On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, one genre of occasionally viral post involves images or videos of American phenomena that “the European mind cannot comprehend.” Recent examples turned up in a search include a morbidly obese old-west cosplayer winning some kind of contest at a shooting range; a man using a flamethrower to clear snow off his driveway; an alligator attempting to climb into a boat only to be slapped off by its pilot, and photographs of the interior of a Buc-ee’s, a chain of enormous just-off-the-freeway convenience stores now spreading outward from Texas. Despite being American myself, I’ve never seen any of those sights in person, though I do hope my next visit to the U.S. includes a stop at a Buc-ee’s. My interest was piqued in part by an enthusiastic post about it on Lost in the USA, a blog by a French couple who’ve traveled my native land much more extensively than I ever will.

Though Americans are notorious for their unwillingness to learn to learn foreign languages, even the most travel-resistant could benefit from doing so in order to attain a fuller view of their homeland. That view would encompass not just criticisms made from afar, but also praise for the qualities of life in the U.S. that they take for granted, or at least find difficult to perceive due to their sheer normality. Some Texans may seize any excuse to pull into a Buc-ee’s, but how often do they stop to consider what its existence says about the nature of American civilization? That line of thinking, I admit, probably occurs much more readily to the European mind in general, and the French mind in particular. It certainly does to that of the philosopher Bruce Bégout, a specialist in phenomenology who’s also written books on airports, the American motel, the hyperrealist sculptor of the lumpenproletariat Duane Hanson, and Las Vegas. When I came across his most recent book on a specifically American subject Los Angeles, capitale du XXe siècle at the Centre Pompidou bookstore, its appeal to my sense of incongruity proved too strong to resist.

Read more

American cities are retarded. Perhaps that sentiment could stand to be further explained. I use American in the most casual sense, in reference not to the continents but to the United States of America in particular; I use retarded in the most literal sense, in reference to a progress being hindered or halted. Keeping those definitions in mind, we have what amounts to the premise of Benjamin Schneider’s new book The Unfinished Metropolis, albeit expressed in a way the author gives the impression of being unwilling to do even in his own head. The proportion of Americans with passports has lately crept up to 50 percent, but even among the half who’ve never gone abroad, many will by now have at least an inkling that their major cities haven’t kept developmental pace with those of Europe and Asia. Comparative deficiencies in public transit and “walkability” have often been lamented, but the lack of less measurable qualities like appealing public spaces and an ambience of life on the street could similarly be ignored only by a die-hard urbanophobe.

Schneider, a die-hard urbanophile who did two years of research visiting a couple dozen major cities both inside and outside the U.S., takes it as his journalistic mission to explain why that happened and what can be done about it. Each resulting chapter of this book takes on one aspect of the American city’s grand retardation. Zoning laws influenced by “the cult of the single-family home” grew increasingly rigid in the twentieth century, making it impossible to build enough housing either to endure a modicum of affordability, let alone to offer the poorest an alternative to life on the street. The auto industry’s lobbying turned once-lively streets into the exclusive property of motorists encouraged to drive them at higher and higher speeds, which not only distorted them out of human scale but also made them inconvenient, even dangerous, to so much as cross. The money that paid for robust prewar streetcar and passenger rail networks dried up, never to be replenished, and the vast postwar freeway system (along with the oversupply of parking dictated by the assumption of universal automobile use) did grievous, possibly irreparable harm to the cities through which it ran. As suburbs prospered while downtowns bled out, the ostensible cure of “urban renewal,” with its misconceived high-rise housing projects and its isolated civic and cultural centers, usually proved as bad as the disease.

These stories have been told before, some of them many times, including in books previously covered here: Steven Conn’s Americans Against the City, Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise, M. Nolan Gray’s Arbitrary Lines. That last is, like The Unfinished Metropolis, a publication of the environmental and urban policy-focused Island Press, whose titles also include Jarrett Walker’s Human Transit. Walker contributed a blurb to Schneider’s book, calling it “an encouraging survey of the great task before us: to make make American cities great again.” The economist, blogger, and podcaster Tyler Cowen, whose Emergent Ventures program provided grants that, in part, supported the work behind both this book and Gray’s, uses very nearly the same expression in his own endorsement. He also mentioned the book in a post on his blog Marginal Revolution, which I’ve read for decades, though without any indication of the extent to which he agrees with the proposition that American cities need to be made great in the first place. His more recent podcast interview with Dan Wang, author of Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future — a book that makes own indictments of the U.S.’ comparatively sluggish urban development — makes me think he’d have his objections.

“Doesn’t America just have better infrastructure than China?” Cowen asks Wang by way of an opener. “Let’s say I live in Columbus, Ohio. What exactly am I lacking in terms of infrastructure? I have this great semi-suburban life. It’s quite comfortable. What’s the problem?” Something about the question makes me hear it as just one provocation in a long-running back-and-forth between the two. In any case, Wang grants that “America has excellent infrastructure if you own a car,” but argues that the “quality of life will be substantially higher” for everyone, suburbanites and urbanites alike, if the the U.S. massively upgrades its rail transit systems running within and between cities. “I agree that we should build more rail,” Cowen responds, “but mostly we’re not going to. We’ll improve airports, add more flights.” And absent the possibility of a revolution in American rail, why not “just get everyone a car, or almost everyone”? After all, “what we have are the very best suburbs,” and “suburbs are the future.” This exchange contains several assumptions worth considering, one being that a suburb of sufficiently high quality can substitute for a city. Another, even more relevant here, is that American civilization essentially, or ideally, takes a suburban form.

There are no doubt many Americans who would agree with that conception, whether or nor they’d put it in those terms themselves. We live in detached single-family houses, arranged into neighborhoods consisting only of such houses; when we need to go somewhere, we get in our cars and drive there: this is what Schneider quotes Donald Trump as branding, in a tweet during his 2020 presidential campaign, “the Suburban Lifestyle Dream.” (The Trump administration comes up again and again in as the chief obstacle to the U.S.’ twenty-first-century urban renaissance, and at one point Schneider suggests that “city-building could offer a new means of ‘resistance’ for Democrats that is constructive rather than symbolic.) Major cities like New York or Los Angeles may have a high cultural profile across the entire world, but they remain exceptional to rather than exemplary of the country’s decentralized nature, which could never accept containment within the sheer urban concentration of a Paris, to say nothing of an all-encompassing capital like Seoul, where I happen to live. The Hamiltonian metropolis has become irrelevant, and given the state of many rural areas, so has the society of Jeffersonian yeoman farmers: the much-invoked real America is, in fact, suburban.

Whether all that is actually true I couldn’t say, at least not without conflating it with the question of whether I personally want it to be true. Schneider surely doesn’t want it to be true, given the frequency of his encouraging words about the potential for American re-urbanization. In the The Unfinished Metropolis‘ final chapter, he reiterates them all, underscoring the non-impossibility of everything from the end of single-family zoning to the permission of single-stairwell apartment buildings to the dedication of exclusive, protected bike and bus lanes. These are just a few of the goals pursued by the movement known as YIMBY, or Yes In My Backyard, named in opposition to the NIMBYs whose influence in city politics bears outsized responsibility for many if not most of the urban deficiencies Schneider diagnoses. Of course, it must be the rare self-described YIMBY who actually has a backyard in the first place, given their tendency toward youth and economic status well short of affluence. Schneider is a freelance journalist (and fellow Substacker, I might add), and though I haven’t looked up his age, I would guess he’s in his late twenties, or maybe his early thirties.

Though sturdy and clear throughout the book, Schneider’s prose occasionally betrays the tendency toward skittishly conformist euphemism (as well as the assumption of sometimes implausible causal power on the part of social prejudices) characteristic of that generation. He uses term “unhoused” four times, for example, and once even goes all the way to “people experiencing homelessness.” This is one sign of a writer preaching to the choir, or in this case to multiple choirs, one of which — that of the urbanists — can claim me as a member. I may have lived outside the U.S. too long to get the last few political-correctness updates, and quite possibly have stayed abroad in part out of a disinclination to encounter speech thus mangled in my immediate surroundings. But a larger reason to live in Seoul, to my mind, is that my homeland has no cities to match it, and — let’s face it — probably never could. There is, of course, New York, which retains its appeal in the face of wearying bursts of disorder and grinding costliness. But as Schneider acknowledges, considerable aspects of that appeal owe to the fact that they were set in stone (or at least concrete) before the American anti-urban regime set in. The structures lining Central Park “form a forbidden city within the city: a collection of well-loved, well-functioning buildings that public policy treats as a mistake.” And as for the subway system, by far the busiest and most extensive in the country, almost all of it was up and running before World War II. (The most recent addition, the two-mile-long initial phase Second Avenue Subway, opened in 2017 at a cost of about $7 billion.)

Los Angeles, where I used to live and which still fascinates me more than most places in the world, comes off in The Unfinished Metropolis as the poster city for twenty-first-century American re-urbanization that it more or less is. If a reader unfamiliar with that phenomenon were somehow to pick up the book, they’d be startled to learn that the “L.A.” they imagine has public transit of any kind, let alone a subway system currently undergoing a long and ambitious-by-U.S.-standards expansion. But the fact remains that none of its stations have bathrooms, to my knowledge, let alone ones that don’t subject their users to waves of fear and disgust. Schneider doesn’t touch the public restroom question at all, maybe because it would be too demoralizing; better, or at least more realistic, to focus on how to make possible the amount of housing and infrastructure already considered standard in other, supposedly less developed parts of the world. The question of why Los Angeles in particular and American cities in general lacked certain traditionally urban qualities soon consumed me when I lived there, and drove the phase of city-book reading I was in at the time. Had it been published then, Schneider’s book, which broadly addresses almost all the relevant factors in a single compact text, would have made for a highly clarifying read.

It wasn’t long thereafter that I began writing professionally about cities myself, publishing first a series of essays on different parts of Los Angeles for a local public TV station that drew the attention of an editor at the Guardian. He was leading the team just about to launch a Rockefeller Foundation-funded site dedicated to cities, one manifestation of what turned out to be a minor flowering of urbanism-focused online media that would mostly wither by the early years of this decade. Guardian Cities shut down in 2020; Atlantic Cities, which launched around the same time with the participation of urban-vitality guru Richard Florida, ended up re-branded to CityLab (a name that at least doesn’t bring to mind a Monopoly board) and sold to Bloomberg, where it was dramatically de-staffed. Schneider nevertheless managed to land a fellowship there, an experience he found formative enough to dub it “CityLab University” in The Unfinished Metropolis‘ acknowledgements, and indeed, the book bears the wonk-Democrat journalistic mark of that venue. (None of its quotations is less surprising that the one from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance in the chapter on reindustrialization.) Still, however professionally suitable, the kind of depersonalized perspective it uses always puts me at something of a loss. Schneider answers many questions, but not the one that eventually rose to the top of my mind: what, exactly, is the city to him?

The book itself offers scant biographical information: the “About the Author” paragraph mentions Schneider’s having been born and raised in San Francisco and now living in Brooklyn, with stints in Los Angeles, Manhattan, and Washington, DC in between. This extended immersion in both the pleasures and shortcomings of some of these most urban of all U.S. cities could constitute the material for a book by itself, and one with the potential to persuade those many of our countrymen without direct experience of city life at that. (As he himself observes, “Americans have trouble believing that buildings and infrastructure can improve their lives because they’ve never seen it happen.”) Also worth hearing would be the kind of full-throated argument for the city — a superfluity in many countries, but certainly not the U.S. — Schneider could make to a worldly contrarian like Tyler Cowen, which makes me hope he eventually gets his day in Conversations with Tyler‘s hot seat. The Unfinished Metropolis was the proper first book for him to write, and it’s all to the good that it wasn’t published under the tentative title Living for the City, which he can thus use for a later, more personal work befitting it. Presumably, he has plenty of career left in which to write it.

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His books include 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro: Where Youth Meets Tradition. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

“Are you deeply interested in how an Argentinean observer might phenomenologically regard a southern Brazilian city, combined with his philosophy of walking, in fictional form?” once asked economist Tyler Cowen in a post on his long-running blog Marginal Revolution. He went on to give his own answer: “I am.” The context was one of his occasional “What I’ve been reading” roundups, and the book in question was Mis dos mundos by Sergio Chejfec — or rather My Two Worlds, as it had just then, in 2011, been published in an English translation by Margaret Carson. Though I’d already been reading Marginal Revolution for years at that point, I can’t recall whether that description piqued my interest when Cowen first posted it, when I had scant experience with cities or travel in any case. But when I found my way back to it last year, my desire to read such a book, ideally in the Spanish original, could hardly have been stronger. Looking up Chejfec and his body of work, I wondered — as I do ever more frequently about Latin American writers — where he’d been all my life.

