The Shield of Achilles is described in Book 18, lines 478–608, of Homer's Iliad. This description is considered an iconic example of ekphrasis. Ekphrasis is a rhetorical device that involves extended description of a work of art. The term can also be used more generally for an extended, vivid description of any sort of object or scene within a speech or poem.
The two noble cities represent states of peace and war. The peaceful city is idyllic, a place where marriages are celebrated with dance and feasting, citizens congregate in the marketplace, and disputes are settled by law courts rather than violence. This is how Troy and the homes of the Greeks might have appeared before the war and what the Greeks long to return to. The second city is one disrupted by war, with the surrounding farms and pastures engulfed in violence. It represents the sort of life that is being experienced by the Trojans during the war.
Other scenes on the shield include the nature (sea, sky, stars), pastoral scenes (the harvest, herds of domestic animals, plowing), choral dancing at a festival, and the ocean.
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~afutrell/w%20civ%2002/iliad.html
Homer lavishes a good deal of description on the Shield of Achilles. It shows both a city at peace as well as another city, near a bucolic world of cultivation and farming, on the brink of possibly being destroyed by war. We see pleasure, plenty, and farming depicted on the shield.
Many critics have pointed to the Shield of Achilles as incorporating the entire Greek world. Greek society, Homer shows, is not simply a warrior society. The Trojan War does not define the whole of who the Greeks are. Their civilization is bigger than a battlefield and more than a sword. The soldiers might fight a war, but the shield represents their deep longing for the world they are defending, a world of religious festivals and music, fields and pastures, food and pleasure. It's a world of vineyards and livestock, flocks and ripe fields, of young men and women dancing and playing pipes, a place of harmony and joy.
In answer to your first question, the shield depicts the whole world and everything in it: the heavens, the earth, the seas, all the various rites and attitudes of humanity.
The two cities are very different. The first is concerned with weddings, feasts, people assembled for a legal dispute concerning a murdered man, and what punishment should be exacted from the killer. This is a city at peace where people are going about the business of life: marriage, holidays, community, and the rule of law.
The second city features armies, a siege, an ambush, and the prospect of peaceful settlement or bloody rampage. This is a city at war where foreign powers are debating whether to destroy the city or simply accept a massive tribute from it and leave it alone. The citizens themselves refuse to compromise and are braced for a fight, which comes in the form of a surprise attack, the first victims of which are “two shepherds playing on their pipes”—that is, peaceful bucolic people about to be destroyed by the forces of war, which is a pertinent scene for the epic.
Other scenes forged by Vulcan include:
A fallow field being plowed
A field of harvest corn, being harvested (with a nice little rural scene of the reapers at work and their wives making them lunch)
A lush vineyard full of ripe grapes, through which young men and women run about blithely and play music and sing and chase each other
A herd of cattle, of which the foremost bull is being eaten by a lion while the cowherds stand powerless to stop it
A mountain pasture full of sheep
A “green”—a lawn, on which young men and women weave dances, wearing flowers in their hair
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