Reading Cities for what it is—not a history of 6,000 years but a miscellany on delights and difficulties of urban living—I relished many odorous pages on sewers, latrines and garbage ... Charmingly, the author is ecologically heretical, considering trash-heaps a part of the glory of cities: 'a small price to pay . . . for feeling fully alive.' Ms. Smith speckles her canvas with vivid dots but is less adept in joining them up ... Unpardonably, the author ignores evidence of writing—in the sense of systematic symbolic notation—earlier than Mesopotamian examples. It is shocking to find an archaeologist who supposes that early 'had relatively few needs other than food,' as if our ancestors were less emotionally complex than ourselves ... Ms. Smith seems unable to shed the sensibilities of a fashionably attuned Californian ... Ms. Smith recognizes the disparity among classes, but does not mind very much. Bourgeois privilege, like choking levels of trash, seems to be, for her, a necessity worth making a virtue of. She regards middle-class 'mojo' as motivating civic 'flow,' without acknowledging the role of dictatorial drive.
There’s much to wonder about in archaeologist Monica L. Smith’s thought-provoking, capacious, often witty new book ... An archaeologist and professor of anthropology at UCLA, Smith has excavated ancient sites around the world and brings her wide and deep experience to her perspective on urbanism. Throughout her engaging book, she also affords the casual reader a glimpse of the tools and techniques of her trade ... In other chapters, again drawing on her knowledge of ancient civilizations, she notes the vital importance of infrastructure ... She describes these projects and project managers in surprisingly, almost shockingly contemporary terms. Can it be that ancient city-dwellers were not so different from 21st-century urbanites?
Although drawing a clean conceptual binary between the rural and the urban is quite uncommon in contemporary urban studies, doing so, to follow Smith’s arguments, illuminates patterns and continuities that are often overlooked. The book engages a simple question: 'Why cities?’ Are they a natural step in human habitation’s evolution or a response to something else?' Drawing from decades of field and analytical work in archaeology and weaving with it a rich exploration of history, geography, and current research, Smith’s argument places cities at the center of human social experience ... Cities is an unusual and compelling journey from city life in ancient urban centers to the present and beyond.
...[a] lively book ... In patient and smoothly readable chapters combining anthropology, archeology, and wonkish earnestness, Smith takes readers on a tour of how cities became the sweet spots of human habitation, tracing the organics of why cities are born, why they flourish, and why they fail.
Archaeologists are rewriting urban history. University of California anthropology professor Smith...enthusiastically recounts her work and the findings of colleagues. As they dig to bedrock, making surprising discoveries in each layer of debris, they are overturning past assumptions about the origins and development of cities ... Readers can sense Smith’s love of archaeology; her chapter on archaeological methods is especially engaging.
Archaeologist and anthropologist Smith traces the cultural phenomenon of cities through time in this enjoyable, humorous combination of archeological findings, historical documents, and present-day experiences ... [Smith] argues that city life has been remarkably consistent across millennia—proximity to strangers, big public squares and winding residential streets, housing shortages, landfills, markets, and graffiti were as much a part of ancient city life as of modern. (This leads to an odd dismissiveness about problems such as subpar housing conditions and environmental damage caused by urban living, which may put off some readers)... Smith writes conversationally and supplies charming details ... For readers who don’t mind a detached view of urban problems, this is a thoroughly enjoyable excavation.
Smith’s argument isn’t new; Lewis Mumford was making similar observations half a century ago while, in recent years, Richard Florida has taken up the cause of cities as creative engines. Still, her points are well-taken: Cities are 'now so widespread that we have a hard time ‘unseeing’ them from the landscape,' and increasingly they have become conurbations, with hundreds of cities, especially in Asia, having attained populations of more than 1 million people and vast metropolitan belts running down river valleys and coastlines.Students of world history, urban studies, economics, and similar fields will find Smith’s book to be a thought-provoking, useful survey.