Read more

So many more books and cities remain to cover — including quite a few that I already had in mind when I launched this newsletter in 2020, not to mention all the volumes yet to be published. In any case, as a celebration of its first half-decade, I’m putting one-year subscriptions on sale for just $30 for a limited time. Upgrade to paid, if you haven’t done so already, and not only will you be able to read every single Books on Cities piece, you’ll also be able to comment on them. But don’t do it for me; do it for these twin future city-explorers, born just last month:

Subscribe now

Edmund White died this past summer at the age of 85, having lived about four decades longer than he must once have expected to. His HIV diagnosis came in 1985, around the height of the AIDS epidemic, when he was in his mid-forties. It can't have been a complete surprise, given that he'd spent most of the "golden age of promiscuity" that extended from the nineteen-seventies into the early eighties living it up in New York's "gay ghetto." There he was involved enough in the local scene to have been one of the original founders of Gay Men's Health Crisis in 1981, before the cause of the new plague had come to light. For a time, that group officially adopted the view that the underlying virus must require multiple sexual exposures to be transmitted, White remembers in his memoir Inside a Pearl, the assumption being that "promiscuity was to blame. Cold comfort for me, since I had had literally thousands of partners."

Whether that résumé point counted as a mark for or against him, White eventually ascended to the presidency of Gay Men's Health Crisis. "I hadn’t liked myself in the role of leader," he remembers, describing himself as "power mad and tyrannical." Wanting an excuse to abdicate that position seems to have been a reason for his relocation from New York to Paris in 1983, though not the only one: "Secretly I’d wanted the party to go on and thought that moving to Europe would give me a new lease on promiscuity. Paris was meant to be an AIDS holiday. After all, I was of the Stonewall generation, equating sexual freedom with freedom itself." Alas, that holiday soon came to an end, though the diagnosis didn't end up putting much of a cramp in his style. White himself proved genetically disinclined to sicken, let alone die, as a result of carrying HIV, unlike so many of the friends and lovers (not a hard distinction in his milieu, it turns out) he ultimately buried.

One of them, a young French architect-turned-illustrator called Hubert Sorin, ended his life as White's professional collaborator. The result was Our Paris: Sketches from Memory, a slim collection of illustrated vignettes featuring the eccentrics both obscure and world-famous with whom their shared life in the French capital put them into contact. With their alternating loose-rigid line and their lighthearted, faintly Art Deco-inflected aesthetic, Sorin's high-contrast drawings exude what I think of as the look and feel of the late nineteen-eighties. That charming book came out in 1995, the year after Sorin's death, as the first volume in White's already considerable bibliography to deal specifically with his time in France, spent mostly from the early eighties to the late nineties. Published in 2014, the much baggier and even more name-dropping (a tendency White openly admitted, and then heartily embraced) Inside a Pearl was the last. Between them, in 2001, came the less obviously personal The Flâneur: a Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris.

The Flâneur brought White to my attention, though I never did make it a priority to explore his work. His reputation had something to do with that: not his status as an avowed Gay Writer, but what I gathered to be his specialization in the detailed description of gay sex acts, a difficult proposition for even the most open-minded straight male reader. Indeed, his career is bookended by the co-authored The Joy of Gay Sex, from 1977, and The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, published just this year, less than six months before his death. His 1982 breakout novel A Boy's Own Story, the first part of an autofictional trilogy, deals with the early homosexual experiences of a protagonist coming of age in the American midwest of the nineteen-fifties. A work of nonfiction not categorized among his memoirs, The Flâneur struck me as an ideal point of entry into White's oeuvre, one that could provide a sense of his prose and worldview without the risk of alienation inherent in a direct plunge into the sexual realm where he spent so much of his personal and professional life, so unabashedly.

Martin Amis, surely one of the straightest British novelists of his generation (and, incidentally, one of White's many famous Paris-frequenting friends described in Inside a Pearl), claimed that sex lies outside the reach of literature. "Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular," he argued in one much-circulated quote. "We all have our different favorites." In some contexts, he also marshaled the words of (the French, gay) Henry de Montherlant, adding that sex, like happiness, "writes white." One could hardly put it past him to have spun that observation, at one time or another, into a pun involving the name of the writer under discussion here: sex writes white; White writes sex. The idea of approaching White through a book like The Flâneur wasn't about separating his work from his sexuality, which his books in any case show to be impossible. Gay life, and specifically the gay life of a cultivated American born during the Second World War, wasn't just a subject conveniently at hand, but one central to his literary project.

The word flâneur has gained a lot of popular traction — and to a tiresome degree, I would say — over the past couple of decades, but I do wonder how many English-language readers of any generation recognized it in 2001. White defines it early on as referring to the "aimless stroller who loses himself in the crowd, who has no destination and goes wherever caprice or curiosity directs his or her steps." The term's initial popularization by Baudelaire explains some of its association with Paris, as do the qualities of the place itself: its commercial robustness, yes, but also its continuity, its interconnectedness, and its consistently "beautiful" built environment. White calls the city "a world meant to be seen by the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail." Of course, it's no longer Baudelaire's "cozy, dirty, mysterious," Paris, which was "destroyed after 1853 by one of the most massive urban renewal plans known to history, and replaced by a city of broad, strictly linear streets, unbroken façades, roundabouts radiating avenues, uniform city lighting, uniform street furniture, a complex, modern sewer system and public transportation."

No one alive remembers Paris before its Haussmannization, but some remember Paris as it was before it became the world's most most tourist-visited city. That particular quality always gave me pause enough that I traveled to a variety of other world capitals before even considering setting foot there. It seemed to me that I'd need a strategy, not just to set myself apart from the tourists, but also to keep the ambience of tourism from impinging too severely on my experience of the city. The deliberate aimlessness of the flâneur was a promising option, not least because of its diametric opposition to the general way of the tourist. "Americans are particularly ill-suited to be flâneurs," White notes, and not just in their own cities, which tend to be unaccommodating or outright hostile to that practice. "They’re good at following books outlining architectural tours of Montparnasse or at visiting scenic spots outside Paris — the Désert de Retz, which is a weird collection of follies, for instance, or Rousseau’s gardens of Ermenonville, where he meditated in a temple built to resemble a Roman ruin. But they are always driven by the urge towards self-improvement."

The true flâneur isn't looking to improve himself on his urban walks — indeed, isn't looking for anything in particular at all. In White's view, "to be gay and cruise is perhaps an extension of the flâneur’s very essence, or at least its most successful application. With one crucial difference: the flâneur’s promenades are meant to be useless, deprived of any goal beyond the pleasure of merely circulating." During his Paris years, White himself seems often to have stepped out the door with one goal very much in mind. "In the beginning I’d cruise along the Seine near the Austerlitz train station under a building that was cantilevered out over the shore on pylons. Or I'd hop over the fence and cruise the pocket park at the end of the Île St Louis, where I lived." This was early in the gay-friendly François Mitterrand administration, which for a New Yorker felt like a blessed safe haven from police raids and "roving gangs of queer-bashers." All the Seine-proximate cruisers had to worry about was periodic illumination: "When the bâteaux mouches would swing round the island, their klieg lights were so stage-set bright that we’d all break apart and try to rearrange our clothing."

That's a memorable image, and about as explicit as White gets in The Flâneur. (Even Inside a Pearl, which parades a succession of lovers numerous enough to get mildly confusing, only goes as far as referencing such encounters as that with "a young Spaniard who’d worked my nipples so hard they were still aflame.") It's perhaps more vivid if you've ridden one of the bâteaux mouches, those long, low, open-topped ferries that make their looping runs along the Seine past the maximum number of historic structures. As it happens, my wife and I took a ride on one of them toward the end of our monthlong honeymoon in Paris a couple of years ago. The short cruise was more interesting than I'd have expected such a purely touristic experience to be, banal though a fellow like White would probably find its pleasures. In Inside a Pearl, he recalls walking his "sumptuous route home" and hearing them pass, making waves on the riverbank and delivering their "running commentary in English, French, Italian, and German." On our bateau-mouche, I noted at least three additional languages — Chinese, Japanese, and even Korean — which I suppose speaks to the ever-widening tourist appeal of Paris in the quarter-century or so since White was living there.

Tourism mostly comes up in the The Flâneur's opening chapter, which offers a potted history of the titular concept. Walter Benjamin devoted much thought to what makes a flâneur, not least through negative definition: "He (or she) is not a foreign tourist eagerly tracing down the Major Sights and ticking them off a list of standard wonders," in White's gloss. "He (or she) is a Parisian in search of a private moment, not a lesson, and whereas wonders can lead to edification, they are not likely to give the viewer gooseflesh. No, it is the private Proustian touchstone — the madeleine, the tilting paving stone — that the flâneur is tracking down." White wrote a biography of Proust, who comes up throughout this book, and of Genet, who does as well. Other illuminating figures brought to the fore by the flâneur's-walk-like structure include American entertainers like Sidney Bechet and Josephine Baker; the Camondos, a prominent nineteenth-century Jewish banking family whose only remaining trace seems to be one of Paris' many obscure museums; Gustave Moreau, whose paintings White describes as grimly kitschy yet strangely enduring; and the Spanish-born Louis XX, whom monarchy-minded Legitimists consider the rightful king of France.

Though brief, the book contains a good deal of history, which in any case constitutes much or most of the appeal of Paris itself for its serious, usually affluent appreciators. White only half-laments that the city has become a "cultural backwater," with a center "too expensive to welcome young bohemians or wannabe novelists, who've all fled to Prague or Budapest, even Riga." (The famed early-to-mid-twentieth century American expatriate writers like Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and James Baldwin came to Paris for a variety of reasons, the most compelling among them being its then-cheapness.) In Inside a Pearl he writes that the city is "full of things an older person likes — books, food, museums"; in Our Paris, that everyone there "seems to be the son or granddaughter or nephew of someone famous. The famous people themselves belong to the city’s glorious past; their relatives, like Parisians in general, are living off their patrimony." Yet "the French have such an attractive civilization, dedicated to calm pleasures and general tolerance, and their taste in every domain is so sharp, so sure, that the foreigner (especially someone from chaotic, confused America) is quickly seduced into believing that if he can only become a Parisian he will at last master the art of living."

This "sneaking suspicion that maybe the French have got it right, that they have located the juste milieu," must have felt especially compelling within White's sub-milieu of ultra-cultured middle-aged gays. As would perhaps be expected, he inclines one of The Flâneur's chapters toward what we could call "gay Paris," as he deals in other parts of the book with "expat Paris," "black Paris" (or at least black American Paris), and "Jewish Paris." Yet to an extent, these are all contradictions in terms, as White acknowledges when he discusses a less-often acknowledged strengths of French civilization. "One of the great paradoxes is that France — the country that produced some of the most renowned pioneer homosexual writers of this century (Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jean Genet, Jean Cocteau and Marguerite Yourcenar, just to begin the list) — is also today the country that most vigorously rejects the very idea of gay literature," he writes. According to the official belief that "society is not a federation of special interest groups but rather an impartial state that treats each citizen — regardless of his or her gender, sexual orientation, religion or color — as an abstract, universal individual," recognizing "any subgroup of citizens is a diminishment of human equality."

France thus has writers who are black, none of whom are known as "black writers"; it has writers who are Jewish, none of whom write "Jewish novels"; and though "so many of the leading French writers of the twentieth century have written openly about their homosexuality," the "label 'gay fiction' evokes only a tired smile in Paris." This all sounds rather salutary to me, but then, it would: I'm from United States, a country driven halfway to the asylum by its own identity politics. I suspect it might also appeal to another of my countrymen who has lived in France and used it as a subject: David Sedaris, whose essays about taking language classes at the Alliance Française in Paris made me laugh harder than I'd ever laughed at anything to that point in life. (I immediately went to pre-order his forthcoming book, then tentatively titled Primates on the Seine.) Sedaris came to mind as I read Inside a Pearl, in which White references a remarkably similar Alliance Française experience of his own, right down to the strict, eccentric teacher and her jumble of cowed, unpromising students. Yet on the whole, the two men have far less in common than one might expect.

Sedaris may be a gay writer (and, come to think of it, he was probably the first one I read, or at least the first who was open about it), but he's not a Gay Writer. It wouldn't be too much to say that he's actively avoided that designation, having spoken in interviews about how he pulled his first book from imminent publication with a small gay press when he realized that route wouldn't take him to the general prominence in letters he'd envisioned. I remember reading it mentioned in another profile, long ago, that he has no interest at all in writing about sex, which has surely done its part to keep his work in the mainstream. So has the life he leads, based as it is on a decades-long monogamous relationship with a boyfriend who figures prominently in his writing. In the eighties, Sedaris once wrote, almost all the gay couples he knew "had some sort of an arrangement. Boyfriend A could sleep with someone else as long as he didn't bring him home — or as long as he did bring him home. And boyfriend B was free to do the same. It was a good setup for those who enjoyed variety and the thrill of the hunt, but to me it was just scary, and way too much work."

