I’ve very much enjoyed read­ing The City and the World by Gre­gor Hens, beau­ti­ful­ly trans­lat­ed from Ger­man by Jen Calle­ja.

In this book, Hens is fas­ci­nat­ed by “the human being in their urban con­text, the human among humans, one among many in the envi­ron­ment he has cre­at­ed for him­self”. Blend­ing reportage with mem­oir, dreams and the­o­ret­i­cal writ­ings on cities, he takes the read­er on a mem­o­rable jour­ney through the life-world of Homo urbanus.

From the “gigan­tic minia­ture park” in Shen­zhen, Chi­na, 48 hectares of scale mod­els of the urban won­ders of the world (“there’s nowhere bet­ter to day­dream being Icarus than in a minia­ture won­der­land”), to Los Ange­les, which he first vis­it­ed at the age of 16, before Google Maps exist­ed (“I had no oth­er choice but to open myself up to the city with all my sens­es, my nose, eyes and ears”), this is a won­der­ful­ly evoca­tive account of the urban expe­ri­ence in the 21st cen­tu­ry.

An author and trans­la­tor who now teach­es urban stud­ies and cre­ative writ­ing in “the win­ter-grey city of Berlin”, Hens grew up on the out­skirts of Cologne. He recalls often climb­ing an old oak (“the Cologne Tree”) from which he could see the icon­ic twin tow­ers of the city’s cathe­dral soar­ing above the city’s sky­line. He points out that the grid of a Roman mil­i­tary camp still defines the struc­ture of inner-city Cologne. The oth­er city in which he lived for many years, LA, was also based on a grid. In a book about expe­ri­ences, such par­al­lels are key to shap­ing how we see a city.

In Berlin, he tasks his inter­na­tion­al stu­dents with going to an “under­ground stop that is pho­net­i­cal­ly clos­est to your name or your home­town”, and walk­ing south-south­west to the next sta­tion: “Don’t use your mobile phone. Be sure to ask for direc­tions. Describe what you see and expe­ri­ence.” He notes that they end up wan­der­ing around the city “lack­ing any and all ori­en­ta­tion”. Nev­er­the­less, he spec­u­lates about how the exper­i­ment may have changed their view of the city, “because the per­son walk­ing car­ries what res­onat­ed with­in them into urban spaces…we can still feel the vibra­tions in the matrix of the city long after we no longer hear them”.

Infused with the spir­it of psy­cho­geog­ra­phy, Hens’s impres­sion­is­tic book reveals how the city opens itself up to walk­ers: “the city is mov­ing; there are places where peo­ple move in streams. The psy­cho­geo­g­ra­ph­er stands still; their activ­i­ty is to watch.” Though he acknowl­edges that the vast­ness and inter­nal speed of the mod­ern metrop­o­lis is no longer con­ducive to this: it’s a mael­strom that pre­vents one from see­ing any­thing oth­er than what is imme­di­ate­ly in front of you. Shang­hai has become the ulti­mate sym­bol of such urban moder­ni­ty, the result of a “ruth­less and destruc­tive” futur­ism. It is a dystopi­an city, but “Shang­hai is the future”, he says bleak­ly.

Filled with allu­sions to the lit­er­a­ture and art of the city, this is a delight­ful­ly orig­i­nal and cre­ative cel­e­bra­tion of how we expe­ri­ence mod­ern urban spaces through our sens­es, mem­o­ry, ideas and images. It’s pub­lished this month by Fitz­car­ral­do Edi­tions and is well worth read­ing!