Cities: How Humans Live Together

Cities: How Humans Live Together is another book in the “Orca Timeline” series, and it is another ‘must-have’ for middle grade readers.

Author Megan Clendenan and illustrator Shari Ogawa have combined to take young readers back to the origins of people collecting together and living in cities, and then the author and illustrator guide them to think critically about what we have learned from cities in the past to create better cities in the future?

Have you ever wondered what it was like to live in a city 100 years ago? How about 1,000? What about 50 years in the future? (p. 1)

Each of the five chapters first looks around the world and back in time to examine a specific topic or theme - urban planning, transit, water and waste, power, and food - using examples from different cultures around the world. Each chapter ends with a focus on the future. For example: “The Future of City Food Is Now”.

A final conclusion to the book instructs students to “Imagine the City You’d Like to Call Home”.

If you could design a city that would be good for both people and the planet and treat all residents equitable, what would it look like? (p. 79)

The information in Cities: How Humans Live Together is presented in an engaging format with an information-packed text supported by a large quantity of photographs, illustrations, and graphics. Ogawa’s artwork shows happy active citizens of all time periods populating the cities used as examples in Clendenan’s text. The colourful drawings add just the right touch of humour to prevent the text from becoming overwhelming.

Several Canadian cities are used in the examples. Clendenan writes in the first person when she uses examples from her home city of Vancouver.

Cities: How Humans Live Together also includes a glossary, a list of print and online resources, and acknowledgments. This review is based on an advance copy with blank pages for an index to be added before publication.

Also included throughout the book are sidebars headed “If You Lived In …”, with details of life in cities around the world. Some of the sidebars highlight cities long in the past, and others highlight modern day cities.

If You Lived In… Mohenjo-daro, Today’s Pakistan

In ancient times (2500-1900 BCE), Mohenjo-daro was a vibrant city with as many as 100,000 residents at its height. The city had assembly halls, marketplaces, grain warehouses and plenty of bathhouses. Your parents might have been artisans who created jewelry from gold or lapis. One of your chores might have been to draw water from one of the 700 freshwater wells situated throughout the city. With so many wells, you likely had a short walk back with a heavy water container. If you had to “go”, you could head to the bathroom in your own home, where baked-clay drains carried waste away to sewers located below street level. (p. 40)

A second series of sidebars headed “When You Gotta Go” is sure to be of high interest to this age-level audience.

When You Gotta Go: World’s Largest Public Restroom

In Chongqing, China, you’ll find the Porcelain Palace. It’s a huge public restroom, measuring over 32,000 square feet (3,000 square meters), with more than 1,000 toilets as well as music, television and Wi-Fi. Many of the toilets are uniquely shaped. Are you brave enough to pee into a toilet shaped like an open crocodile mouth? (p. 56)

By encouraging critical thinking about the development of sustainable, safe, equitable cities around the world, Cities: How Humans Live Together challenges today’s students to learn from the past and prepare for the future.