Nigel Thrift - Killer Cities

Theory, Culture & Society caters for the resurgence of interest in culture within contemporary social science and the humanities. Building on the heritage of classical social theory, the book series examines ways in which this tradition has been reshaped by a new generation of theorists. It also publishes theoretically informed analyses of everyday life, popular culture, and new intellectual movements.

EDITOR: Mike Featherstone, Goldsmiths, University of London

David Beer, University of York

Nicholas Gane, University of Warwick

Scott Lash, University of Oxford

The Theory, Culture & Society book series, the journals Theory, Culture & Society and Body & Society, the TCS website and related conferences, workshops, and other activities now operate from Goldsmiths, University of London. For further details please contact:

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Recent volumes include:

W.H. Auden (1937) As I Walked Out One Evening'

Cities are often considered to be one of the high points of human civilization. I am not so sure. It might be better to think of them as an amalgam, containing both hope and despair. Rather like Mir, who chose two very different works of art, Velsquez's Las Meninas and Goya's Dog, as the works he most admired in the Prado, so we might argue that cities currently contain spaces glowing with an easy power and privilege, like Las Meninas, mixed with spaces which seem to announce both a premonition of doom and a final burst of defiance, so brilliantly marked out by Goya as a dog facing the imminent prospect of inundation by forces unknown1. But neither depiction, however extraordinary it may be, inspires much confidence in our collective future. So we have to find another way. No wonder that Picasso wanted to refigure Las Meninas2. Heaven knows what he would have done with Goya's dog: perhaps it is there somewhere in the sufferings of the horse in Guernica.

Cities are often depicted as the safe havens of human civilization, as the places where the best outweighs the worst. They are certainly where much that can be counted as positive about the human endeavour has flourished. But against that record of success needs to be set a rather different reckoning. Cities have also been the scenes of the most extraordinary levels of violence and barbarity. Not surprisingly, given the different ways in which statistics on violence are gathered, it is not possible to give any kind of exact accounting. But the evidence is there in the historical record, however approximate it might sometimes be. Furthermore, as societies have become more urbanized, so more and more violence has tended to occur within city bounds rather than without.