Book excerpt: Monumental in scale and epic in development, cities have become the most visible and significant symbol of human progress. The geography on and around which they are constructed, however, has come to be viewed merely in terms of its resources and is often laid to waste once its assets have been stripped. The City in Geography is an urban exploration through this phenomenon, from settlement to city through physical geography, which reveals an incremental progression of removing terrain, topography and geography from the built environment, ushering in and advancing global destruction and instability. This book explains how the fall of geography in relationship to human survival has come through the loss of contact between urban dwellers and physical terrain, and details the radical rethinking required to remedy the separations between the city, its inhabitants and the landscape upon which it was built.