To celebrate 20 years of urban research, UCL Urban Laboratory hosted Zadie Smith for the 2025 edition of the annual Cities Imaginaries Lecture, presented in collaboration with the UCL Department of English Language & Literature. During the event, Zadie Smith read her essay ‘Under the Banner of New York’, marking the publication of her latest essay collection Dead and Alive (Penguin Books, 2025).
‘Under the Banner of New York’ was written after the October 2017 Lower Manhattan truck attack. The essay weaves in her husband Nick Laird’s poem ‘New York Elasticity’, which captures the “city’s brute capacity for gathering”, a phrase Zadie Smith returns to throughout her reflection on what makes cities work despite their chaos and inequalities.
She described witnessing strangers spontaneously helping a mother with a broken stroller and an elderly woman who had fallen, illustrating how urban communities form and disperse with “dizzying fluidity” whilst displaying strength, defending cities against those who view them as “godless, decadent, morally degenerate urban hellholes”.
We are a multiplicity of humans in an elastic social arrangement that can be stretched in many directions. It’s not broken yet. I have no idea if it will break soon—but it’s not broken yet.
During the Q&A session chaired by Prof Matthew Beaumont, Zadie Smith discussed the recent New York City mayoral election, highlighting how diverse coalitions can form around shared economic concerns. She noted that while the working-class coalition supporting Zohran Mamdani may disagree on questions of gender, religion or race, they united around fundamental questions such as “Is your rent too high?” or “Are you sick of the oligarchy in this city?” She described this as an example of cities' capacity to gather people without requiring perfect alignment on all issues.
Zadie Smith also reflected on her approach to writing about places, explaining that she claims a position of observation – which can always be right or wrong – rather than a position of authority, because “we are all citizens of the world observing these things”.
Dead and Alive examines the intersections of art, culture and place, featuring essays on Kara Walker, Stormzy's Glastonbury performance and North West London, alongside tributes to Joan Didion and Toni Morrison.
Cities Imaginaries is an annual public lecture series in which invited speakers reflect on how their creative work engages with cities, urban life and cultural representation. Previous speakers include Caleb Femi, Roger Robinson, David Olusoga, Xiaolu Guo and Linton Kwesi Johnson.