Pittock has established himself as an eighteenth-century British historian of impressive range. Here he turns to urban history, material culture history and a demonstration of how Edinburgh became an enlightened capital of European significance between 1660 and 1750. ‘Enlightenment’ is here defined capaciously as a culture pursuing the ‘application of reason to knowledge in a context of material improvement’ (p. 14). The ‘dynamic basis for intellectual change’ is not to be found in instances of heroic intellectual achievement but in the changing functioning of Edinburgh's cultural superstructure – especially its ‘distinctive ecology of [urban] networks’ (pp. 16–17). It was, he argues, a ‘smart city’ due to its ‘connected leadership and engaged citizens’ (p. 19). The ‘mechanics’ driving forward Enlightenment are not philosophical works but socio-cultural factors such as a resident nobility ideologically and personally aligned with the professions, the existence of strong professional institutions, noble patronage at work within these institutions, theological conflict between moderates and conservatives within the Church of Scotland, compact living and employment conditions encouraging the flow of ideas, a resulting associational life which transcended social (though not gender) divisions, literary and artistic innovation and an increasingly diverse citizenry. All of these factors are in place in Edinburgh in the late seventeenth century and they account for the city's zest for material improvement.

Pittock's introduction contains the bulk of his argument. The subsequent chapters are less analysis-heavy and offer rich, often dense, arrangements of evidence and incident. Edinburgh's Enlightenment-inducing qualities were a consequence of it being a royal capital, with the associated benefits of investment on institutional infrastructure, and the centre of Scotland's diplomatic, intellectual and commercial overseas networks. The Union of 1707, and the relocation of political power to London, did not alter the high concentration of nobility and professionals in the city, but rather encouraged their focus on civil improvements. Pittock details how the emergence of Moderatism within the Kirk and the rise of key associations were the result of ‘association, hybridisation and fusion of the professions’ (p. 110). Pittock emphasizes the multicultural quality of Edinburgh's population stemming from its globalized commercial and Europe-facing, specifically Dutch, university networks.

The longest chapter assesses the ‘growing circulation of visual art’ and its relationship to the ‘advance of consumerism, cosmopolitanism and innovation’ (p. 131). Pittock argues that the visual arts had a greater impact on framing the social imaginary of enlightened Edinburgh than we currently appreciate. The chapter on Edinburgh's associational culture again stresses that their significance resulted from their provision of opportunities of cross-fertilization between the nobility, the professions, merchants and trade. The final chapter explores the role of Edinburgh's burgeoning (and patriotic) publishing trades on encouraging the transmission of ideas and intellectual innovations and the growth of knowledge-intensive businesses. The book does not have a concluding chapter.

Enlightenment in a Smart City is another instance of how work on urban development can be immensely conducive to better understanding the European Enlightenments. Much of the freshness of Pittock's work results from his application of contemporary thinking about successful urban development to the historical instance of Edinburgh's emergence as the centre of the Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh was an innovating city for the reasons contemporary theorists explain successful urban development. This freshness might inspire imitation amongst historians usually trained to be sceptical of outside expertise's ability to inform, rather than distort, historical research. That said, the analysis might have benefited from further historical comparisons with other Enlightenment-era urban developments – does Pittock's explanation of Enlightenment help us understand Paris or Potsdam or St Petersburg? Or with what happened next, given that Edinburgh's intellectual golden age is the generation succeeding the three covered by Pittock? Still, lots of conclusions result from Pittock's study. Edinburgh's Enlightenment occurs decades before the usual focus on the 1750s or, indeed, on the Union of 1707. Jacobitism plays a prominent role. Similarly, we need to avoid emphasis on singular causal factors – the universities, Moderatism, Hume's works. (Whether anyone offered such simplistic interpretations is another matter.) The relationship between the nobility and the professions in associational urban settings is key, though Pittock warns against the prosopographic tendencies of earlier scholarship. We miss all these elements if we get bogged down in philosophical texts.

Pittock redresses the balance of Enlightenment studies more heavily in favour of a picture integrating economic, social and cultural change at the expense of the traditional stress on the role of ideas. Paradoxically, then, we end up with an account of the urban conditions for intellectual innovation containing little actual space for treating those innovations on their own terms or as factors for change. Pittock's analysis ends up in a similar position to the old historical materialist account of ideas: able to explain the context in which intellectual flourishing takes place, but not the specific origin, content and purpose of those ideas. Pittock certainly presents a powerful case for treating ideas as a historical factor with less importance – indeed, considerably less – than Scottish Enlightenment studies currently does, and for taking urban settings even more seriously. The inevitable response will be that the iconoclasm goes too far the other way. This, quite easily, need not have been the case. All told, this is a fresh, informative and interesting study that deserves to be read closely by Enlightenment historians generally and might possibly be of interest to contemporary urban development specialists too.