PD Smith

Like much of our often invis­i­ble urban infra­struc­ture, mod­ern city dwellers take street light­ing for grant­ed. At least, they do until they walk down an unlit and unfa­mil­iar street. While I was research­ing City, I came across the rather sad sto­ry of one of the pio­neers of gas light­ing, a man who was tru­ly ahead of his time. There wasn’t room to include it in the book, so I thought I’d share it with you now.

Con­tin­ue read­ing…

Dan Wagstaff has inter­viewed me for his won­der­ful blog The Casu­al Opti­mist. We cov­ered a lot of ground, from cities (of course) and dystopias, to my ear­li­est expe­ri­ence of writ­ing (as well as read­er feed­back) and my favourite book (Titus Groan). You can read it here.

City was reviewed by Will Wiles in this mon­th’s Icon mag­a­zine. It’s an urban-themed issue, includ­ing a fas­ci­nat­ing piece on fer­al cities by Geoff Man­augh and some of Michael Wolf’s superb pho­tos of Hong Kong sky­scrap­ers. Well worth buy­ing! The review is not online, but here’s a taster of what he thought about the book:

“The over­all effect is an ener­getic trib­ute to the city rather than a guide or aca­d­e­m­ic study — a cel­e­bra­tion of city-ness itself. Smith…writes plain­ly and with aston­ish­ing scope, per­sis­tent­ly glob­al and seem­ing­ly at home with every­thing from Mar­dok to Mas­dar. The lit­tle the­mat­ic essays are a joy… With even lit­tler texts boxed in colour and scat­tered hith­er and yon, City is a tremen­dous­ly jazzy, rest­less book.”

“Arrival frames many of our expe­ri­ences of the city: the rou­tine arrival of the com­muter each day, the excite­ment of the tourist at that first glimpse of the metrop­o­lis, the anx­i­ety of the migrant – a stranger in a strange city. Sam Thompson’s Com­mu­nion Town begins with an appeal to a migrant, Ulya, from a face­less offi­cial who has been secret­ly observ­ing her and her hus­band, ever since they arrived in the city. He tells Ulya that he just wants her to open up, to con­fess her true feel­ings. Think of it as your “true arrival in the city,” he says. But the words of this sin­is­ter, Kafkaesque nar­ra­tor ring false. It smells like a trap.”

My review of Sam Thomp­son’s nov­el Com­mu­nion Town: A City in Ten Chap­ters, which has been long-list­ed for the Book­er Prize, appeared in the TLS last week. You can read it here.

The Aus­tralian Design Review has pub­lished an edit­ed extract from “The Wired City” essay in my new book City. It’s about urban infra­struc­ture. Here’s the first para­graph:

Dur­ing the 1870s time was pumped beneath the streets of Paris. Spread out under the city was a net­work of pipes filled with com­pressed air from indus­tri­al steam plants. The pipes emerged into homes and com­mer­cial premis­es, where they were con­nect­ed to clocks. From a con­trol room in the rue du Télégraphe, a pres­sure pulse peri­od­i­cal­ly rip­pled through the sys­tem of pipes beneath the streets, pneu­mat­i­cal­ly syn­chro­nis­ing the clocks of the French cap­i­tal to the stan­dard time of the Paris Obser­va­to­ry.

You can read the rest here.

The last few days have been pleas­ant­ly busy with inter­views and reviews of City. I was on Sean Mon­crieff’s show last Mon­day and talked to Robert Elms at BBC Lon­don on Wednes­day. Robert real­ly loves cities, espe­cial­ly Lon­don of course, so that was great fun. Yes­ter­day I talked to Rob Fer­rett at Wis­con­sin Pub­lic Radio. It was a wide-rang­ing dis­cus­sion about some of my favourite cities through­out his­to­ry. We talked for about an hour and took calls from lis­ten­ers, includ­ing one who had been to Tim­buk­tu. You can down­load the pro­gramme here.

A piece by me that appeared in last mon­th’s Archi­tec­ture Today on “My Kind of Town” is now online. I cheat­ed a bit and cre­at­ed a com­pos­ite of those aspects of cities that have most impressed me, from the gar­den squares of Blooms­bury, the evoca­tive his­to­ry of Rome, and the friend­li­ness and effi­cien­cy of Tokyo, to the dynam­ic diver­si­ty of New York City. Read it here.

This week­end there was a good review of City in The Econ­o­mist. Here’s an extract:

Mr Smith has writ­ten an unapolo­getic paean, not to any par­tic­u­lar city but to the urban idea in gen­er­al. Not for Mr Smith the lazy myths of a lost, rur­al gold­en age, to which many city-dwellers are prone to suc­cumb after a day spent nego­ti­at­ing the noise, traf­fic and smog of their man-made envi­ron­ments… The city is the build­ing block of civil­i­sa­tion and of almost every­thing peo­ple do; a guide­book to the city is real­ly, there­fore, a guide­book to how a large and ever-grow­ing chunk of human­i­ty choos­es to live. Mr Smith’s book serves as an excel­lent intro­duc­tion to a vast sub­ject, and will sug­gest plen­ty of fur­ther lines of inquiry.

The full review is online here. Yes­ter­day I found out that City had also been reviewed in the cur­rent issue of The New York­er. Being reviewed by The New York­er is a new expe­ri­ence for me, so that was real­ly excit­ing. It’s not online but I don’t sup­pose they will mind too much if I share it with you:

This “guide­book for the urban age” ranges from the Mesopotami­an cities of Eridu and Ur to the unbuilt cities of the future, which may or may not fea­ture smart elec­tric­i­ty grids, rent-by-the-hour “love hotels,” and “sky­scraper farms” hous­ing chick­en and fish that feed on the waste from hydro­pon­ic crops. Short chap­ters cov­er such sub­jects as parks, train sta­tions, depart­ment stores, hotels, graf­fi­ti, gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, park­ing meters, street food, ceme­ter­ies, and ruins. Smith’s enthu­si­asm for cities some­times laps­es in a gener­ic boos­t­er­ism that white­wash­es their more per­ni­cious aspects. But the book’s hodge­podge struc­ture excit­ing­ly mir­rors the impro­vised order of cities them­selves, and Smith encour­ages his read­ers to “wan­der and drift,” a strat­e­gy liable to gen­er­ate sur­pris­ing jux­ta­po­si­tions – as between urban birds, which sing at a high­er pitch than birds in the coun­try, and the police drones that fly above the streets of Liv­er­pool.