Edmund White, safe to say, lived for variety and the thrill of the hunt. Though always devoted, in some sense and in his own telling, to his various long-term lovers, neither he nor they seem ever to have even considered the possibility of conventional fidelity. Complexly quasi-familial domestic, financial, and travel arrangements resulted: taking both his current partner and a previous on a foreign vacation, say, while keeping also keeping the nights to himself for brief assignations amid shrubbery and under bridges. "I doubt that most women can understand how romantic anonymous sex can be," he writes in Inside a Pearl. "What men like about anonymity is that it allows free rein to any fantasy whatsoever. There are no specifics to contradict the most extravagant scenario." Though he liked to quote Camus' observation about American writers being the only ones in the world who aren't intellectuals, White did have his intellectual tendencies of his own. As such, he must also have enjoyed what I once heard Andrew Sullivan, in an interview with Tyler Cowen, frame as "the good thing about being gay": that it brings you into frequent contact with individuals of a "totally different socioeconomic group than you are through sexual and romantic attraction."

In this sense, the straight flâneur is at a disadvantage when it comes to understanding a city at all its levels. He may dream of a walk suddenly putting him face to face with the woman of his life — always, though he may not realize it, of roughly equivalent background to his own — or he may exorcise his desires in a more utilitarian fashion, with the aid of professionals. (The latter strategy, I suspect, has been fading into a thing of the past for quite some time now. In Paris, the prostitutes who stood daily in the same spots on the sidewalks and in the doorways of our neighborhood held no allure apart from that of the quaint anachronism.) No matter what, there remain swathes of society with which he never enters into intimacy of any kind. Not so the gay intellectual, a thoroughly urban figure from whose distinct vantage White looked throughout nearly 50 years of steadily published fiction, memoirs, and essays. White's life placed him well to understand this, including though it did stints in relatively bucolic regions of America and France. He was, after all, what (in a style that had become "simpler and more direct because of living in two languages") he titled his memoir on New York in the sixties and seventies: a city boy.

See also:

Lawrence Osborne, Paris Dreambook: An Unconventional Guide to the Splendor and Squalor of the City (1990)

Georges Perec, Lieux (2022)

Harold Brodkey, My Venice (1998)

Donald Richie, Tokyo: A View of the City (1999)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His latest book, published in Korean, is 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea). Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

You've almost certainly seen Saul Steinberg's 1976 New Yorker cover illustration View of the World from 9th Avenue, whether or not you read the New Yorker — and indeed, whether or not you were alive in 1976. Lower Manhattan dominates the image; beyond the Hudson river, all dissolves into near-abstraction, labeled only by a handful of city, state, or country names. These are rendered in upper-case letters with the curious exception of Chicago, off by itself in a featureless corner of the patch of green meant to represent the rest of the United States of America. On the cover of the New Yorker, such an image reads as self-deprecating. (Or rather, it would read as self-deprecating if it didn't also transmit the assumption that the skewed perceptions it satirized are, on some level, justified.) When an earlier version of the same concept, which seems directly to have inspired Steinberg's rendition, appeared in the Chicago Tribune in 1922, it must have come off as more resentful. But then, it could also have been drawn in the spirit of bullishness, given that Chicago in the nineteen-twenties seemed poised to overtake New York as the dominant city of the U.S.

By the end of the forties, when the New Yorker's A. J. Liebling spent a year in Chicago, those days were over. The question of what put an end to them drives the series of articles he published in the magazine, then in book form, in 1952. The slim Chicago: The Second City is somewhat filled out by an introduction and footnotes concerned almost entirely with the reactions the original pieces drew from Chicagoans. "The letters from the visitors, and from expatriates, were almost all favorable," Liebling writes, while "those from people who were still there weren’t. The most catamountainous of all came from the suburbs; the people who wouldn’t live in the city if you gave them the place rose to its defense like fighters off peripheral air-fields in the Ruhr in 1944." Certain of the responses quoted at length exhibit the kind of articulate quasi-literacy I associate with the early twentieth century. "Is Mr. Liebling forming a 'Be Nasty to Chicago Club'???" asks one. Or perhaps he's unwittingly "endeavoring to inspire helpful people to action at the Chicago front," in which case "I should adore to board the next plane possible and be first in line to tenderly and encouragingly grasp the hand of Mr. Liebling as he staggers (I hope) backward from reading such reactionaries as this one of many of which he must be in recipience daily!"

Read more

"Can't overstate how much everyone must go see La grande bellezza," Ferdinand Addis tweeted in September of 2013. "I want to spend the rest of my life staring at Toni Servillo's forehead." At that time, he was most widely known — to the extent that he was known to the public at all — as Ferdie Addis, author of books like Opening Pandora's Box: Phrases We Borrowed From the Classics and the Stories Behind Them and I Have a Dream: The Speeches that Changed History (with Amen to That!: The Amazing Way the Bible Influences Our Everyday Language soon to be published). Though you wouldn't necessarily visit the bookstore in search of these slim volumes, you might buy one on impulse, perhaps as a gift, upon spotting it beside the checkout counter. Whatever their raison d'être, these publications put Addis in the position be offered a contact to write a history of Rome, structured out of discontinuous episodes involving famed personages and high drama for maximum popular appeal.

In the event, he didn't write that book. Or rather, that book wasn't written by Ferdie Addis, specialist in breezily explanatory collections of notable facts and quotable quotes rapidly produced for, and consumed at the same speed by, the British market. To his history of Rome Addis bought the dignity of his non-truncated given name, as well as that of a non-truncated research and writing process, which ultimately took something like seven times the yearlong period originally specified by the contract. The resulting book was convincing enough to be marketable abroad as well. When it came time to sell it in the United States, as The Eternal City: A History of Rome, Simon & Schuster insisted on calling it the work of a "master historian." Addis himself protested against that description, as he tells it in one podcast interview, perhaps because of his relative youth and inexperience, at least by the standards of the Roman history field. Or perhaps it had to do with his not being an academic: an admirable choice, to my non-academic mind, as is his use of BC and AD for dates instead of the institutionally fashionable BCE and CE.

"This book is, above all, about the ways humans have located themselves within history," Addis writes. "It is not an academic book, nor is it concerned with history as a quasi-scientific discipline. It makes no claim to abstraction, or impersonal authority. It might question the idea that any era could be 'common' to all. This is a book about people, and their experiences and prejudices and beliefs, the myths to which people have clung." Indeed, most of its chronologically ordered 22 chapters — each conveying, in keeping with the spirit of the project as the publisher originally conceived it, a clearly distinct slice of history — center on one person in particular: Ovid, Nero, Petrarch, Michelangelo, and Mussolini, to name a few of the most recognizable. The very first deals with Romulus and Remus, the mythical twins said to have founded the city of Rome after being nursed by a she-wolf on the banks of the Tiber (permanently fixed in my mind as a pixelated image, thanks to childhood hours spent playing the PC game Centurion: Defender of Rome); the last, with Federico Fellini and his film La Dolce Vita, the Rome movie of the twentieth century in the same manner that, in La grande bellezza (known in English as The Great Beauty), Paolo Sorrentino made the Rome movie of the twenty-first.

For all his appreciation of Toni Servillo's forehead, Addis has said that The Eternal City gave him the chance to get up to speed on Italian cinema, about which he'd previously known little. Whether inspired by that research or not, he seems to have developed a cinematic writing style, at least in the present-tense establishing sections that open each chapter in medias res. "A summer night," begins one such passage set in 64 AD. "Down by the foot of the Caelian hill, the darkness hangs thick in the alleyways. Sounds of a city asleep: a muffled snore; the whine of a mosquito. High overhead, a narrow crack of pale sky, framed by the black outlines of looming apartment blocks." It emerges, a few paragraphs later, that "this night something is different. There is a sudden wind blowing from the Circus, acrid and hot. And now, rounding a corner, comes sound, unexpected, of shouts, and a sick orange glow lights up the graffiti on the plaster walls even though it is long before dawn, and now there are men running out of an alley with leather buckets from the cistern and pointing and clutching absurd sponges although it is already becoming clear that the moment for sponges and buckets has passed. And somewhere, in an apartment high above, a baby has woken up and is crying, and so he should be, because Rome is burning."

There are readers literal-minded enough to ask how Addis could know that just such a scene took place, and perhaps The Eternal City is not the book for them. Much of its text deals with not just what did happen — according, at least, to the best available scholarly available — but what probably happened, or what must surely have happened. The texture is that of popular history, as is the lack of prerequisites for enjoyment: the book will satisfy those who may not have read Gibbon, but nevertheless have been idly curious about whether Nero was really fiddling while Rome burned (he did fancy himself a troubadour, though his weapon of choice was the lyre), whether spectators at the Colosseum actually decided the fate of gladiators by giving the thumbs-down (it was probably a thumbs-up), or whether Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel lying flat on scaffolding (he would've been standing). At the same time, nothing in it sounds dumbed down, and readers more than casually familiar with ancient Rome will also find themselves learning new things, not least about relatively obscure figures like the teenage emperor Elagabalus, who seems to have spent his brief reign in the early third century arranging both public worship of his preferred Arab sun god and private encounters with only the best-endowed of the empire’s gladiators.

Elagabalus also appears in Gibbon, described in a manner that could hardly have improved his image, but he looms somewhat larger over Addis' much shorter book, which devotes a greater proportion of its attention to matters visceral, from sexual scandal both aristocratic and plebeian to grisly scenes of battle and torture. This is all good fun, of course, and I now feel the temptation to step into the even more lurid realm of Steven Saylor's first century-set Roma Sub Rosa detective thrillers, the kind of literature-adjacent reading material much enriched by subject-area knowledge. The Eternal City could set any non-specialist on the road to such an understanding of Roman civilization, which feels like the book's real subject over the first third or even half of its length. Indeed, for a while there, I wondered whether it would qualify as a Book on Cities at all, despite most of the history it recounts taking place within Rome's walls. But then, civilization and city are never separate, not in general, and especially not in the case of ancient Rome. At the root of the very word civilization is the Latin civitas, after all, and even in its low eras — having been sacked yet again, say, or surpassed in wealth and population by the likes of Bologna and Genoa, to say nothing of Milan and Florence — Rome continued, in Addis' telling, to stand in a more permanent way for the entity that wouldn't yet have been considered Italy.

Much of Rome's outsized role in its cultural context owes to the presence of the Vatican, of course, but the city had already amassed a formidable weight of history well before the rise of Christianity. Even before he became the first emperor of Rome to profess that religion, Constantine could march through the city and pass countless "achievements of Rome’s glorious dead. There was the mausoleum of Augustus. Further away, on the river’s right bank, the Mausoleum of Hadrian. Down the road was Aurelian’s temple of Sol Invictus and the great concrete dome of the Pantheon." It's fairly common to hear the built environment of any reasonably mature city described as a palimpsest, and much more common to hear it about Rome. "For nearly three thousand years, Rome's rulers have been rewriting the city to their own purposes," Addis writes. "Nero built a Golden House; Titus obliterated it with his Colosseum. Constantine built a basilica over the burial ground of his defeated enemies. Colonna barons quarried ancient monuments for their fortified towers. Sixteenth-century popes hid medieval churches behind baroque façades. Nineteenth-century nationalists raised their great Altar of the Fatherland on the ancient and sacred ground of the Capitoline Hill." The palimpsest metaphor works so well not just because of its air of antiquity, but also because none of these builders, however power-mad, could ever fully overwrote the Eternal City as they'd found it.

The surrounding physical presence of centuries, even millennia, tends to impress Americans traveling in most any European capital (as it tends to be a reliable source of feelings of superiority, justified or otherwise, for Europeans themselves). To borrow a concept from Malcolm Harris, who memorably describes California as "America's America," Rome is in that sense Europe's Europe, a role much reinforced by its culminating destination of the "Grand Tour" embarked upon by aristocrats coming of age in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (Gibbon did it more than once.) Having long been fascinated by that tradition, I was pleased to see Addis discuss it in his chapter on nineteenth-century Romantics like Byron and Shelley. By their day, the Grand Tour was already not what it used to be; soon the railways would come, as would the "lawyers and brokers and manufacturers, shuffling round the sights, clutching tight their Murray Guides and their plump children." Mark Twain would later get a great deal of comedic mileage out of the Americans who succeeded them, though I do wonder whether he could manage to derive much humor from the phone-brandishing twenty-first century tourists who, as Addis sees them, "perch in flocks around the Trevi fountain and up and down the Spanish Steps, queue to go round the weedkiller-bleached wreckage of the Colosseum," and, in the Sistine Chapel, "gather like souls in limbo, peering upward for salvation while the papal security guards intone their hopeless litany: silence please; no photo; no photo."

