PD Smith

Since Jonathan Glancey’s and Jonathan Yard­ley’s reviews of City appeared at the begin­ning of June, there have been many more favourable pieces on my book. Here are a few quotes and links:

“It’s a won­der­ful book: BLDGBLOG meets Ita­lo Calvi­no. Gor­geous, smart, fun, and full of sur­pris­es, like wan­der­ing all the world’s great cities at once … Irre­sistible”
— David Dobbs, Wired.com

“From mega­lopo­lis to small urban spaces, we can­not deny that the pow­er and influ­ence of cities is tru­ly glob­al, as Smith argues. This book is a per­fect way to under­stand the glob­alised phe­nom­e­na hid­den behind the word ‘city’.”
— Ethel Baraona Pohl, Domus, 29 June 2012

“…hand­some and well-written…the great strength of City is that it gath­ers in one place myr­i­ad themes and angles, pro­vid­ing gen­er­al­ists with a high­ly read­able, pithy resumé of cen­turies of city-relat­ed hap­pen­ings and trends. Authors such as Alain de Bot­ton and Iain Sin­clair have cov­ered sim­i­lar ter­ri­to­ry else­where, but Smith is less pre­ten­tious and and less opaque than either…”
— Chris Moss, Times Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment, 15 June 2012

“The range of mate­r­i­al is breath­tak­ing, but Smith wears his eru­di­tion light­ly. The prose of City is smart and fast-paced, with a nice bal­ance between big pic­ture his­to­ry and close-up details. The book is full of “aha” moments and occa­sion­al humor. This one’s a must read for his­to­ry geeks.”
— Pamela Toler, Shelf Aware­ness, 29 June 2012. Starred review.

“Smith’s prose is clear-cut and con­fi­dent, and the book fea­tures stun­ning illus­tra­tions, most of them in colour…Smith is espe­cial­ly adept at cap­tur­ing the inces­sant human inter­ac­tion which char­ac­ter­izes city life, from car­ni­vals to street demon­stra­tions and graf­fi­ti. Read­ers can vir­tu­al­ly smell the pho sold by a street ven­dor in Hanoi, or mar­vel at acro­bat­ics of skate­board­ers along the Thames. An absorb­ing and time­ly book.”
— Marc Vincent, Cleve­land Plain Deal­er, 24 June 2012

More reviews and com­ments here. City is avail­able as a hard­back or as an e‑book on Kin­dle (UK & US) or iPad. Buy at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | Blooms­bury |Indiebound | Water­stones

To mark the recent pub­li­ca­tion of the US edi­tion of City, I’ve been inter­viewed by the Atlantic Cities and Kirkus Reviews.

Nate Berg of Atlantic Cities writes:

“Mim­ic­k­ing the trav­el­er’s guide­book for­mat, Smith breaks the city down into famil­iar but loose seg­ments: cus­toms, where to stay, get­ting around, and so on. But unlike the typ­i­cal hotel sug­ges­tions and tip­ping advice you might get in a tourist guide, Smith uses these lens­es to explore into such com­mon facets of urban­i­ty as lan­guages, fes­ti­vals, hous­ing, eth­nic enclaves, archi­tec­tur­al styles, street food and pick­pock­ets. Each sec­tion explores the his­to­ry of these urban ele­ments, their devel­op­ment over time, their inter­pre­ta­tion in lit­er­a­ture and the cul­tur­al shifts they’ve cre­at­ed. The book wise­ly avoids a straight­for­ward nar­ra­tive and approach­es the city as it is: a wide vari­ety of inter­con­nect­ed parts that co-evolved into an ecosys­tem.”

Clay­ton Moore of Kirkus Reviews asked me why I chose to explore the con­cept of cities rather than con­cen­trate on one city. I replied:

“There are already some won­der­ful biogra­phies of spe­cif­ic cities. Peter Ackroyd’s Lon­don and Alexan­dra Richie’s his­to­ry of Berlin, Faust’s Metrop­o­lis, spring to mind imme­di­ate­ly. But I want­ed to do some­thing dif­fer­ent. Name­ly, to explore our endur­ing love affair with cities and to try to iden­ti­fy the essen­tial fea­tures that explain the glob­al suc­cess of cities and city life. I want­ed to write a book that cap­tured some­thing of our urban DNA.”

Read the inter­views at the Atlantic Cities and Kirkus Reviews web­sites.

My essay “Gen­tle­men, You are Mad!: Mutu­al Assured Destruc­tion and Cold War Cul­ture” has been pub­lished in The Oxford Hand­book of Post­war Euro­pean His­to­ry, edit­ed by Pro­fes­sor Dan Stone. This sub­stan­tial vol­ume con­tains 35 chap­ters explor­ing the Cold War through the lens­es of many dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines. My con­tri­bu­tion looks at how mutu­al assured destruc­tion (MAD) was reflect­ed and refract­ed in Euro­pean cul­ture and soci­ety from 1950 to 1985, and argues that film and fic­tion played a key role in high­light­ing the hor­rif­ic poten­tial out­come of MAD – a glob­al nuclear holo­caust. It was fas­ci­nat­ing to revis­it a sub­ject I explored in my book Dooms­day Men (2007) but I also enjoyed the oppor­tu­ni­ty to look in more detail at the his­to­ry of the anti-nuclear move­ments through­out the Cold War.

