"Whether evoking the slums of Mumbai, a 1905 dinner party at London’s Savoy Hotel, or the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán before Cortés conquered it in 1521, Smith proves a lively, learned narrator with a strong synthetic sense. Discursive, imaginative, and comprehensive, his analysis of everything from the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to skateboarding and graffiti should be savored. Read in parts or whole, readers can wander and drift, and enjoy the element of surprise, just as in the exploration of a real city."

You can read the review here.

My review of Living in the Endless City, edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, and The New Blackwell Companion to the City, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, is in the current Times Literary Supplement (February 10, 2012, p 24). I have posted a somewhat longer version of the published review here.

The full-colour hardback of City is due in shops in May (UK) and June (US).

My review of Gordon Mathews' fascinating book Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong is in this week's TLS. You can read it online here.

Kristina Ford was director of city planning in New Orleans for eight years before Hurricane Katrina swept across the Big Easy in 2005, bringing floods and devastation on a scale unparalleled in an American city in modern times. According to Ford, the hurricane was an opportunity for city planners to do the job they were trained for: “to devise how to use the city’s lands more to the city’s betterment.” But this didn’t happen.

Ford's The Trouble with City Planning: What New Orleans Can Teach Us (Yale, £18.00) is a detailed and insightful analysis of what went wrong and a blueprint for how city planning can be improved in all cities. Cities are constantly changing and the way land is used impacts the lives of every city dweller. In post-Katrina New Orleans there was a “blizzard of planning”. There were at least five different plans in all, but the process was chaotic and the results largely ignored by the city’s elected leaders. They also failed to address the thorny historical issue of why people (largely poor African Americans) were living in areas – such as the Lower Ninth Ward – which were vulnerable to flooding. As Ford says, “any street that appeared on a map of New Orleans drawn in the nineteenth century…probably did not flood”. Planning decisions made in the early twentieth century placed too much faith in the power of technology to protect new residential areas. And importantly no attempt was made in the post-Katrina pans to explore, let alone explain, these decisions.

According to Ford, even today “a plan for rebuilding New Orleans still remains a most elusive goal”. But the experiences of the residents of New Orleans cast light on the trouble with contemporary urban planning throughout America. Ford wants to put city dwellers back at the heart of urban planning: good plans “are made with citizens and are meant to be used by them”. For a start she wants plans to be written in plain English rather than jargon and to incorporate not just facts but people’s experiences of how they use the city, what they love and hate about the city, what problems need to be solved and what kind of city they want in the future. Planners need to listen more to the people who live and work in the city. When she was a New Orleans city planner residents of New Orleans told Ford that their priorities were easy access to the amenities of the city, neighbourhoods with a strong sense of community, streetcars and cycle lanes. These are the kinds of views that should be at the centre of a city’s plan, argues Ford. A good plan should be “an expression of how the citizenry, working with city planners, believes a city could be made better”. At the heart of her argument is an important point that is often overlooked: cities are first and foremost human environments, not display cases for architecture.

Ford argues passionately that plans need to be “robust and supple documents”, which include the voices of city dwellers, and are “rooted in history”. She acknowledges that the planning process is as much an art as it is a science. There is even room for serendipity: “A Good City Plan acknowledges that what enlivens any city is frequently the product of the unexpected.” But as well as listening to the voices of residents, she is also reasserting the vital role planners must play in creating tomorrow’s cities: “what city planners know is essential to great cities”. By reforming the way city plans are created, Ford believes “the trouble with city planning” can be overcome. As a result mayors will be obliged to use city plans rather than political expediency as the basis for planning decisions. Ford’s idealism is certainly inspiring but this is an idealism grounded in a practical understanding of the challenges of city planning. And in the end, it is this that makes her book so valuable for cities and citizens everywhere.

[NB. This is a longer version of my review published in the Guardian on 12 November 2011.]

I shall be taking part in a panel discussion on "Jane Jacobs and the Future of the City" at the Bristol Festival of Ideas on 3 December, together with Geoff Dyer, Anna Mansfield, and Ben Rogers. More details and booking information here. Should be interesting. See you there!

As the book's editor Mark Shephard says, we are "on the cusp of a near-future city capable of reflexively monitoring its environment and our behaviour within it, becoming an active agent in the organization of everyday life."

'It must have been a truly magical experience to wander through the gardens at night, along tree-lined gravel walks, with bird-song and music in the air and light from the 20,000 oil-lamps twinkling among the branches (William Wordsworth, who visited aged 18, was struck by the "wilderness of lamps / Dimming the stars"). For 18th-century Londoners, it must have seemed like stepping into a dream world. As Fanny Burney's heroine Evelina says, it was "enchanted ground".'

Read the rest of my review here.