Feelings of preemptive revulsion toward even the mental picture of such experiences have done their part to keep me from having set foot in Rome, or indeed Italy — so far, at least. I did begin casually studying the Italian language a few years ago, inspired primarily by an Italian cinema binge beginning with Roberto Rossellini's Roma città aperta (which Addis calls "perhaps the greatest dramatic expression of Italy's wartime sacrifice") and ending with yet another viewing of La grande bellezza. Reason to intensify my learning came along last spring, when my sister-in-law married a Canadian-born son of Sicilian immigrants; the wedding, I figured, would be a prime opportunity to get in some conversation practice (not that I was prepared to hear, let alone speak, the Sicilian dialect). For their honeymoon, they spent a week or so in Italy on a multi-city package trip scheduled at what I would call a breakneck pace, which required them to go to the Colosseum practically straight from the airport. What they saw was no doubt a far cry from how it would have looked on a Grand Tour, covered in wild vegetation and, ideally, illuminated by moonlight alone. Still, I'm sure the ruins of that ancient arena (which Toni Servillo's Jep Gambardella could see from his hammock) will play as central a role in my own first trip to Rome as it did in my reading of The Eternal City: the Colosseum was the point from which I looked up the walking route to every major landmark Addis mentions.

In The Eternal City’s epilogue, Addis briefly tells of his own first trip to Rome, made with a couple of friends at the age of eighteen. "We came by cargo ship from Valencia, had no money at all, no idea of anything," he writes. "That was before smartphones and data roaming, so we just wandered, three shambling boys in too-big jeans; got lost; ended up sharing two cellophane-wrapped panini on a grass verge by a traffic intersection somewhere near the Baths of Caracalla." Yet he couldn't have been quite as intellectually unprepared as he makes himself sound. In one of the aforementioned interviews, he mentions having done Latin and Greek at school; though we're of the same generation, those languages weren't even an option where I went, let alone a requirement. (I've come to believe that American schools were wrong to phase them out, and indeed to de-emphasize subjects involving large amounts of rote memorization in general.) Though my own interest in the classical world arose much later, thanks in large part to the Roman Stoic figureheads, Seneca the Younger and Marcus Aurelius, it eventually developed to the point that, when I got in my new brother-in-law's car and heard its stereo resume playing a Great Courses series on the history of the Roman Empire, I knew we'd get along just fine.

Maybe that's not terribly surprising, given that men — at least as the meme from a couple years ago had it — think about the Roman Empire every day. It surprised my wife to hear that, and even more so to hear, when she asked me, that I myself am no exception. In my defense, I have to write fairly often about matters to do with not just the Empire, but also the Republic, an even more interesting period in its own way. Bear in mind, too, that my wife is Korean, and that we live in Korea, in whose populace such thoughts are presumably much less common than in those of Western countries whose civilization plausibly descends from that of ancient Rome. (A Korean man, a librarian, with whom I discussed all this also professed not to understand why anyone would think about the Roman Empire every day, at least until he reflected upon his own love of stories of the Korean peninsula's Three Kingdoms period, which lasted from the first century BC until the seventh century AD.) A certain degree of obsession should, in any case, prove useful during however many years of preparation lie between now and my own, inevitable, Roman sojourn. Like Fellini or Sorrentino, Addis reminds us that to appreciate Rome requires cultivating a certain mindset. It's not about the ability to ignore the city's aura of thoroughgoing decay, say, or the behavior of its locals, which has been putting off foreigners since time immemorial, but rather about the ability to perceive all the more clearly the eternal qualities those things throw, ever more starkly, into contrast.

See also:

Harold Brodkey, My Venice (1998)

Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities) (1972)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His latest book, published in Korean, is 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea). Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

As you'd expect from a cultural figure who moves in the international music and art worlds — while running a record label called Todo Mundo — David Byrne travels a lot. What's more notable is that, when he arrives in each world capital that requests his presence, he gets around on a bicycle. Sometimes he rents one in the city; most of the time, he flies with a folding model in an oversized suitcase. Part of this must owe to sheer habit, since Byrne has been cycling in New York, where he lives, since the early eighties, but it also seems to take the psychological edge off frequent business travel. "Some people retreat into themselves or their hotel rooms if a place is unfamiliar, or lash out in an attempt to gain some control," he explains in Bicycle Diaries. "I myself find that the physical sensation of self-powered transport coupled with the feeling of self-control endemic to this two-wheeled situation is nicely empowering and reassuring, even if temporary, and it is enough to center me for the rest of the day."

Cycling may also be the sensorially richest way to experience a city. "I felt more connected to the life on the streets than I would have inside a car or in some form of public transport," he writes. "I could stop whenever I wanted to; it was often (very often) faster than a car or taxi for getting from point A to point B; and I didn’t have to follow any set route. The same exhilaration, as the air and street life whizzed by, happened again in each town." Byrne's experiences suggest that one can get the measure of a new city no faster than while riding a bike. That goes as much for the Copenhagens of the world as it does for the places where taking to the streets on a bicycle of one’s own volition is considered a mild form of insanity: Manila, for example, which Byrne recounts first visiting as a research trip for Here Lies Love, his disco musical about the life of Imelda Marcos.

Read more

The late Pope Francis may have been the most quotable head of the Catholic Church in living memory. His line about how "the Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth” certainly had a way of making the rounds every few years on Twitter. Another of his pointed observations on the state of the world appears as the epigraph of the first chapter of Henry Grabar's Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. "The quality of life in cities has much to do with systems of transport, which are often a source of much suffering for those who use them. Many cars, used by one or more people, circulate in cities, causing traffic congestion, raising the level of pollution, and consuming enormous quantities of non-renewable energy. This makes it necessary to build more roads and parking areas which spoil the urban landscape." The following 350 or so pages constitute an expansion on that theme, and specifically on the part about parking areas, the overabundance of which has done so much to reduce the quality of life in cities — across the world, yes, but most visibly in the United States of America.

I admit that, when Paved Paradise came out two years ago, I wondered if the world really needed another book on that subject. After all, there was already The High Cost of Free Parking, chef d'oeuvre of Donald Shoup, the UCLA urban planning professor interviewed for every single article, explainer video, and podcast about the negative effects of excessive legally mandated parking infrastructure on the built environment. I even interviewed him on my own podcast, Notebook on Cities and Culture, which I started up soon after moving to Los Angeles in the early twenty-tens. As any fan of Shoup (or "Shoupista," as they call themselves online) will tell you, his book is far more readable and entertaining than an 800-page statistic-laden tome about parking policy has any right to be. As is the work, so was the man, who continued patiently and humorously articulating his diagnosis of the problem and his recommended solutions right up until his death this past February. Given that he was in his mid-eighties, the need for a successor had presumably been clear for some time, and in any case, The High Cost of Free Parking, originally published twenty years ago, hadn't had a revision since 2011.

Paved Paradise won't supplant The High Cost of Free Parking, but then, its lack of intent to do so could hardly be more apparent. One can trace the basic difference between the two books to Grabar's being a journalist and Shoup's having been an academic. In addition to its arguments succinctly and plainly stated — over and over again, from every possible angle, and through a host of simple but vivid metaphors often having to do with junk food — The High Cost of Free Parking also offers, to those in need of them, graphs, diagrams, a good deal of quantitative research data, and even economic formulae. Paved Paradise succeeds, and impeccably, according to the rules of reportage, explaining the relevant ideas from urban policy, development, and economics to the lay reader between the personal stories of various interviewees, most of whom advocate in one way or another for a world with fewer vast, mostly empty lots and garages, whose reasonable supply of parking is efficiently allocated by market prices. This cast of characters includes Shoup, of course, but also a few other figures of whom American urbanists may have heard.

In one chapter, Grabar writes of Mark Vallianatos, a Los Angeles lawyer who gives what he calls "Forbidden City" tours on the side. "It sounded mysterious, perhaps even indecent, but it was something like the opposite: an architecture tour with a heavy dose of regulatory history." Vallianatos' tours visit Melrose Place-style "gated courts of stucco cottages grouped around grassy courtyards," "Hollywood apartment towers, with their schlocky appropriations of French châteaus or Chinese pagodas," "handsome two-story houses in the style of old Spanish missions or Cape Cods" split up into several units, "elegant, Bauhaus-inspired midrise apartment buildings," and a variety of other "quintessentially LA" structures — all of them now illegal to construct, because they lack the number of parking spaces that have since come to be required by law. Though I left Los Angeles a decade ago, I've never surrendered my fascination with the city, nor my need to understand how it's taken what shape it has. Last I returned for a visit, I invited Vallianatos out for coffee, and we discussed, among many other things, how the relatively modest fifteen-story "mixed-use" tower in Seoul in which I then lived could never be built in Los Angeles. Why? Too little parking.

To some readers, that may not sound especially objectionable. They might argue that, given that Los Angeles is, as everyone knows, a "car city," it's only natural that its ever-growing population has resulted in an ever-increasing number of automobiles, and thus an ever-worsening lack of places to park. To alleviate that condition, older building types with little space to do so must be displaced by newer building types with more of it. What Paved Paradise and The High Cost of Free Parking clarify is that the very form of the "car city" (in the particular case of Los Angeles, a city "both denser than other car-oriented cities and more car-oriented than other dense cities," as Shoup memorably puts it) hasn't resulted from the car itself, but from the assumption, hardened into law, that parking should be free. Most American cities dictate a minimum number of parking spaces that must be included in each new building, according to the use of that building. Scientific-sounding but wholly arbitrary, that number usually exceeds the number of spaces that would be occupied at the busiest imaginable moment, assuming everyone is parking in them with no charge.

Where these assumptions took hold, developers came to find that "anything between sprawl and high-density development was impossible to build because it was impossible to park" — i.e., to meet the parking requirements. "Surface parking would take up too much room; structured parking would cost too much to build." In the case of housing, "situations like this draw builders into a vicious cycle: Parking garages cost so much money that developers must raise rents. To justify high rents, developers get into an arms race to provide amenities — roof gardens, cycling studios — which add costs. And then before you know it, everything is a 'luxury' development." It's an instructive exercise to ask suburban Americans to guess what a single space in a parking garage costs to build; few will land within the range of $20,000 to $100,000 (early two-thousands dollars) quoted in The High Cost of Free Parking. Grabar describes Shoup's calculations confirming that "the annual American subsidy to parking was in the hundreds of billions of dollars," invisible but extracted nearly everywhere. "You paid for it in the rent, in the check at the restaurant, in the collection box at church. It was hidden on your receipt from Foot Locker and buried in your local tax bill," to say nothing of electricity costs and environmental damage. "But you almost never paid for it when you parked your car."

Parking requirements were a major cause — perhaps the major cause — of the much-lamented decline of the American downtown in the decades after the Second World War. In Los Angeles, in fact, they started going into effect even before the war. "At the time, they were considered an incremental approach to an urgent problem. By the millennium, however, those laws had helped give the Los Angeles Central Business District an astounding 107,000 parking spots — the highest parking garage density in the world," though with nothing much left to do for anyone who parked there. "Downtown Los Angeles had, after Chicago, the country’s greatest concentration of early-twentieth-century architecture, but the sum of the buildings was little more than a set for movies like Armageddon." Only with the passage in 1999 of the city's Adaptive Reuse Ordinance (treated extensively by both Shoup and Grabar, the latter of whom profiles one of its chief architects), which made it possible to convert those classic, hollowed-out buildings to officially "under-parked" residential uses, did it start to publicly become clear just what had been holding back the long-hoped-for downtown revival.

Los Angeles may offer a prime example of both the parking-induced death and parking-light rebirth of the American “inner city,” but I wouldn't want to give the impression that these books pick on it. Despite its reputation, it's far from the most car-dependent city in America, and in any case, even much less car-dependent cities exhibit grave parking-induced neuroses of their own. Take Grabar's hometown of New York, with its long-standing combination of free curb parking and "alternate-side" regulations that results in the city's drivers seldom getting in their cars except to briefly move them on certain mornings in compliance with the law, then park them right back again in the space they'd previously occupied. ("Free curb parking is like rent control for cars," writes Shoup, and the analogies between the strange New Yorker behaviors incentivized by both conditions draw themselves.) Despite growing up in the nineties, I never did tune in to Seinfeld, which, though shot in Los Angeles, brought an almost (but not quite) parodically heightened New York sensibility into the mainstream. Still, I've known for decades George's comparison of paying for parking to visiting a prostitute, which might as well be an articulation of foundational belief of American urban planning: "Why should I pay when, if I apply myself, maybe I can get it for free?"

That line is quoted in both The High Cost of Free Parking (a book with a wholly unexpected density of pop-culture references) and Paved Paradise. So, unsurprisingly, is the Joni Mitchell hit from which the latter takes its title — and of which, in truth, I've never been a big fan. Tom Lehrer described "Little Boxes" as "the most sanctimonious song ever written," and to my mind, "Big Yellow Taxi" isn't far out of that league, though both do make undeniable criticisms of U.S. cities. "One reason that Americans retain such nostalgia for college is that it was the only time in our lives so much was within walking distance," writes Grabar. "We take our vacations to places where we can get out of the car — Charleston, Disneyland, Manhattan, Miami Beach, Rome. Housing prices reflect the desirability of such destinations, making anything but a brief stay off-limits to all but a moneyed few." Disneyland aside, those places are all packed with cars as well, the key difference being that they haven't been deformed in accommodation of the car. That even Americans prefer such environments is reflected in the costs of those environments, obscured though that preference is by how so much of their country has been rigged to develop: "The vast subsidy for car parking was just part of the way the deck was stacked in favor of suburban life, from the mortgage interest deduction to biased lending practices to gerrymandered school districts to cheap gas and other unpriced externalities of driving."

