City A Guidebook for the Urban Age (Audible Audio Edition) P D Smith Steven Crossley Audible Studios for Bloomsbury Books
Download As PDF : City A Guidebook for the Urban Age (Audible Audio Edition) P D Smith Steven Crossley Audible Studios for Bloomsbury Books
For the first time in the history of our planet, more than half the population - 3.3 billion people - is now living in cities. City is the ultimate guidebook to our urban centers - the signature unit of human civilization. With erudite prose, this unique work of metatourism explores what cities are and how they work. It covers history, customs and language, districts, transport, money, work, shops and markets, and tourist sites, creating a fantastically detailed portrait of the city through history and into the future.
The urban explorer will revel in essays on downtowns, suburbs, shantytowns and favelas, graffiti, skylines, crime, the theater, street food, sport, eco-cities, and sacred sites, as well as mini essays on the Tower of Babel, flash mobs, ghettos, skateboarding, and SimCity, among many others.
Acclaimed author and independent scholar P. D. Smith explores what it was like to live in the first cities, how they have evolved, and why in the future, cities will play an even greater role in human life.
City A Guidebook for the Urban Age (Audible Audio Edition) P D Smith Steven Crossley Audible Studios for Bloomsbury Books
Desmond Morris wrote about the rise of super-tribes—groupings of people in which it was no longer possible for every member to know every other. Morris controversially proposed that super-tribes facilitated the growth of many behaviors that are considered weird, perverse, or aberrant. The fact that the seedy underbelly of society resides right under the greatest concentration of noses is one of the reasons we find cities fascinating. But it’s not the only reason. (Smith touches on but doesn’t dwell on the seamy side of the city, including sidebars on gangs and red-light districts.) The tremendous challenges of governance, distribution, transportation, and security that arise when people are packed together are huge.Smith gives a fascinating overview of the past, present, and possible future of the city. We learn about a time when the most advanced cities in the world weren’t New York, London, or Tokyo, but instead were Sumer, Tenochtitlan, or Angkor. (A nice feature of this book is how much ground it covers geographically. Smith brings in examples from ancient Alexandria to modern-day Mumbai in addition to those from cities--such as New York, Tokyo, and Paris--that might first pop to mind when one thinks of a city.) The reader is shown a city as an organism that has to get food and workers to its heart while expelling a massive accumulation of wastes. Cities require homeostasis as much as does the human body.
The book has eight chapters that discuss topics such as the rise of the city and how it was tied to human endeavors more generally (e.g. on the agricultural front), the development of neighborhoods, the challenge of transportation in an ever-growing community, how cities manage to be exemplary of both wealth and poverty at the same time, how the masses are entertained given the free time that arose from specialization and regulation of the labor market, and what the future of cities might bring. It’s topically, rather than chronologically arranged (though the discussion of the rise of the city is early in the book), and the organization works though it’s not necessarily what would spring to mind if one were outlining such a book.
I found this book fascinating. It’s full of interesting information and uses graphics and sidebars to good effect. If it can be called a micro-history (the subject of the urban world being so encompassing), it’s among the most interesting micro-histories that I’ve read. Whether it’s churches, Chinatowns, or coffee houses, this book lends insight into the nooks and crannies of the modern metropolis. The sections on subway systems and skyscrapers are among the most fascinating subchapters. (It just occurred to me that the last sentence could be taken in some sort of freaky, sexual way. That wasn’t my intention. I just find the engineering challenges of such infrastructure to be intriguing.) From gladiatorial combat to the birth of libraries, there’s something in this book to pique a reader’s interest.
I’d highly recommend this book for readers of non-fiction, and in particularly those who enjoy micro-histories.
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City A Guidebook for the Urban Age (Audible Audio Edition) P D Smith Steven Crossley Audible Studios for Bloomsbury Books Reviews
This book approaches the subject by looking at key institutions such as hotels, railway stations and so forth. The book is a bit light on data references and therefore is more of a light read than a serious analysis..
I had to get this for class and ended up unexpectedly reading the whole thing.
Great intro to the city and urban life. This is a hymn to urban life and urbanity....so don't look for doom and gloom here. great book.
