{"id":2199,"date":"2014-04-14T13:27:13","date_gmt":"2014-04-14T20:27:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2199"},"modified":"2014-04-14T13:27:13","modified_gmt":"2014-04-14T20:27:13","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s4e30-masters-of-the-city-with-pd-smith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2199","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S4E30: Masters of the City with PD Smith"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-2200\" style=\"margin-right: 5px; margin-left: 5px; border: 0px;\" title=\"PD Smith, photo by Susan Ng\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/PD-Smith-photo-by-Susan-Ng.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/PD-Smith-photo-by-Susan-Ng.jpg 300w, http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/PD-Smith-photo-by-Susan-Ng-150x150.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>Colin Marshall sits down in Winchester, England with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.peterdsmith.com\">PD Smith<\/a>, author of books on science, literature, superweapons, and, most recently, <em>City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age<\/em>. They discuss whether London has all the elements of the archetypally ideal city; the essential quality of &#8220;a place where you meet strangers&#8221;; the need to avoid writing only about buildings; the recent moment when half the world&#8217;s population found itself living in cities; the factors that have made city life more possible today than ever before; what on Earth Prince Charles talks about when he talks about architecture and urbanism; the enduring impulse to knock cities down and start them over; the un-knocked-down city as a palimpsest-like store of knowledge, perhaps with its own &#8220;latent consciousness&#8221;; Tokyo and the metaphor of city as body; whether, in experiencing cities or writing about them, to focus on one element at a time or to try to take them whole; what Germans get right about city-building; when and where Starbucks starts to seem like the most foreign place you could go; the globe-spanning &#8220;cities&#8221; of the airport, the high street, or any other non-place; what it takes to make London strange again; the detective as a quintessentially urban figure exhibiting a mastery of his sensationalistically grim, dark, troubled environment; and the challenge any interesting city issues its resident: &#8220;Figure out how to live in me.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Download the interview\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/colinmarshall\/NCC_S4E30_PD_Smith.output.mp3\">here as an MP3<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/itunes.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/notebook-on-cities-culture\/id266539442\">iTunes<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>(Photo: Susan Ng)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Colin Marshall sits down in Winchester, England with PD Smith, author of books on science, literature, superweapons, and, most recently, City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age. They discuss whether London has all the elements of the archetypally ideal city; the essential quality of &#8220;a place where you meet strangers&#8221;; the need to avoid writing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-london","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2199"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2202,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2199\/revisions\/2202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}