Seoul, where I now live, hasn't been subject to the same forces. While the complaints one sometimes hears about this city's aesthetics aren't always without cause, they're never due to parking infrastructure having eaten away at its urban fabric "like moths devouring a lace wedding gown" (to use a phrase, quoted by Grabar, originally from Mark C. Childs' Parking Spaces: A Design, Implementation, and Use Manual for Architects, Planners, and Engineers). The garages I've seen here tend to be located down back streets, fairly tall but also extremely narrow because they function like storage elevators: you give the attendant your license plate number, and he calls your car down to the ground level. Seoul’s surface lots, which would hardly merit the name in America, tend to max out at four or five spaces, though some can be made to hold more than twice that many cars through creative double-parking. What makes that a viable strategy is the presence, in practically every automobile's window, of a sign bearing the owner's phone number: if you've blocked in someone who needs to get out, they simply call you and you come back out to move your car, no harm, no foul. (My first sight of those phone-number signs, at least after someone told me what they were for, drove home that I really had come to a different society.)

What Seoul lacks are parking meters. This will be a conspicuous absence to any visiting American who attempts to drive here, though for many, not a bothersome one. The everyman's abomination of the parking meter stretches nearly all the way back to its invention in the Oklahoma City of 1935, a story told by both Shoup and Graber. Yet as their books argue, the American city's path to salvation runs through its coin slot — or its credit card IC chip sensor, or some even easier payment system yet to be widely implemented. In The High Cost of Free Parking, Shoup proposes parking meter networks whose pricing changes in real time according to demand, calibrated so to keep their spaces about 85 percent full in total, so that anyone who needs to park can always do so without "cruising" (i.e., circling around and around for an opening). At the time of the book's first publication in 2005, this would have seemed an outlandish notion in most parts of the country, but it seems to have gradually caught on. Key to such schemes' public acceptance, Shoup thoroughly explains, is their use to fund improvements and services in the surrounding area. He illustrates this with a real-life tale of two neighborhoods, Westwood Village and Old Pasadena. The former, once the red hot center of young Los Angeles, had fallen into a desuetude out of which it just couldn't climb, no matter how much of itself it sacrificed to expensive garages; the latter turned from a quasi-ghost town into the liveliest part of Pasadena thanks to its installation of parking meters and local reinvestment of their revenue.

This story has since been retold in Jeff Speck's Walkable City, among other urbanist texts — including, come to think of it, the book on Los Angeles I myself have been working on for a while now. More than a decade ago, when I published online an early version of its essay on Old Pasadena, Shoup himself sent me an e-mail asking me to make sure to send him a copy of the final product as soon as it came out. That I didn't get it done in his lifetime (due in part to distraction by other cities, Seoul included) will remain a matter of some regret. But I do believe that the man will live on as a kind of patron saint of parking reform, his gospel preached by Grabar and many other public-facing acolytes. The Shoupian message is, after all, a hopeful one: the false beliefs about parking that have deadened American cities are correctable, the reforms that consequently follow are straightforward, and if implemented correctly, they'll unlocked an enormous urban potential currently buried under huge tracts of white-lined asphalt. Shoupistas everywhere can take satisfaction in knowing that he lived to see his ideas accepted by more than a few city governments and urban planning organizations. If he'd stuck around just a little longer, he'd also have witnessed the election to the papacy of Leo XIV, the first pope from Chicago: the rare American city to declare not a parking minimum, but a parking maximum.

See also:

Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) (2008)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His current projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Harold Brodkey put out his first novel The Runaway Soul at the age of 61. He did so after enjoying more than thirty years of literary notoriety, if "enjoying" be the word. Since the late nineteen-fifties, he'd been publishing only short stories and New Yorker pieces, and somewhere along the line, as the repeatedly promised full-length debut repeatedly failed to appear, his golden-boy reputation turned somehow villainous. During the first half of his career, he seems to have been regarded as a potential American Proust; during the second, as a bloviating, quasi-malevolent egoist, bent on inflicting his torturously convoluted, near-parodically self-obsessed prose on the innocent reading public. When it appeared, the 800-page-long The Runaway Soul was greeted by reviews now remembered — if, like the book itself, remembered at all — as career-endingly harsh.

Yet Brodkey's career didn't end: he wrote a second novel, and did so, in fact, in just one year. Where the not-quite-universally-savaged The Runaway Soul centers on his longtime alter-ego Wiley Silenowicz, an adopted child who grows up in nineteen-thirties St. Louis, Profane Friendship centers on Niles O'Hara, a famous novelist remembering his youth in the Venice around that same period. Though primarily set in Venice, it does fall short of being a book about it. In a contemporary London Review of Books piece, Colm Tóibín notes that "there are times when the description of Venice seems to be written by numbers," quoting the following: "February’s an alphabetical light, pale with dark shadows like lines and blotches on a page. We played in the beckoning and slightly motional, slightly vulgar, pallid and yellowish light of March."

That particular passage doesn't appear in My Venice, a short collection of Brodkey's writings on La Serenissima published posthumously in 1998. He'd died of AIDS two years earlier, an experience that had provided him material for a final series of New Yorker essays, including "A Writer in Venice," which reappears as this book's final chapter. Otherwise, My Venice consists mostly of excerpts from Profane Friendship, both the published novel and its earlier drafts. In a note at the end, editor Angela Praesent explains that the project "arose from our resistance to the innumerable revisions, deletions, and expansions of Profane Friendship that the author made as he carried out his larger vision for the novel. A plan was devised to preserve the extended descriptions of Venice that Brodkey sacrificed for the sake of the novel's overall composition."

Read more

Japan was experiencing a tourism boom even before the COVID-19 pandemic, and when that period's restrictions were lifted, the gaijin floodgates opened wider than ever. Though this seems to have been a rather mixed blessing for the Japanese, it's surely benefited Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, which had the good fortune to be published in the middle of 2022. While most of Japan's recent first-time visitors were no doubt content to put together a few Instagram stories and check the Land of the Rising Sun off their "bucket list," one imagines the more urbanism-minded among them returning home inspired to understand what they saw and experienced of the day-to-day life of Japanese cities — and of no Japanese city more than Tokyo, foreign tourists' most common starting point.

It hardly needs saying that Tokyo is unlike any capital in the West, and it doesn't closely resemble any other Asian megacity either. Sheer scale contributes something to its difference — more than 14 million people live within the city proper, and 41 million in the metro area — but more so the sheer functionality it exhibits at that scale. At every level, from its efficient train networks to its countless eateries to its well-stocked convenience stores to its ever-present bottled-drink vending machines, Tokyo appears simply to "work" in a way Westerners no longer even expect from their own cities, even without an apparent guiding intelligence overseeing the process. The reasons behind that hold out enough interest that Emergent Tokyo's co-author Joe McReynolds, an American academic with a good deal of experience in Japan, has spoken of originally having intended to write a book called How Tokyo Works.

That was before he met Jorge Almazán, a Spanish architect practicing in Japan and a professor at Tokyo's Keio University, where he runs StudioLab, "a university-based collaboration platform that works as architecture design studio and research laboratory." StudioLab itself is credited alongside Almazán on the book's cover; so, in other contexts, is Naoki Saito, another StudioLab-affilated Keio professor. Emergent Tokyo is the fruit of their collaboration, and at first one may suspect too many cooks, a common disorder in this type of visually lavish crossover academic-popular architectural-urbanistic study. But while its voice may have come out sounding somewhat depersonalized, its prose is thoroughly readable, a quality never guaranteed in this subgenre.

I've gone back and forth in my mind about whether to take to task a certain over-reliance on the word foster, which has a technically objectionable tendency to vagueness, but also a feel I simply don't like. Regardless, its preponderance is understandable given the stated goal of Almazán, McReynolds, Saito, et al.: not just to explain Tokyo's distinctive and not-formally-designed urban characteristics, but to figure out how conditions could be set up to allow similar characteristics to emerge in other world cities. They do this by isolating and examining five environments either unique to Tokyo or manifest in unique way there: yokochō alleyways, zakkyo buildings, undertrack infills, ankyo streets, and "dense low-rise neighborhoods."

Density must be among the qualities most widely and instinctively associated with Tokyo, but to foreign visitors, its low-rise neighborhoods come as more of a surprise, not least in the vastness of their sprawl. That's made especially clear by the view from the window of the Shinkansen, Japan's bullet train, which has been accused — not without reason — of turning huge swaths of the country into one big suburb of Tokyo over the past sixty years. But for most of the aforementioned 41 million greater Tokyoites, a built environment of closely packed (but not touching) one-, two-, and three-story buildings characterizes the city as they've long known it. "Although Tokyo has the image of a mega-city in the popular imagination," the authors write, "until recently high-rise buildings were few and far between."

"The majority of Tokyo’s daytime population lives in railway suburbs full of mundane apartment blocks and suburban tracts, much the same as can be found on the outskirts of many other cities." But do note the word railway: "These neighborhoods are not isolated, car-dependent suburbs. The population of these areas can easily access central Tokyo via convenient suburban railway connections." (As Taras Grescoe puts it in Straphanger's Tokyo chapter, "the real challenge is to find any development that is not transit-oriented.") And thanks to much less restrictive zoning laws than those in the United States, "even quiet residential lanes are sprinkled with idiosyncratic mom-and-pop businesses with homeowners living above them."

Despite living "next door," at least in a world-geographical sense, I haven't been to Tokyo for the better part of a decade now. This book has stoked my desire to get out there again, and not just to parts of town like Ikebukuro, Ebisu, and Shimokitazawa, but also to outer districts like Nishi-Ogikubo. There, after a ride west on the Chūō Line (that storied link to "some of the city's most cultured and bohemian residential suburbs"), one finds yanagi kōji, one of several yokochō intensely scrutinized in this book. Yokochō are "warrens of lively, micro-scale bars and restaurants centered around tiny alleys and backstreets," many of which evolved from informal clusters of black-market businesses that cropped up around train stations after the war; today, for their regulars, each one is "a third place full of third places."

If you want to visit a yokochō, the likes of TripAdvisor will gladly point you right to the most famous of them all: the Golden Gai in Shinjuku, another of Emergent Tokyo's objects of research. "The world's densest bar district," its six blocks contain more than 200 drinking establishments, most of them "highly idiosyncratic and creative" in the classic yokochō manner, "displaying the personal world of the owner through music, decoration, and other aesthetic choices." All are tiny, some with just enough room for the bartender and three or four stools. The book conveys their size with precision using not just photographs, but also numerous detailed diagrams of a selection of yokochō bars in cutaway, from the side, from above, and situated within their immediate urban contexts.

Writing as tourism in Japan was once again ramping up, the authors note that "foreigners are now as common as Japanese among Golden Gai's nighttime lanes, sparking fears that the intimate and countercultural character of the district could be lost." Thus far, their effect doesn't seem to have been devastating, thanks in part to the way a few conspicuously accessible bars lightning-rod the most undiscriminating tourists away from the rest. Regardless, in the Golden Gai or other yokochō, "the presence of foreigners who do not speak Japanese and possess only a limited understanding of Japanese social mores is often felt particularly deeply in such an intimate social environment."

Years ago, I struck up a conversation with an Englishman at a translation conference in the U.K. He told me a memorable story about the time his teenage daughter invited a friend from California to come visit her in London. Upon boarding one of those Routemaster-type double-decker buses, the Californian girl took one look at the narrow, curved stairway leading to the upper deck and said not "I've never seen that before," nor "That looks dangerous," but "Is that legal?" Versions of her remark, one of the most telling about the American mindset I could ever imagine, have no doubt been spoken by Western tourists upon first stepping into the richly atmospheric confines of a yokochō bar. And there, rhetorical though it may be, the question does have an answer: no, it's not legal, at least not in the U.S.

Many of the features documented in Emergent Tokyo have effectively been outlawed in American cities. Take zakkyo buildings, which I've long tried to describe to Westerners as "vertical streets," in that as you ascend through them, you pass an unpredictable variety of businesses. "While in most cities around the world a building's commercial uses are located on its ground floors along the street, these buildings accommodate commercial functions vertically on all levels," the authors write. "It is possible to find a restaurant, an internet café, a health clinic, a hostess club, and a language school in the same building, without any particular hierarchy or organizing principle."

