PD Smith

Restless Cities

28 June 2010 | cities | 2 comments

As part of my research on cities I’ve been read­ing Rest­less Cities, edit­ed by Matthew Beau­mont and Gre­go­ry Dart, just pub­lished by Ver­so. It’s a won­der­ful series of med­i­ta­tions on the expe­ri­ence of the city that com­mu­ni­cates “a sense of the metrop­o­lis as a site of end­less mak­ing and unmak­ing”. Con­trib­u­tors include Chris Petit, Mar­shall Berman, Patrick Keiller, Geoff Dyer, Michael New­ton, and Iain Sin­clair.

Michael Sher­ing­ham’s piece on “Archiv­ing” was immense­ly rich and sug­ges­tive in its explo­ration of the city as a repos­i­to­ry of mem­o­ries, as “lay­er upon lay­er of com­pact­ed mate­r­i­al detail”. I was par­tic­u­lar­ly struck by his idea that as well as the writ­ten his­to­ry of a city, there is a unique and per­son­al his­to­ry expe­ri­enced by each inhab­i­tant — the Tube sta­tion where you met your lover on the first date, the street where a grand­par­ent used to live, the anony­mous office block where you used to work. The city’s street cor­ners are dense with his­to­ries both writ­ten and unwrit­ten. The city, says Sher­ing­ham, is “a mem­o­ry machine.”

It remind­ed me of Calvi­no’s beau­ti­ful fan­ta­sy, Invis­i­ble Cities, in which he says that a city’s past is writ­ten into its fab­ric like the lines on a labourer’s hand, “in the cor­ners of the streets, the grat­ings of the win­dows, the ban­is­ters of the steps, the anten­nae of the light­ning rods, the poles of the flags, every seg­ment marked in turn with scratch­es, inden­ta­tions, scrolls.”

You can read my review of Rest­less Cities on the Guardian’s web­site.

2 comments so far:

  1. Paul Halpern | 01 July 2010

    Your review rais­es many inter­est­ing points about the impor­tance of cities as repos­i­to­ries of mem­o­ries. When I’ve vis­it­ed cities with long his­to­ries such as Rome, Paris and Berlin, I’ve felt over­whelmed by the ghosts of past events. Invis­i­ble Cities has long been one of my favorite books, and I hope, based upon your rec­om­men­da­tion to add Rest­less Cities to my read­ing list.

  2. whh | 30 July 2010

    Ver­so books rarely dis­ap­point. Thank you for the tip. I will be order­ing this book.