The pedestrian escalator, which takes you up the steep, lower slopes of Victoria Peak, is a high-tech extension of these. All you have to do is stand still while you are conveyed through Hong Kong’s sticky air above the city’s busy streets. At some 800 metres, it is apparently the longest of its kind in the world. Futurists like HG Wells and Jules Verne imagined that skywalks and travelators would one day be ubiquitous in cities. They were wrong, but the climate, geography and wealth of Hong Kong has made them a reality here.

Even in this age of megacities, Hong Kong’s skyline at night is awe-inspiring. There is beauty in its audacity and ambition. The glittering cathedrals of commerce, their lights undimmed by the global recession, tower above the harbour. Unfortunately, the gaudy green lasers that blaze out from the highest pinnacles threatened to reduce the whole cityscape to the backdrop of some 1980s pop video. All it lacked was dry ice.

Hong Kong is a vertical city: it has more high-rise buildings than any other city. It’s only when you notice the old colonial buildings that you really grasp the scale of the place. Today, the towers of the central business district dwarf the LEGCO Building (built in 1898) on Statue Square, once the heart of the city. (You can see an old photo of what the square used to look like here.)

Hong Kong has not tired of reaching for the skies. Opened this year, the International Commerce Centre has become Hong Kong’s tallest building, soaring 484 metres (1,588 feet) above Kowloon. The Ritz-Carlton Hotel on floors 102 to 108 is now said to be the world’s highest hotel.

Like every tourist, I made the pilgrimage up the Peak. Despite the cloudy weather, the view was indeed memorable. Looking down from the 550-metre Peak, you can see how Hong Kong’s skyscrapers are hemmed in by the sea on one side and by dense forest on the other, a concentrated ribbon of construction. They had no choice but to colonise that extra dimension of space above them. And beyond Hong Kong, lost somewhere in the mist and the smog, was the mainland – the vastness of China.

Equally memorable was the hair-raising journey up to the Peak, along a precipitous, winding road on top of a swaying double-decker bus. Hong Kong is also served – rather more sedately – by a wonderful system of old double-decker trams, which started running in 1904. I have read that they are the last operational double-deckers in the world.

Another remnant from the past are the island’s last gas lamps (two-light Rochester models) which still illuminate the Duddell Street Steps, a reminder of an age before electricity, before today’s wired, global cities.

But this is a city that doesn’t have much time for history – unlike nearby Macau, whose sixteenth-century centre has been turned into a quaint but over-crowded tourist Mecca.

One morning, I took the Number 1 bus north up Kowloon’s Nathan Street to the Kowloon Walled City Park. This was once one of the densest urban slums on the planet, home to more than 30,000 people.

The original walled city had been a Chinese garrison town. It remained Chinese even under the 1898 convention by which the British gained control of Hong Kong and Kowloon. It was an anomaly, a walled community outside the jurisdiction of the colonial rulers. After World War II, refugees from mainland China created a shanty town here, beyond the reach of policemen or officials. It became a self-regulating city within a city. There was no electricity or mains water supplies, so the resourceful inhabitants hijacked nearby power cables and dug wells. They built rickety towers up into the sky; every inch of space was precious. In a city where there were no laws and no taxes, crime and business flourished. It’s said that about 80% of Hong Kong’s fish balls were manufactured in Kowloon Walled City.

Kowloon Walled City was eventually bulldozed in 1993. Today, it has been turned into a traditional Chinese garden, a haven of trickling streams and carefully tended plants. Ornate pavilions have been built where once ramshackle tenement blocks stood (and sometimes fell). Narrow alleys lit by fluorescent tubes have been replaced by serpentine walks between clipped hedges. Now all that remains of Kowloon Walled City is a scale model.

It’s June now and I’ve returned to a chilly, wet England. But my mind is still alive with memories of this extraordinary city: busy food markets selling every kind of fruit, vegetables, fish, nuts, spices, dried mushrooms and freshly butchered meat;

tiny specialist shops crammed with goods up to their ceilings, like an Aladdin’s cave;

vast marble shopping malls in which the air is as cold as a mausoleum (how many Prada shops can one city support?); the sharp, jarring smells of seawater and diesel fuel on the Star Ferry, crossing from Hong Kong island to Kowloon;

exquisite dim sum (my mouth is watering as I type this); narrow streets like canyons, snaking between skyscrapers; people practicing Tai chi on the Kowloon waterfront each morning in a slow-motion ballet;

an elderly woman pushing a poodle in a pram at Hung Hom; temples hazy with incense; the clanking of the trams on their metal tracks in Causeway Bay; bare-foot pilgrims chanting in front of the Big Buddha on Lantau Island.

One thing is certain: I won’t forget Hong Kong.

(You can watch a slideshow of my photos of Hong Kong and Macau on Flickr.)

"It is not easy to live like Debord. It is not easy to think like him or even with him. Which is why it is not easy to forget him."

~ Vincent Kaufmann

I have reviewed Kaufmann's insightful study of Guy Debord's life and work for this week's TLS. You can read a slightly longer version of the review here.