Though they could hardly be more normal to a twenty-first-century Tokyoite, zakkyo buildings — and the neon signs that adorn their exteriors — have figured prominently in foreign depictions of the Japanese capital. The "emergent monument" that is the zakkyo lineup on the north side of Yasukuni Avenue has been featured in Lost in Translation, Kill Bill, and The Wolverine, suggesting that "its evocative power outstrips the few large-scale monuments, such as the Tokyo Skytree, that the city has intentionally produced." Nor were zakkyo buildings themselves the product of intention: the first generation consisted of architectural regulation-tailored "multi-tenant low-rent office buildings with a commercial ground level," which then underwent "gradual vertical colonization by incoming commercial enterprises." Simple "mixed-used" buildings have been a part of this century's much-discussed American urban revival (not least in the proliferating form of the unloved "5-over-1"), but I'm not prepared to call it a success until more commercial operations get up past the first floor.

Most U.S. cities hollowed out in the twentieth century can reflect on a more gloriously bustling urban past. But none had a canal system as elaborate as that of old Tokyo — or rather Edo, as it was then called. Much of it was filled in during Japan's own postwar modernization fervor, but certain traces remain for those who know how to see them: ankyo, for example, which are "former watercourses that have been covered over and turned into paths and roads." Usually winding and too narrow to accommodate motor vehicles, they would be considered practically useless in the context of most American cities, I suspect, and probably even looked on with suspicion for their potential to attract loiterers to the residential quarters through which they run. Even if nobody got mugged in such a tucked-away street, its presence would sooner or later generate one kind of lawsuit or another.

The public-private ambiguity of ankyo would be another source of discomfort, though in Japan it has facilitated formal and informal beautification efforts, as well as the installation of amenities uncommon on more major Tokyo streets. "The in-between status of many ankyo streets has enabled the residents who live among them to actively appropriate them for their own purposes," the authors write. "People expand their domestic realms into the small alleys (a practice sometimes referred to as afuredashi), much as one sees in the back alleys or roji of Tokyo's dense, low-rise neighborhoods." One element I associate with afuredashi is the potted plant, each and every one of which placed along an ankyo in Harajuku called Mozart-Brahms Lane as of February 2020 appears marked on a "street level analysis and visual sequence," which occupies a two-page spread.

The visual richness of Emergent Tokyo is worth underscoring. If you were to come across the book's Japanese translation, you could still learn quite a bit from it even if you can't read a word of Japanese. Not that every one of its photographs and diagrams is fully legible at a glance, especially the renderings of streets that incorporate more than one perspective in a Cubist-looking manner. (I'm sure there's a particular term for those, but I'm not yet avid enough a reader of architecture books to know it.) Not that Tokyo itself is fully legible at a glance either. Despite having been there about a dozen times over the past decade, my grasp of the city remains elementary. When I imagine the possibility of living in Japan in the future, somehow making a home in Tokyo — despite its obvious advantages — always seems far less plausible than doing so in a regional capital like Osaka or Sapporo.

Given my Italo Calvino-like preference for huge cities, Tokyo's size may not be the main reason I can't get a handle on it. Perhaps one simply has to live there, first getting to know one's chōme (the basic areal unit of a system of "mini towns," each with "its own local neighborhood associations and a cohesive character," much like the dong here in Korea), coming to understand it as a single cell within a much larger urban organism. Disquisitions on the nature of Tokyo tend to reach into other domains for their metaphors: not just biology (with particularly striking results from the Metabolist movement in Japanese architecture, which produced structures like Kurokawa Kisho's Nakagin Capsule Tower), but also chaos theory, at least when it was in vogue back in the eighties.

"Western architects and planners became enthralled with the city’s uncontrollable and fragmentary aspects, rejecting earlier modernist notions that one could ever truly control a city," the authors of Emergent Tokyo write of that era, when economic-bubble-era urban Japan was also growing like mad. "But Western writers generally don't treat Dallas or Los Angeles as exotic cities of chaos." I almost pulled a muscle raising an eyebrow at that assumption: I don't know much about Dallas, but "exotic city of chaos" practically sums up at least a couple generations of writing on Los Angeles. Regardless, being uniquely chaotic is just one of what Almazán, McReynolds and their collaborators identify as "two dominant myths perpetuated by much of the writing about Tokyo," the other being that "Tokyo is a mysterious city that can only be understood as a product of Japanese culture."

This brings to mind a lament from the plainspoken literary translator Jay Rubin's guidebook Making Sense of Japanese. Since that language's grammar doesn't absolutely require sentences to include subjects, he writes, "students are subtly encouraged to think that Japanese verbs just 'happen,' without subjects, deep within some Oriental fog." As I read through Emergent Tokyo, it became clear that the authors have taken it as a quasi-religious mission to blow that Oriental fog out of Tokyology. The text references the notion of Japanese culture having shaped the city with a surprising frequency and dismissiveness; toward the end, it comes around to the damnable nihonjinron, or works on "the theory of Japaneseness," which "can lead to a mistaken vision of Japanese cities as being mysterious, exotic, and unknowable to outsiders."

I admit to wondering, occasionally, quite how mistaken that vision is. Much or all of nihonjiron may indeed be claptrap, but what Emergent Tokyo transmits is less a determination that "Japaneseness" is not a major factor in the shaping of Japanese cities than a determination that it not be. It feels a bit like the declarations an expatriate friend of mine here in Seoul tends to make, usually after a few drinks, that there are no such things as countries or cultures. But while he always refuses to elaborate on what brought him to such an outlandish-sounding belief, this book's authors do, at one point, acknowledge a practical grounds for their position: "Pretending Tokyo is utterly different from Western cities quickly becomes an excuse to reject Tokyo's example as a comparison case or a source of practical wisdom."

This is the same phenomenon in action when a delegation from a U.S. city hall arrives in Latin America to try out a successful bus rapid transit system, heaps that system with praise, then turns right around and says, well, of course, it wouldn't work back home. I myself wrote a piece for Archinect a few years ago about how Tokyo provides the best model for Los Angeles' future development. Though its premise still seems true to me, broadly speaking, I suspect it must, in one quarter or another, have received the valid critique that I ignored the cultural dissimilarity — to put it mildly — between Los Angeles and Tokyo. A Los Angeles whose density and infrastructure even approximated Tokyo's would be an improvement on the city as it is today. But given the difference in those societies' attitudes toward the relationship between urban space and the individual, whether it would function anywhere near as well as Tokyo is another matter entirely.

On one of his early stays in Tokyo, David Sedaris simultaneously took on the formidable tasks of quitting smoking and learning the Japanese language. In a published diary entry from that time, he relates a conversation with his classmates:

I was in the school break room with Christophe-san yesterday, and the two of us got to talking about vending machines, not just the ones before us, but the ones outside as well. “Can you believe it?” he asked. “In the subway station, on the street, they just stand there, completely unmolested.”

“I know it,” I said.

Our Indonesian classmate came up, and after listening to us go on, he asked what the big deal was.

“In New York or Paris, these machines would be trashed,” I told him.

The Indonesian raised his eyebrows.

“He means destroyed,” Christophe said. “Persons would break the glass and cover everything with graffiti.”

The Indonesian student asked why, and we were hard put to explain.

“It’s something to do?” I offered.

“But you can read a newspaper,” the Indonesian said.

“Yes,” I explained, “but that wouldn’t satisfy your basic need to tear something apart.”

Eventually, he said, “Oh, OK,” the way I do when moving on seems more important than understanding. Then we all went back to class.

I reflected on our conversation after school, as I hurried down a skyway connecting two train stations. Windows flanked the moving sidewalks, and on their ledges sat potted flowers. No one had pulled the petals off. No one had thrown trash into the pots or dashed them to the floor. How different life looks when people behave themselves — the windows not barred, the walls not covered with graffiti-repellent paint. And those vending machines, right out in the open, lined up on the sidewalk like people waiting for a bus.

This, whatever it is, would be the aspect of Tokyo most difficult to replicate in other countries, even more so than all those urban train lines, yokochō, zakkyo, and ankyo. A lack of it is the reason American city-dwellers regard the spaces underneath elevated highways and train tracks, the subject of one of Emergent Tokyo's chapters, as no-go zones rather than as inviting sites of commercial and social life. What makes it possible — what fosters it, I daresay — is hardly to be found solely or even mainly in the structure of the built environment. Outside the cores of Tokyo and other major cities, the authors take care to remind us, "Japanese suburbia has the usual landscape of highways, drive-in franchises, and big-box shopping malls one sees across the world, with not a speck of exotic Japan in sight."

Yet crappy Japanese suburbia remains considerably more appealing than crappy American suburbia, a judgment confirmed by my friend and countryman Chris Arnade, who's made a career of walking twenty miles per day through the least glamorous parts of cities and countries around the world. Hardly an uncritical Japanophile, he's also written about his dissatisfactions with Japanese cities, which at some points overlap with common tourist complaints: the lack of garbage cans and benches on the street, the lackluster parks. Emergent Tokyo cites a few explanations for deficiencies of this kind — that the very concept of public space is "incompatible with Japanese society due to its Western origins," say, or that the Japanese "emphasize temporality, favoring less permanent architecture marked by periodic events and temporal change," unlike monument-oriented Westerners — only to cast them and their stench of nihonjinron aside.

Emergent Tokyo emphasizes that Tokyo continues to emerge, or at least to change, even today. In the twenty-twenties, its central struggle is between "the vast scale of the skyscraper as a triumph of economic efficiency, and the tiny scale of the dense low-rise neighborhood as a triumph of individual property rights." As an example of the former, the authors point to the now 22-year-old development Roppongi Hills, whose "isolated towers and intimidating luxury shopping spaces" stand as "a symbol of social segregation and the privatization of public space." For an example of the latter, I'd look not to a real place, but to the titular establishment of the much-loved Japanese television series Midnight Diner. Despite being fictional, that twelve-seat, mostly regular-frequented restaurant open between the hours of midnight and 7:00 A.M. could plausibly exist in the middle of Shinjuku. Considering why it couldn't elsewhere will be left as an exercise for the reader.

See also:

Donald Richie, Tokyo: A View of the City (1999)

Robert Fouser, Exploring Cities with Robert Fouser (로버트 파우저의 도시 탐구기) (2019)

In the Los Angeles Review of Books: Tokyo Junkie (Robert Whiting, 2021)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His current projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Stendhal was born and buried in France, but his tombstone describes him as a Milanese. Italo Calvino, whose life began and ended in Italy, long maintained that he wanted "New Yorker" engraved on his tombstone. Stendhal may only have lived in Milan for seven years, but that was considerably more time than Calvino's longest stretch in New York, four months of a six-month trip to the United States sponsored by the Ford Foundation in 1959 and 1960. Though he did make an effort to see the country from the Midwest to California and back around to the South, he felt most at home in New York, "a place which is neither exactly America nor exactly Europe, which gives you a burst of extraordinary energy, which you immediately feel you know like the back of your hand, as though you had always lived here."

This passage comes from Martin McLaughlin's English translation of Calvino's "American Diary," which is included in the collection Hermit in Paris. So is an interview conducted in 1985, the last year of Calvino's life, by the scholar Maria Corti. "Every time I go to New York I find it more beautiful and closer to the shape of an ideal city," he tells her. "It may also be the fact that it is a geometric, crystalline city, without a past, without depth, apparently without secrets; therefore it is the city which intimidates me least, the city which I can have the illusion of possessing in my mind, of being able to think about in its entirety all in the same instant." This could almost be a passage from his most famous book — and perhaps the most famous modern Italian book — Le città invisibili, which had come out in 1972.

Invisible Cities, William Weaver's English version, was published two years later. (An intriguing figure in his own right, Weaver may be even better known for his translation of The Name of the Rose, whose success paid for an addition to his Tuscan villa he called the "Eco chamber." It was a different time.) That was the form in which I first came to know the book, and until recently, it was the only form in which I knew it. But having lately found the motivation to work on my Italian, a language on which I'd long dragged my feet, I figured I could hardly do better for reading material than the original Le città invisibili, given its short length, its fragmentary construction that allows for reading practically at random, and — above all — its alignment with my own interest in cities.

Read more

If you want to learn a language, move to New York. It doesn't really matter what language you want to learn: with its nearly 40-percent foreign-born population, it's now "the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world," home to over 700 of them. So writes linguist and New Yorker Ross Perlin in his book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York. If you do make such a move, you could do worse than following his example and living in Queens, since "nowhere on the planet, square mile after square mile, is more linguistically diverse." This was heartening for me to read, since I've long imagined that Queens would be my own most viable New York option, given the cost of Manhattan and Brooklyn. I still recall a good Dominican breakfast I had the one time I stayed there.

Whether I ordered that breakfast in Spanish doesn't come back to mind. Not that I would have had to go to New York to do so, Spanish being a practicable language in more than a few regions of the United States — and, in any case, not one especially relevant to Perlin's project. The core chapters of this book deal with Seke, Wakhi, Yiddish, N'Ko (technically a writing system), Nahuatl, and Lenape, some of whose names may not ring a bell even for serious linguaphiles. But linguaphiles don't come much more serious than Perlin, who in college "tried inhaling Old Norse, Uighur, Luo, Russian, and Arabic, racing like a bucket-list traveler to stamp the pages of my linguistic passport. Above all I threw myself into Mandarin, keen to go up against its proverbial difficulty," a desire that led him to a six-month immersion sojourn in Beijing.

