A FASCINATING INVESTIGATION INTO THE HISTORY OF CITIES: WHY DID THEY OCCUR, HOW HAVE THEY EVOLVED, WHY DO SO MANY OF US CHOOSE TO LIVE IN THEM AND HOW DO THEY AFFECT US? '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 will make the science of cities come to life for the broad public. I expect that CITIES will be a great read and will sell well.' Jared Diamond, author of Collapse Over half of the world's population lives in an urban area and cities around the globe are getting bigger and bigger. Love them or hate them, more and more of us are choosing to live in them. Cities investigates the following intriguing questions: why did cities start to occur around 6,000 years ago, how have they evolved, why do so many of us choose to live in them, how do they affect us, and what does the future hold at a time when we're increasingly connected by technology? In Cities, Monica L. Smith points out that, even if you don't live in a city, your life is inevitably affected by one, whether you commute into one for work, sell coffee beans to a company that supplies urban coffee shops, or host city-dwelling tourists seeking adventure and respite from the city in your remote village. Using fascinating anecdotes and research findings from her work as an archaeologist, Smith also reveals that many of the problems that we associate with modern cities (violence, hyperconsumption, etc.) have, in fact, always existed. And, more positively, how many of the things that draw us to cities in modern times (educational and economic opportunities, social mobility, culture) are the things that have drawn us to them since they first appeared. She also makes the controversial argument that it's down to cities that the middle class exists and she examines why social movements flourish in cities in a way they rarely do in rural settings.
About the Author
Hello readers! I'm an archaeologist based at UCLA where I use my background of global field research to identify the things that make human societies and settlements distinct.How did I start studying cities? Many years ago I moved to Manhattan after living in a small town while I was a graduate student. That move was electrifying and made me think about what it meant to be an urban person. The move dovetailed with new research that I was undertaking in India, so that I became lucky enough to study something that I loved and wanted to find out more about. There are two books that came out of that process. One book is A Prehistory of Ordinary People, which looks at how and why humans are so good at multitasking. The other is Cities: The First 6,000 Years, which looks at the way that cities both past and present are places where people connect with each other in a dynamic and energizing way. Even though we all recognize that cities have some disadvantages, they've become the dominant form of population center because of the great nexus of economic, educational, and entertainment options that they offer.In the Cities book, I wanted to have a conversation with readers and let them see how they can decode their own cities just as archaeologists decode the material traces of the past. I’d love to hear from you about your journey!
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