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.

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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.