There he discovered that China has about 300 languages apart from Mandarin, many of them officially endangered. This inspired him to return a few years later to do PhD fieldwork on Trung, spoken by fewer than 7,000 people "literally at the end of the road, on China’s remote border with Tibet and a breakaway part of Myanmar." This was a work of scholarship, but also of preservation, performed in the awareness that "a world was slipping away even faster than the words that referred to it." He's continued to fight the good fight, for Trung and a host of other languages besides, in his capacity as co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) in New York, "the only organization anywhere focused on the linguistic diversity of cities, and especially on endangered, Indigenous, and primarily oral languages."

I wouldn't say that Language City is advertisement for the ELA, nor would I say that it isn't an advertisement for the ELA, exactly. Perlin emphasizes its scrappy, near-Quixotic perseverance, and his involvement there seems to have brought him into contact with the speakers of the six particular languages he profiles in the book. Most are polyglot immigrants in a city (or rather an urbanized region, extending out to the New Jersey suburbs) of polyglot immigrants. In Perlin's New York, a single square mile contains "a Ghanaian evangelical church, a Russian banya, a florist/bar for hipsters, a Juhuri-speaking synagogue for the Jews of Azerbaijan and Daghestan, Dominican hair salons, Pakistani auto body shops, Haitian dollar-van stops, an organization of Darfuri refugees, a Cambodian Buddhist wat, an Albanian mosque, a Panamanian bar, and a restaurant where Uzbek Uber drivers swig bottles of Jameson while savoring fine kebabs."

This image appeals to me, not least in its promise of the world in microcosm, something writers have been trying to see in New York and certain other world capitals for at least a century. Perlin cites the intriguing example of Around the World in New York, whose author Konrad Bercovici ("himself a polyglot Romanian Jewish immigrant") delivers a paean to a city in which residents belonging to the same foreign culture not only "live in the same neighborhood, but they lead the same lives, sing their own songs, and speak their own tongue." This may have been on the wishful side even at the time, but the very year Bercovici's book was published, the national-origins quotas and other restrictions of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 effectively put an end to the booming immigrant influx of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth.

"Cut off from the source, languages and cultures withered in an atmosphere that increasingly promoted assimilation to white American norms, allowing at most for pride in certain countries, provided they were on friendly terms with the United States," Perlin writes. By 1970, New York's foreign-born population was less than 20 percent of the total. (How this shaped New York movies of the seventies, by far that city's most vital cinematic decade, is a subject for another study.) That was a lagging indicator, the doors having been flung wide open again five years before by the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965. "Over the following half century, what had been true of European New York — not only the presence of every major group but also, disproportionately, of certain linguistic minorities — would become true of Latin American New York, Asian New York, Caribbean New York, and African New York."

The modern Babel that resulted, host to many languages and even some on the verge of extinction, is also, in Perlin's view, now existentially threatened itself. He gestures toward the "fiercely anti-immigrant politics" behind "the rise of Donald Trump, a Queens-born grandson of immigrants whose administration tried a host of measures, including over four hundred executive orders, to roll back the world that 1965 made." Though Language City was published before the 2024 presidential election, Perlin writes its conclusion as if steeling himself for the very outcome he fears, or at least for a continuation of its underlying sociopolitical trends. He may believe in "language justice," which regards provisions like "phone tree or touch screen options that start by asking your language" as something close to a human right, but the stripe of Americans who react apoplectically when asked to "press one for English" seems to be in the ascendant.

Not that those Americans are, in the main, New Yorkers themselves. In a footnote, Perlin quotes historian Thomas Bender's observation that "the outlook associated with New York's cosmopolitan experience has been unable to establish itself as an American standard." In every respect, New York is an exceptional American city, not an exemplary one, wield though it does outsized national influence as a media capital. Though I haven't lived in the U.S. for some time now, I don't think I'm wrong in sensing a certain superciliousness in the New York-centered media's coverage of phenomena like the recent controversy over the high volume of Haitian immigration into the small town of Springfield, Ohio. Oh, those benighted non-cosmopolitans getting worked up over a few desperate, hardworking new arrivals, if not in Springfield itself then twisting the story to their xenophobic purposes elsewhere — don't they know they're living in a nation of immigrants?

As I've often found myself explaining here in Korea, the conception of the U.S. as a "nation of immigrants" is held rather more dear in the wider world than in the U.S. itself. Ask a cross-section of Americans to list the defining characteristics their country, and I'd wager that few, even among the non-Trump-voters, would include its immigration policy in their top ten. As for the Trump-voters, I hesitate to ascribe whatever anti-immigration sentiments they harbor to pure bigotry. "Trumpism" may be too incoherent to define as an ideology, but it does seem clear that its popularity derives at least in part from what I once read memorably described as frustration with the U.S.' entanglements beyond its borders — ingress of apparently unassimilable immigrants, yes, but also prolonged foreign wars and unfavorable (or seemingly unfavorable) trade deals — given that things don't feel like they're going particularly well at home.

Regarding one's own country as "of immigrants" isn't an idea that can gain much traction on ordinary thought. Nor are the precepts of what Perlin calls "radical linguistics," or indeed of non-radical linguistics: that "all languages are cognitively and communicatively equal," or that "no language as used by a native speaker is in any way inferior, let alone broken." If linguistics refuses to distinguish between good and bad language, I've often joked, then so much the worse for linguistics. Yet it isn't hard to understand the intellectual load such assumptions bear, even if they do occasionally lead their believers to waste their time in bitter prescriptivist-descriptivist clashes (in which the prescriptivists often turn out to be phantoms conjured up in a fury of descriptivist self-justification), excuse even the most brazen sloppiness as "semantic drift," or lavish hyperbolic-sounding praise on any language or language-related practice that appears minor, powerless, or oppressed.

If I give linguistics a hard time, it's only because I'm interested in language. Indeed, it would be hard for me not to like Perlin's book, though language interests me from a different angle than it does him. In his academic field, he's made accomplishments that I'd never even dream of attempting, and nobody could accuse him of conducting his career from his armchair. Not only does he put in the hours with his subjects in New York, he also takes some of them all the way back to their homelands, where he shoots the videos of locals speaking their language (or languages) that end up on ELA's Youtube channel. These places, economically agricultural and geographically remote even within Nepal, Tajikistan, or Ontario, don't appear to have much of a future; one the five Seke-speaking villages in existence seems mostly to have emigrated to a single apartment building in Flatbush.

It occurs to me that, on the list of factors that put a language at risk of endangerment, not having developed an urban civilization must come high. Perlin offers an approximate figure of 7,000 languages currently spoken in the world, adding that "up to half are likely to disappear over the next few centuries"; none of the languages in that unfortunate half, I would venture, is the lingua franca of any world capital. Having cultivated my own interests in language and cities at about the same time — and consequently being unable to separate one from the other — I've never really been able to get exercised about the prospect of language extinction per se. When the news breaks that some last native speaker or other has died, I'd hardly say that I like it, but nor does it keep me up at night.

Aside from the Korean I speak every day, most of my linguistic interest has been drawn by the likes of French, Spanish, and Mandarin: "killer languages," as Perlin mentions they're sometimes called. Add to that my study of Japanese and Latin, and I would seem to have a taste for the imperial, or at least the formerly imperial. Given that, one might imagine me welcoming the prospect of my native English overtaking the whole world, when nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it pleases very much indeed to read Perlin report that, in Queens, "English is a vital lingua franca, not a linguistic overlord," and I even take a kind of pleasure in his prediction that "someday English, too, will be down to its last speaker" — surprising for a writer who primarily uses English, I admit, but then, language inspires complex and contradictory feelings.

When I moved to Los Angeles, the first major city in which I'd lived as an adult, the choice had much to with the languages I could hear and speak there. Indeed, holding "in its suburban sprawl dozens of Indigenous languages of the Americas, together with a unique linguistic assemblage from the Asia-Pacific," it could easily inspire its own Language City. ("Welcome to Los Angeles, the City That's a World in Itself," said a banner I remember hanging at LAX, an example of unusually plausible boosterism.) But as Perlin sees it, "cities depend on diversity but swallow it up and spit out a monoculture. Without continuous infusions of new speakers, few immigrant languages typically make it beyond the third generation": tantamount, I would say, to total cultural loss. Could New York could become "a 'Babel in reverse' metabolizing the languages and cultures of the world until none are left"?

Maybe so, assuming everyone moves to New York, as Perlin's interviewees can give the impression that everyone wants to. (This flatters the American delusion of universal desire to live in the U.S. — which, like most American delusions, has a basis in fact.) Ibrahima, the middle-aged Guinean promoter of N'Ko script recalls his days of longing, shopping for James Brown and Michael Jackson tapes while working in Saudi Arabia; possessed of "the strength of a hundred inspiring TED talks," Husniya, the thirty-something Tajik woman with whom Perlin works on Wakhi dreams of going on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. It's dispiriting when people from distant lands turn out to revere American popular culture of this kind, especially since Perlin underscores their intelligence. (English is the would-be Ellen guest's ninth language.) One can't help but ponder the severity of the brain drain that must be afflicting the places from which they came.

"They’re trying to forget it, because they don’t need it," Husniya says of her Wakhi-speaking compatriots. "But now someone in the U.S. is learning that? It’s like they must have nothing else to do!" Perlin's other interviewees display their own attitudes of tempest-tossed immigrant pragmatism, now slightly tempered by having come to value their native tongues after settling in New York. (The non-immigrant exception is Karen, a speaker of the Native American Lenape language who commutes from Ontario to Manhattan to teach it.) Some even bring family over, with varying results: Husniya's grandmother is "disgusted by all the food except cheeseburgers and fries" and "just wants get back to the apartment and watch the new fifty-five-inch TV with all the Russian channels." Nearly everyone can easily get media from back home, a theoretical positive for language preservation, but one that certainly complicates the process we once knew as assimilation.

The current rate of language loss, according to the Catalogue of Endangered Languages, is one every three months. It could be slowed by encouraging New York to become the city Perlin imagines, "where there is space for smaller languages to thrive in homes and community contexts. Where speakers of every language have access to the information and interpretation they need. Where multilingualism is a priority, and everyone has the options and resources to maintain and develop their ancestral and community languages, not to mention learning new ones." But it could also be slowed by encouraging the development of prosperous centers of urban civilization in as many different linguistic territories of the world as possible. Perlin quotes the old line, Yiddish in origin, about how a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. But what any language really needs to ensure its survival is its own New York.

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His current projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Orhan Pamuk has spent almost all of his 72 years in Istanbul. That may not be especially rare for a Turk, but it's somewhat more surprising for one who happens to be an internationally acclaimed novelist, not to mention a Nobel laureate. When he was growing up, as he tells it in Istanbul: Memories and the City, his older brother was the real achiever. Şevket Pamuk went on to become a economist, educated at Yale and Berkeley, who throughout his career has year held positions at universities like Penn, Villanova, and Princeton, with more recent stints at the London School of Economics and Harvard. As for the younger of the two, "apart from three years in New York, Orhan Pamuk has spent all his life in the same streets and district of Istanbul, and he now lives in the building where he was raised."

I quote from the bio on his official web site, which one might expect to end by saying he's now an emeritus at, say, UC Irvine. That seems to be part of the deal for those who rise sufficiently high up in the realm of "world literature," on whose top tier Pamuk presumably sits. But he's done things his own way: "I've never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets, and neighborhoods of my childhood," he writes in the first chapter of this book, which was first published in 2003, before his New York sojourn. (Maureen Freely's English translation came out two years later.) "We live in an age defined by mass migration and creative immigrants, so l am sometimes hard-pressed to explain why I've stayed, not only in the same place but in the same building." The rest of the text constitutes that explanation, more or less.

Istanbul is a book about the eponymous city, but it's also an autobiography. Any attempt Pamuk might make at the former would also be the latter, it seems, and vice versa. Moreover, it's a book about civilization, though it presents Turkish civilization per se as something of a construct, evoked mainly to shore up the modernization project that, amid Ottoman ruins, created the Turkish Republic we know today. "Great as the desire to Westernize and modernize may have been, the more desperate wish was probably to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire," he writes. "But as nothing, Western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to Westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine, otherwise glad of republican progress, to furnish their houses like museums."

Read more

If you've never visited Austin, Texas, it's probably too late to do so now. That, in any case, is the impression I've received over the past fifteen years, during which time my interest in the city has greatly diminished. Word has long circulated that Austin is "over," but until now, there hasn't been a book declaring quite how over it is. Just this month, that book arrived: Lost in Austin: The Evolution of an American City, by a British reporter named Alex Hannaford. Enamored with the drifting, breakfast taco-fueled bohemianism of Texas capital since a road trip in 1999, Hannaford made regular visits thereafter, meeting the woman who would become his wife at South by Southwest in 2003. He put down down roots in what seemed like an ideal adopted hometown, and even started a family there. But within a couple of decades, he'd pulled those roots up.