The title of the essay is a quo­ta­tion from a 1946 arti­cle by the his­to­ri­an Lewis Mum­ford attack­ing the sui­ci­dal poli­cies of the Cold War. “We in Amer­i­ca,” he wrote, “are liv­ing among mad­men. Mad­men gov­ern our affairs in the name of order and secu­ri­ty.” Accord­ing to Mum­ford, the mod­ern super­weapon soci­ety, for all its tech­no­log­i­cal suprema­cy, was unable to rec­og­nize the loom­ing dis­as­ter. Peo­ple were sleep­walk­ing towards the abyss of atom­ic war: “The mad­men have tak­en it upon them­selves to lead us by grad­ual stages to that final act of mad­ness which will cor­rupt the face of the earth and blot out the nations of men, pos­si­bly put an end to all life on the plan­et itself.”

Mumford’s arti­cle pro­vid­ed the per­fect point of depar­ture for a jour­ney through the era of the alpha­bet bombs – the A‑bomb, the H‑bomb and the world-destroy­ing C‑bomb. I show that films and fic­tions from Dr Strangelove and On the Beach, to The Day After played a major role in reveal­ing the flawed, dooms­day log­ic behind MAD. As Albert Camus said just days after the bomb­ing of Hiroshi­ma: “peace is the only bat­tle worth wag­ing”.

It was anoth­er text by Mum­ford – The City in His­to­ry (1961) – that was among the first books I read when I began writ­ing my lat­est book, City: A Guide­book for the Urban Age. Mumford’s book is an immense­ly impres­sive work of schol­ar­ship and syn­the­sis, although as Jonathan Yard­ley point­ed out in his recent Wash­ing­ton Post review of my book, much has changed since he was writ­ing:

“Half a cen­tu­ry ago, Lewis Mum­ford pub­lished The City in His­to­ry, a huge­ly influ­en­tial and in some ways con­tro­ver­sial book that has been the Bible for stu­dents and lovers of city life. But that was half a cen­tu­ry ago, and around the world the cityscape has under­gone enor­mous changes. A new look at this great sub­ject has for some time been need­ed, and in City: A Guide­book for the Urban Age, P.D. Smith pro­vides it. A British schol­ar con­nect­ed to Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, Smith is less philo­soph­i­cal and more empir­i­cal than Mum­ford, but if any­thing this is wel­come, as City is whol­ly acces­si­ble to the seri­ous gen­er­al read­er.”

City was pub­lished a cou­ple of weeks ago in the UK and is due out on 19 June in US. It is always an anx­ious time for any author and as City is struc­tural­ly quite unusu­al – being designed like a guide­book to an imag­i­nary “Everyc­i­ty” – I am par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in the reac­tion of read­ers. For­tu­nate­ly Yardley’s review was favourable, as was Jonathan Glancey’s in the Guardian:

“So behind the walls of the city – Smith has a chap­ter on these – there is dark­ness, graf­fi­ti, street lan­guage, upris­ings, reli­gions, ghet­tos and slums, cathe­dral-like rail­way sta­tions, traf­fic, trade, bazaars, malls, muse­ums, red-light dis­tricts and so much else. Smith packs the blood, guts, under­bel­ly and dri­ving forces of the arche­typ­al city into chap­ters as dense­ly packed as the streetscapes of Man­hat­tan or Hong Kong.”

So far I have talked about the book on BBC Radio 3, Talk Radio Europe, as well as Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Radio, and there are many more inter­views and arti­cles yet to appear. Watch this space!

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, last week I injured my back – what is pop­u­lar­ly (although, accord­ing to my phys­io­ther­a­pist, inac­cu­rate­ly) known as a slipped disc. It’s excru­ci­at­ing­ly painful and I’m writ­ing this while lying flat on my back. It’s ter­ri­ble tim­ing, of course, but I’m keep­ing my fin­gers crossed that the drugs and the doc­tors will have me on my feet again soon.

It does, how­ev­er, pro­vide the per­fect excuse to catch up on read­ing, such as Nick Harkaway’s won­der­ful­ly doomy nov­el Angel­mak­er… Just what the doc­tor ordered!

“Arriv­ing at each new city, the trav­eller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had.”

- Ita­lo Calvi­no, Invis­i­ble Cities (1972)

I took part in a BBC Radio 3 pro­gramme cel­e­brat­ing the for­ti­eth anniver­sary of the pub­li­ca­tion of Calvi­no’s won­der­ful book, Invis­i­ble Cities. Oth­er con­trib­u­tors include Rebec­ca Sol­nit, Bradley L. Gar­rett and Anna Minton. You can lis­ten to the pro­gramme for the next three days here and after­wards here.

I’ve writ­ten a piece for Arc 1.2, the new dig­i­tal quar­ter­ly from the mak­ers of New Sci­en­tist, about cities and fun:

“Every year for three whole days in the pic­turesque Pied­mont town of Ivrea, Italy, some three thou­sand peo­ple pelt each oth­er mer­ci­less­ly with oranges, until the streets are cov­ered with eight inch­es of gold­en cit­rus gore and the gut­ters run with juice. Wel­come to the Bat­tle of the Oranges, part of Ivrea’s Car­ni­val fes­tiv­i­ties. In this age of mush­room­ing megac­i­ties, Car­ni­val is a bois­ter­ous reminder that urban life has proved so pop­u­lar in the last five thou­sand years not just because of the eco­nom­ic ben­e­fits, but because cities are fun.”

Buy the issue — titled Post Human Con­di­tions — and read the whole arti­cle, “Built for Pleasure”, here.