‘Cities’ Review: The Metropolis and the Masses

Americans opt for unexciting suburban life. The English idealize their culturally desolate countryside. True Europeans prefer cities—happiest among boulevards and bars, cafés and cathedrals, scrutinizing the street life or admiring the art. Yet cities smother soil, augment pollution, breed disease, accumulate inefficiencies, spread slums, nourish rats, multiply crime, present vulnerable targets and stress out their citizens. So why do people throng them? Are the gains worth the pain? What demon made our ancestors build cities in the first place?

If, like Monica L. Smith, you are a materialist, you may come up with overly glib answers. Ms. Smith holds a chair in anthropology at UCLA, where she directs an archaeology lab. She knows how to sift diggings. She can construct a pot from a sherd and clone a whole culture from a fragment of ancient detritus. 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. I could smile at vignettes of archaeological adventures, especially the story of a young excavator derided because he uncovered too little trash. 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. Vagueness about which species to classify as human over a “million-plus years” subverts her assertions about supposedly unique qualities, such as lifelong tool-use and “our capacity to convert individual experience” into shared knowledge. Tell that to the chimpanzees. She thinks grammar (including “the future tense”) is “essential . . . to envision scenarios”; yet languageless predators and prey anticipate events. 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 Homo sapiens “had relatively few needs other than food,” as if our ancestors were less emotionally complex than ourselves. Nor were “all of their tools and weapons” made from stone.

Ms. Smith seems unable to shed the sensibilities of a fashionably attuned Californian. She thinks people 6,000 years ago shared her responsiveness to “the thrill of a crowd, the excitement of new inventions and novel foods, and the tantalizing allure of meeting a romantic partner from beyond the confines of the village”—a historical insight that would not disgrace “The Flintstones.” Even if such Bedrock pleasures were highly valued by remote ancestors, they could be sampled outside city limits. And for much of the 6,000 years that Ms. Smith purports to cover, cities were remarkably uninnovative—run by reactionary elites determined to inhibit change and preserve their dominance.