P.D. Smith's Blog, page 6

City Breaks

James Mather has written a fascinating and largely favourable review of City for this week's Spectator (7 July 2012). Here's a taster:

"The book...is a rich kaleidoscope celebrating urban life in all its aspects. It is neither a sustained narrative nor a polemic, but takes its cue from the episodic construction of city guidebooks. This conceit works well, helped along by copious and colourful illustrations. No city, let alone the universal city, can be seen entire. Smith's approach is to take the reader on a series of tours, which are consistently well-written and researched - and impressively eclectic - that reveal his subject matter in myriad small glimpses. [...] Smith's book is at once a hugely enjoyable read and an inspiring vision to aim for."

You can view a PDF of the review here.

The Gateway to the City of Dreams

I began my book City with a section on the theme of Arrival. For me there is one place that symbolises the hopes and fears of everyone who has ever arrived in a city, hoping to begin a new life: Ellis Island. Immigrants were dealt with on Ellis Island from 1892. In the years to 1919, no less than twelve million people passed through this gateway to America. Nearly half settled permanently in New York City. It has been estimated that almost 40% of Americans have an ancestor who passed through Ellis Island.

I visited Ellis Island in 1998 as a tourist and found it a deeply evocative space, with its unforgettable views of the soaring towers of Manhattan - the promised land, as one immigrant, Jacob Riis, described it. For those who were turned away, this little island in the shadow of Lady Liberty became the ‘Island of Tears’, to quote a contemporary journalist.  But those who successfully passed the medical examinations and the questioning (How much money do you have? Have you been in jail? Have you been an anarchist?) were free to take the fifteen-minute boat ride to the city of their dreams.

The modernist writer Djuna Barnes used a rather sinister image to describe the sight of New York from the water in her essay 'The Hem of Manhattan' (1917):  ‘As we rounded the Battery, New York rose out of the water like a great wave that found it impossible to return again and so remained there in horror, peering out of the million windows men had caged it with’. As the new immigrants, fresh from the traumatic experience of Ellis Island, approached the Barge Office at the south east corner of Battery Park, near Castle Garden, they must have been awe-struck by the skyline of Manhattan, home to the world’s tallest buildings. Their prayers had been answered and their dreams were about to come true. ‘I thought I was in heaven,’ recalled one. ‘My God – was this a city on earth or a city in heaven?’

In Henry Roth’s novel Call It Sleep (1934), Genya Schearl watches New York from the ferry, after passing through Ellis Island:

‘Before her the grimy cupolas and towering square walls of the city loomed up. Above the jagged roof tops, the white smoke, whitened and suffused by the slanting sun, faded into the slots and wedges of the sky. She pressed her brow against her child’s, hushed him with whispers. This was that vast incredible land, the land of freedom, of immense opportunity, that Golden Land.’

A bewildering array of emotions must have consumed those immigrants as they prepared to step foot on American soil. Intense joy mixed with a growing feeling of anxiety. It was, after all, their first day in the New World.

You can view a full-colour sampler of the first section of City, including the essay on Ellis Island, here.

A city is made great by its people

The author Mark Lamster has interviewed me about my book and about urban history for Design Observer. He liked City, describing it as "a magnificent achievement". One of his questions was: Given the opportunity to live in any of history's great cities in their respective heydays, where would you go? Here's part of my answer:

Berlin in the so-called Golden Twenties. It was a deeply troubled city that had experienced the hyperinflation of 1922-23, when newspaper presses were used to print banknotes. There were regular street battles between the Nazis and the Communists. But paradoxically it was also an incredibly dynamic city, attracting some of the era’s greatest artists, writers, scientists and filmmakers. It was a concentration of talent that has never been equaled in Europe. Albert Einstein went there, as did Leo Szilard, the scientist who first realized how to unleash the power of the atom. Bertolt Brecht was there and the opening of his and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera in 1928 became a night people remembered all their lives. The Berlin artist George Grosz used to walk the streets with a sign reading “Dada über Alles”. It was the city of Alfred Döblin, whose modernist novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) is one of my favorite depictions of big city life. His novel echoes with the lost sounds and sights of Berlin: faces glimpsed amongst the crowds, snatches of conversation, phrases from songs and advertising hoardings, newspaper headlines, the rattle of trams in Berlin’s streets, and the squeals of dying animals in Berlin’s vast new slaughterhouse. Berlin’s heady mix of danger and creativity encapsulates everything that makes urban life so endlessly fascinating and alluring.

Read the whole interview here.

What people are saying about City

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

Urban DNA

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.

Gentlemen, You are Mad

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!

Invisible Cities

"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.

Pleasure Cities

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.

 

London’s Squares & Time Travel

I've just reviewed two very different but fascinating books: The London Square: Gardens in the Midst of Town, by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan and Build Your Own Time Machine: The Real Science of Time Travel, by Brian Clegg.

I've always thought London's garden squares are one of the most beautiful features of the capital (especially Russell Square garden, above), so I was delighted to read Todd Longstaffe-Gowan's beautifully illustrated book:

"Squares are arguably London's most significant contribution to the development of urban form (there are some 300 in Greater London). Inspired by the Italian piazza, they were introduced in the 17th century as a way of creating open spaces at the centre of London's new residential neighbourhoods. But it was not until the following century that their gardens were enclosed and the gates locked against the 'rudeness of the populace'."

Read the rest of the review at the Guardian.

Brian Clegg's study of time travel is an excellent survey of an endlessly fascinating subject. A delight for all epicures of duration. My review was in the TLS. Read it here.

The urban age

"Human history would be vastly different without cities. The move from village life, where one is surrounded by family and kin, to urban life among strangers – this has fundamentally shaped us as a species. Cities, as Lewis Mumford has said, are 'the molds in which men’s lifetimes have cooled and congealed.' Writing begins in cities, and cities are where the first libraries and museums are built. These dense centres of humanity have nurtured trade, science, religion, philosophy and theatre. The story of cities is also the story of human civilisation."

I've been interviewed about my new book City by Karl Whitney. Read the full interview at 3:AM Magazine.