Note edition endnote references are not activated. -_-
An excellent survey - a text for a beginning urban studies course. And a refresher for us older students, who left school decades ago to live around the world.
Chock full of interesting facts, this history of the "city" is interesting and fascinating in many respects.
A retrospective look at the "how and why" of city life, along with it's development throughout the world at corresponding times in history, and man's continued migration to the urban environment.
An anthropological, environmental and financial analysis of the urban environment, including transportation, design,architecture, culture, consumerism and every other aspect that plays a role in everyday city life.
So full of facts it's rather difficult to follow at times as the author jumps fron India to China to England and the United States and back in the same paragraph, citing figures on top of figures until your head is spinning....
It's obvious he has a passion for his subject, and it really shows. The images and the charts help keep your interest,
I enjoyed it,but tended to skip over some of the more tedious sections.
As a "Downtown" ( you will learn the origin of this word) Chicago resident, I did appreciate the look into this fascinating area of study, but feel like this should probably been a series of books.......
Liked this as it wasn't some typical urban planning treatise on the perfect city. Provided some intriguing insights and an evolutionary story (actually several different threads about what makes a city and how those elements have evolved) and is well told. I'm an architect and most urban planning texts are heady eye-glazing stuff, but not this.
We have here a man who believes, as I do, that cities are the motor of civilization, that cities are humanity's best hope of avoiding the slings and arrows of misfortune and deliberate stupidity. The book treats the history of the common parts of cities, the markets and the jails, the entry ports and the neighborhoods that make up life for two billion modern people. His discussion of the evolution of each part is interesting, his conclusions of what needs to be done is elegant.
I am a citydweller, born in Chicago, spending all of my controllable life in Chicago, New York and LA. I love cities even the grimy parts and it seems to me Mr. Smith does too.
Desmond Morris wrote about the rise of super-tribes—groupings of people in which it was no longer possible for every member to know every other. Morris controversially proposed that super-tribes facilitated the growth of many behaviors that are considered weird, perverse, or aberrant. The fact that the seedy underbelly of society resides right under the greatest concentration of noses is one of the reasons we find cities fascinating. But it’s not the only reason. (Smith touches on but doesn’t dwell on the seamy side of the city, including sidebars on gangs and red-light districts.) The tremendous challenges of governance, distribution, transportation, and security that arise when people are packed together are huge.
Smith gives a fascinating overview of the past, present, and possible future of the city. We learn about a time when the most advanced cities in the world weren’t New York, London, or Tokyo, but instead were Sumer, Tenochtitlan, or Angkor. (A nice feature of this book is how much ground it covers geographically. Smith brings in examples from ancient Alexandria to modern-day Mumbai in addition to those from cities--such as New York, Tokyo, and Paris--that might first pop to mind when one thinks of a city.) The reader is shown a city as an organism that has to get food and workers to its heart while expelling a massive accumulation of wastes. Cities require homeostasis as much as does the human body.
The book has eight chapters that discuss topics such as the rise of the city and how it was tied to human endeavors more generally (e.g. on the agricultural front), the development of neighborhoods, the challenge of transportation in an ever-growing community, how cities manage to be exemplary of both wealth and poverty at the same time, how the masses are entertained given the free time that arose from specialization and regulation of the labor market, and what the future of cities might bring. It’s topically, rather than chronologically arranged (though the discussion of the rise of the city is early in the book), and the organization works though it’s not necessarily what would spring to mind if one were outlining such a book.
I found this book fascinating. It’s full of interesting information and uses graphics and sidebars to good effect. If it can be called a micro-history (the subject of the urban world being so encompassing), it’s among the most interesting micro-histories that I’ve read. Whether it’s churches, Chinatowns, or coffee houses, this book lends insight into the nooks and crannies of the modern metropolis. The sections on subway systems and skyscrapers are among the most fascinating subchapters. (It just occurred to me that the last sentence could be taken in some sort of freaky, sexual way. That wasn’t my intention. I just find the engineering challenges of such infrastructure to be intriguing.) From gladiatorial combat to the birth of libraries, there’s something in this book to pique a reader’s interest.
I’d highly recommend this book for readers of non-fiction, and in particularly those who enjoy micro-histories.
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