Image: Charles Mudede
"And don't worry about getting lost. Some say it's the only way really to experience a city." Smith is right when he talks about getting lost, for there is always another city alley to take, doorway to enter, park to stroll through or some overlooked or even forbidden quarter of a city to sidle through. The greatest cities are inexhaustible, and not least because they are constantly changing. And when a city stops evolving, its lifeblood freezes and it becomes – as history proves – little or nothing more than a museum showcasing its own past or a cluster of haunting ruins."
"Cities, like dreams, are made of desire and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else."
"The city, then, is never as rational as its founders, patrons, architects, planners, bureaucrats and engineers might have wished it to be. Truly great cities have always been a heady mix of the planned and the unplanned, the rational and the irrational, the dreamlike and the matter-of-fact. A great city today might have a magnificent core of grand central streets, stirring architecture, a comprehensive public transport system running like clockwork, secret sewers going about their sulphurous business untiringly, sane governance, bright schools, comforting hospitals, and all of these underpinned by healthy commerce and adorned by a confident culture. And, yet, the same city would be woven through with the unpredictable worlds of fashion, music, art, cuisine, carnivals, hobbies, cults, clubs.
So behind the walls of the city – Smith has a chapter on these – there is darkness, graffiti, street language, uprisings, religions, ghettos and slums, cathedral-like railway stations, traffic, trade, bazaars, malls, museums, red-light districts and so much else."
City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by PD Smith – review (The Guardian)
