Cities

"A revelation of the drive and creative flux of the metropolis over time." --Nature "This is a must-read book for any city dweller with a voracious appetite for understanding the wonders of cities and why we're so attracted to them."--Zahi Hawass, author of Hidden Treasures of Ancient Egypt A sweeping history of cities through the millennia--from Mesopotamia to Manhattan--and how they have propelled Homo sapiens to dominance. Six thousand years ago, there were no cities on the planet. Today, more than half of the world's population lives in urban areas, and that number is growing. Weaving together archeology, history, and contemporary observations, Monica Smith explains the rise of the first urban developments and their connection to our own. She takes readers on a journey through the ancient world of Tell Brak in modern-day Syria; Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan in Mexico; her own digs in India; as well as the more well-known Pompeii, Rome, and Athens. Along the way, she presents the unique properties that made cities singularly responsible for the flowering of humankind: the development of networked infrastructure, the rise of an entrepreneurial middle class, and the culture of consumption that results in everything from take-out food to the tell-tale secrets of trash. Cities is an impassioned and learned account full of fascinating details of daily life in ancient urban centers, using archaeological perspectives to show that the aspects of cities we find most irresistible (and the most annoying) have been with us since the very beginnings of urbanism itself. She also proves the rise of cities was hardly inevitable, yet it was crucial to the eventual global dominance of our species--and that cities are here to stay.

"[A] compelling journey from city life in ancient urban centers to the present and beyond...By the time the book reaches the urban-age anxieties of the present, we not only appreciate their proper place within the complex trajectory of cities and their rise, we are compelled to consider Smith’s assertion that cities were, and continue to be, central to human ascendancy—for better or worse."—Science

“Monica Smith is the person best qualified to write a book about the big problems raised by the increasing concentration of the human population into cities. She also has a gift for vivid writing that makes the science of cities come to life for the broad public.”—Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies*

• "A lively romp that takes the reader through a rich landscape of urban scenarios and across an inclusive cross-section of city dwellers . . . The author is a well-known figure in the anthropological and archaeological study of cities, and the book represents a summation of decades of scholarly reflection as well as of fieldwork at a dizzying variety of sites across different continents."—American Journal of Archeology

"Smith is a professional archaeologist who has excavated many ancient ruins around the world. As she conjures the lives lived among those now tumbled stones, she depicts people who bear an uncanny resemblance to contemporary, urban Californians."—The New York Review of Books

“Cities captures the reality and stress of how we make cities and how, sometimes, cities make us. This is a must-read book for any city dweller with a voracious appetite for understanding the wonders of cities and why we’re so attracted to them.”—Zahi Hawass, author of Hidden Treasures of Ancient Egypt

"[An] enjoyable, humorous combination of archeological findings, historical documents, and present-day experiences.” —Publishers Weekly 

“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."—Booklist

"A thought-provoking, useful survey."—Kirkus Reviews

“A panoramic guide to our earliest urban areas, places that seem both so foreign and so familiar. Monica Smith’s fascinating description of the many millennia of city building should remind us that we are an urban species. The cities that Smith describes faced many of the same challenges as our cities today, and the lessons of that past remain important today. This is a rich treatment of the growing and important field of urban archaeology, which continues to yield new surprises and insights that matter for city making today. Cities are responsible for many of the best things that humankind has achieved—Monica Smith tells the story of how we built the cities that made everything else possible.”—Edward Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City

“This engaging book excavates the story of the cities we take for granted today—and clearly shows the origins of so many present day concepts from millennia ago. Fun and full of fantastic stories from Professor Smith’s career, this book is highly recommended for anyone interested in the roots of our so-called ‘modern’ urban life.”—Sarah Parcak, author of Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past

Échantillon de lecture

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Why Cities?

As an archaeologist, my favorite place in Rome is not the Colosseum or the Forum. It's the ancient trash dump of Monte Testaccio. Right in the middle of the city, it is a giant mound of broken pottery where the ancient Romans threw away the containers used to ship wine and olive oil all around the Mediterranean. Each of those vessels was about half the height of a person and made of coarse clay that would have roughed up a stevedore's hands. Their odd shape of two handles and a pointy base made them good for packing into a ship's hold or standing upright on a sandy shoreline but very inconvenient for much else. After a cargo of them arrived at its destination on the bustling shores of the Tiber at the very heart of the Roman world, a few were reused and a few were recycled. Mostly, people poured out the contents and threw the containers away. Over the centuries, the pile of discards grew, with the result that one of the famous hills of Rome is actually not a hill at all but a human construction-a landfill, essentially. Today Monte Testaccio is topped by trendy nightclubs and has been endlessly mined for construction, but there are still the remains of twenty-five million ancient containers poking up from the vegetation of the hillside.
Now consider a very different metropolis. My favorite part of Tokyo? The backside of the Tsukiji fish market, the part that tourists don't visit. Tsukiji is enormous, and the passageways are crowded with plastic buckets and barrels teeming with every kind of creature that you can imagine from the briny deep. Crabs attempt to crawl their way out of baskets, little fish are piled up in ice buckets, and great slabs of tuna glisten under the klieg lights. The market is open to everyone, with chefs and restaurant owners jostling with homemakers for a clearer view of the day's catch. It's a world without friendly chitchat, punctuated by the dangerous darting movements of souped-up forklifts that dodge their way in and out of the building and heap up their discards out back. Behind the market is an enormous dump of plastic-foam shipping boxes used to transport the globally sourced tuna, squid, and shrimp from each morning's auctions. The pile of containers is taller than a two-story building and so large that it is continually cleared by bulldozer. Some of the cartons are trampled and…