Cities (Monica L. Smith)

Cities: The First 6,000 Years
Monica L. Smith
Viking
Nonfiction, Cultures/Geography/History
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Few things exemplify modern life quite like a city, but even the newest, brightest, most advanced city can trace the roots of nearly everything that keeps it running back to the very beginning, to the first (known) cities in the Middle East, in Asia, in Central and South America even. Archaeologist Monica L. Smith takes a look at what prompts humans to develop urban lifestyles, so very different from our long evolutionary history of hunting and gathering and even agricultural village existence, and how many innovations and technologies go into making them survive and thrive, sometimes outlasting the cultures that founded them.

REVIEW: I was looking for something different for the day's audiobook selection at work, so I hit the Random function on Libby and scrolled until something looked vaguely interesting. I've played a few city builder games in my time, and many of my favorite books involve cities past, present, future, and imagined, so I decided to give this one a try.
As promised, it's a nice introduction to the subject, outlining what defines a city, how similar they often are even across vast geographic and cultural (and temporal) distances, and why it's highly unlikely (save massive population and/or climate collapse) that we'll ever abandon the idea altogether; they seem to take on lives of their own, once founded, and even when cities are abandoned the survivors tend to be absorbed by other cities. She views cities as an inevitable outgrowth of our species's inherent tendencies toward innovation and cooperative ventures, and the massive efforts that we're apparently willing to undertake to keep them running seem to argue in favor of their benefits outweighing their costs. Smith doesn't just draw from the "usual suspects" of Middle Eastern and European examples, citing cities around the globe that all ultimately have quite a lot in common, enough that distant explorers could, with minimal trial and error, generally navigate city life and recognize the basics of organization no matter where they traveled. Of course, there are some drawbacks to cities and city life, but Smith focuses more on the benefits, and the innovations that go into overcoming the drawbacks (while acknowledging that some, such as inequalities in opportunity and quality of life, seem to be persistent bugs). She even praises "conspicuous consumption", particularly in the middle class, as part of what makes cities so great. (I'm not entirely sure that an argument that boils roughly down to "we've always had conspicuous consumption and massive waste so we shouldn't be worried about continuing the trend" is a completely convincing argument in its favor, especially as we're staring down increasing scarcity and the unprecedented disruptions of catastrophic climate change that are no longer just over the horizon but standing right outside the metaphoric city gates, but I'm not the archaeologist...)
It's a book aimed at us undereducated lay readers, so it's not an in-depth examination (which would take far, far more than one book to tackle anyway), but it's still an intriguing look at a feature of civilization that many of us take for granted, and how far back "modern" city features like fast food and night life and middle management bureaucracies can be traced in the archaeological record.
On a closing note, one downside: it does fire up the ol' itch to replay my classic city builder games... I was so, so close to reaching the rank of pharaoh in Pharaoh/Cleopatra, and I was just about getting the hang of Children of the Nile...

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