make conflict and cooperation inevitable. How we live in cities directly changes how new technologies develop and spread, and how everyone ends up living down the line. And, if you live in one of these places, why would you ever think you could find intellectual nourishment anywhere else? A city like London is a black hole that sucks people in; the stuff that escapes, its Hawking radiation, is ideas.

The second point of focus is that part about London as a capital of empire. Cities, as the most efficient and effective ways to bring people together, concentrate and focus all the things that make their existence possible. The famous old buildings that populate London, the ones that get put on postcards or appear on the skyline in movies, were often built with money from dubious sources. (Take an example from a few decades after Johnson’s death, when the Victorians constructed a comprehensive national railway network using slave money. We still use that infrastructure today.)

Johnson might not have felt there was anything outside of London worth seeing, but that’s what you get when you live in a magpie city that thrives on bringing the shiniest parts of the rest of the world to its ports. Cities are chaotic, but the material reasons they exist might not be; in turn, the way they look and the ideas they produce are usually influenced by material things. An entirely new petro-funded city in the desert comes from a different place than one centuries-old on a frigid Baltic coast, and, accordingly, the characteristics that their own Dr. Johnsons most love and loathe about them will be different.

Taken together, the point I’m making here is that cities are places of innovation, but also places where innovation makes itself felt—good or bad. That’s what Metropolis month is all about. What are the issues that will dominate how we live on top of each other in the great and less great cities of the world? How will science and technology change them, or how will the way we live in cities change how we produce science and technology? Will we recognize cities a century from now? Can we see the reasons why that might be today?

Join us as we find out.