What made Austin intolerable for Hannaford turns out to be the progression of trends that had long preceded his arrival. He'd much preferred the nearly year-round sunshine to the long stretches of unrelieved gray back in London, but eventually the climate became too hot to enjoy the local outdoor-activity culture as often as he once did. A spike in school shootings inspired fresh reservations about Texas' rate of gun ownership. The latest "tech boom," a successor of the one driven by the arrival of Dell Computer and the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation in the early eighties, brought Tesla, Apple, and Google to town, among many other smaller players, provoking real-estate bidding wars and waves of gentrification. And the increasing difficulty of keeping concert venues in business had made ever hollower Austin's brand of being "the Live Music Capital of the World®."

One might diagnose a larger failure to Keep Austin Weird, in the words of another, less formal slogan — and one the level-headed Hannaford also considers so much marketing. "It's true that a cross-dressing homeless man once ran for mayor three times," he writes. "And it’s true that every Sunday between 4:00 and 8:00 p.m. at the Little Longhorn Saloon you can still place your bets on which bingo numbers a chicken sitting on a platform above the table will shit on between the grilles (it’s called 'chicken shit bingo' for a reason). And we always saw some shirtless, thong-wearing guy cycling around downtown with a cat on his shoulder, but I don’t believe Austin has ever really been a weird city — just that it was, at least until recently, affordable enough for some really eccentric people to live there."

I have no more direct point of reference for Austin eccentricity than Slacker, the film whose success turned Richard Linklater into a major filmmaker. Shot in 1989, it "managed to perfectly capture Austin at a moment in time. It follows a ragtag bunch of misfits over the course of one day as they opt out of mainstream society. There are the philosophical grad students who pontificate over coffee and pastries, the hipster at tempting to sell what she insists is Madonna’s pap smear, and a conspiracy peddler who clutches a tall glass of iced coffee as he tags along with a student clearly uninterested in his ramblings." Hannaford doesn't say whether he feels any regret about not having experienced that particular moment himself, but every time I watch Slacker — which happens every decade or so, with greater appreciation of its rambling artistry each time — I certainly do.

For all my desire to step though the screen into it, the Austin of Slacker hardly looks like a city I, or anyone describable as an urbanist, would much enjoy. The streets Linklater shows exhibit a suburban density at the very highest, and the transit system seems to amount to a single taxicab in which an early scene plays out. But then, apart from a few rides given by one character to another, the chained-conversation structure of the film is built around movement on foot. Unmotivated though they may be, these slackers walk almost everywhere they go, mainly bookstores, coffee shops, and restaurants. Whenever I watch one evening scene, in which a few friends smoke and chat over a tableful of beer bottles and plates of half-eaten Tex-Mex, I feel as if I'm receiving a precious glimpse of a lost civilization.

Convinced to check out a show by young smooth-talker who claims to be on its guest list, these young women take the film into the realm of Austin's live music. A few character changes (and one Fisher-Price Pixelvision camcorder sequence) later, the scene is the Continental Club, still extant on South Congress Avenue. The act onstage has drawn only a handful of attendees, which, according to Linklater's commentary track, would register to a true eighties Austinite as not just a familiar vibe but also a deliberate joke: the band in question, a noise-rock outfit called Ed Hall, was enough of a local phenomenon to fill such a venue easily. They play a song "about Austin — like, having missed the boat. Whenever you're in any town, it's like this: 'Oh, you missed it. Before you got here, there was all this cool stuff going on, and now there's nothin' going on.'"

Linklater goes on to say that he "always resented that attitude, and never wanted to be like that myself. I think Austin's better now than it was. At this point in history, really, nothing was going on." Given that Linklater recorded the commentary track in 2004, Hannaford may actually agree with this specific claim, having settled in the city himself not long before. "There's a saying around here that the last day Austin was perfect was the day you moved to town," he writes. "It's certainly true today, but it's been true pretty much since the city was founded." This perception is also common in expatriate circles: it didn't surprise me to hear American here in Seoul who first came to Korea as a missionary say that, when he first arrived in the seventies, people were telling him he really ought to have come in the sixties.

Hannaford shows awareness of the most predictable potential criticism of his book: that he himself is just another transplant to Austin convinced that he caught the tail end of its last golden age. His rebuttal, simplified but not excessively so, is that it's different this time: "Perhaps the changes that Austin has undergone in the last two decades have been so profound, so expansive, that it's become a place only the rich can afford to move to; and perhaps that spark — that magic fairy dust that was sprinkled on the city by the very folks who can no longer afford to call it home — has gone forever." As he frames it, the city has about as much chance of getting less expensive, and thus less hostile to not-conventionally-ambitious eccentricity (if not out-and-out weirdness), as it does it does of getting less hot.

Another, slightly less obvious objection is that the process that has produced the Austin of today is also known as success. To take a more straightforwardly libertarian tack than I instinctively would: real-estate prices have increased because Austin has become more desirable, the architectural style (and scale) has changed in logical response to that demand, and the number of live music venues has decreased because Austinites no longer value them as much as other possible uses of urban space. On this subject, Hannaford quotes an unexpected source: a fellow Brit named Kevin Ashton, who's most widely known for having come up with the concept "Internet of Things" (and the even more dubious "smart city"). "Kevin reckons if we insist on having an unregulated market where everything goes to the highest bidder, we’re going to see a Starbucks on every corner, and that’ll happen, he says, 'because everybody buys fucking Starbucks.'"

"Saying 'I used to love Joe's coffee shop that my friend Joe ran but it's now a Starbucks' is privileged hand-wringing at its finest," Ashton says. A better way to mitigate the effects of gentrification, Hannaford writes, would be to figure out how not to have to "push certain people into longer and longer commutes, into neighborhoods that will be food deserts until they flip too and become gentrified." This could be accomplished by allowing for taller and denser construction, for which he doesn't seem to advocate, while also building a decent rapid-transit system, a goal of which he writes more approvingly, even as he takes a dim view of its prospects. The sole rail line in service (which is still one more than there was in the Slacker days) "doesn’t go to the university. It doesn’t go to the airport. It doesn’t serve south Austin. Or east Austin. Or west."

In 2020, Austin voters approved a fairly ambitious $7 billion expansion of the city's bus and rail network, which was scaled down severely within a couple of years due to the fast-increasing cost of acquiring the necessary land. In other words, "Austin’s growth and crazy real estate market meant that a plan to fix one of the very problems caused by that growth was being stymied by that growth, which had caused costs to escalate." This is the kind of passage Hannaford can point to if accused of opposing tech-driven growth per se, to which medium-sized cites have few apparent alternatives besides Rust Belt-style decay. What he opposes is growth at excessive speed: "A city can change and develop, but the consequences of rapid growth are dire. To grow so fast makes a city unaffordable, and the real thing you lose in a city growing too fast is its people."

Like most of the clichés I instinctively ridicule, that a city is ultimately its people has real truth to it. And it's no doubt also true that Austin, at least to the minds of some who preferred it in earlier times, has been invaded by the wrong people. Hannaford conveys more of Ashton's argument: "If enough people shop at the Walmart that apparently nobody wanted in the neighborhood in the first place, he says it’s going to stay there. What we’re really saying is we don’t want a place for those people to go." Though they probably aren't Walmart shoppers, Joe Rogan and Elon Musk have also relocated their operations from southern California to Austin; both are named in the book — and indeed, given a chapter title — as representative figures of the undesirable changes foisted on the city in recent years.

Rogan and Musk have also become bêtes noires of mainstream liberal American journalism, whose hectoring institutional voice occasionally manifests in Hannaford's prose. This doesn't bother me so much ideologically as aesthetically: the homogenization of American cities makes them not only "generic" and "soulless," but "less diverse and vibrant." The principles of Texan-style libertarian conservatism, underscored by the polar vortex of 2021, held that "government shouldn’t interfere. Freedom is paramount. You’re on your own. Except, of course, when it comes to women and what they wanted to do with their bodies." Climate change "and ensuing extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, and wildfires, while affecting all of us, disproportionately impact marginalized communities." I'm reminded of how P. J. O'Rourke once summed up the perspective of NPR: "World to end — poor and minorities hardest hit."

I should reiterate here that Hannaford is British. After arriving in Austin to stay, he found that the kind of freak-show reportage "that illustrated how Americans and the British were two cultures separated by a common language seemed to land with editors back home: gun culture, executions, the border." But he sounds as if, like certain of his countrymen who emigrate to the U.S., he eventually went native and then some. His prose is riddled with Americanisms, including frequent references to "folks" and people or communities "of color," and even the occasional mention of a "bougie" grocery store or "impactful" satirical protest. But he also re-identifies himself with the the old country when criticizing Austin's apparent indifference to its built heritage: "We preserve old buildings not just as reminders of a city’s past but to help establish the character of a place — some permanence amid rapid cultural change."

Austin's newer buildings "look like they were built in a rush by contractors on a budget and architects without taste." So writes a relatively recent arrival in the city, a social-media personality called David Perell who styles himself as "The Writing Guy." (Theoretically, his advice should interest me, though from what I've seen, it tends to be of the "tell readers exactly why they should care within the first seven words" variety.) On South Congress Avenue, as he describes it, "you see the sterile, globalist, and hyper-contemporary aesthetic that defines so much of modern urban architecture. You have the same brands that you see in every major American city too: Equinox, Nike, Everlane, Alo, Lululemon, Allbirds, Sweetgreen, Warby Parker, and SOHO house — all of which are foreign to Austin’s native culture (seeing these brands in order is like a game of Millennial brand bingo)."

Though Hannaford would probably regard Perell as one of the tech-adjacent Johnnies-come-lately whose arrival signaled Austin's downfall, here the two agree. (Hannaford laments the transition of its urban persona from "a hippie in flip-flops chowing down on Tex-Mex watching a blues band in some dive bar to a guy in a pressed shirt, Patagonia vest, and Allbirds sneakers eating Japanese-barbecue fusion in an air-conditioned new-build.") Perell, however, comes off as unbothered by the presence of Tesla, Apple, and Google, and even a local "passionate cadre of Bitcoiners." He also looks askance at the inistence that the city on the whole has declined: "Though most of the longtime locals I meet say that Austin used to be better, they cite different years as Austin’s peak — usually the first five years they lived here. I’m not sure what to make of this, but it makes me skeptical of this-city-used-to-be-better claims."

Delivered, executive-summary-style, in the very first line, Perell's verdict on Austin is that it's "a mediocre city, but a great place to live." Apart from an observation about how it combines the ambitions of a larger city with the "long time horizons" of a smaller one, none of the qualities he mentions thereafter really intrigue me. There's certainly nothing to equal Hannaford's memories of his early Austin experiences with his wife: "Shannon and I would meet friends at Pace Bend Park out on the lake, where we’d take turns launching ourselves into the cool water from the cliffs, or laze around in floats, chatting and drinking beer. By early evening we were back downtown picking up cheap Tex-Mex to eat at my condo, barhopping on Sixth Street, or watching alt-country shows at the Continental Club. Days bled into one another. Mornings began with rocket fuel coffee from quirky cafés."

Hannaford gives a convincing impression that, fifteen-odd years after Linklater captured it, the Austin of Slacker still existed — and an equally convincing one that it has now vanished, never to return. Still, revisiting the film after reading Lost in Austin, it's hard to ignore its reflections of phenomena Hannaford cites as contributing to the city's degradation, from the peripatetic conspiracy-theorist's remarks on the worsening heat to the gun-toting young men (who, admittedly, have their own notable real-life precedent) to the Ron Paul campaign advertisement on the side of a truck. Even the heavy-metal dude toward the very end, rambling profanely and incoherently from a loudspeaker mounted on his slow-moving car, differs only in the technology he uses from the bien-pensant view of the average "Intellectual Dark Web" podcaster.

Linklater himself has admitted that the sample of Austin presented in Slacker isn't representative, either geographically or socially. I was reminded of this when I looked up the Google Street View of one of the intersections Hannaford mentions, that of Twelfth and Chicon Streets, near a soul-food joint he selects to represent the humble local institution in the crosshairs of gentrification. Having heard Austin described many times as a "city that feels like a small town" (which, in accordance with a common American prejudice, isn't meant as a criticism), I knew it wouldn't look like Manhattan. Still, I was unprepared to see a cleaner, more orderly version of the outskirts of a middle-tier Third World city — though that's slightly unfair to middle-tier Third World cities, which don't tend to give over large swathes of their blocks to surface parking lots.

I wonder if that comparison ever occurred to Hannaford, a former resident of both Lagos and Hong Kong whose whose worldliness extends far beyond the transatlantic. He does portray east Austin, in which Twelfth and Chicon is located, as a neglected "historically Black" (there, again, the NPR-ish phrasing) region of the city. But even so, I wondered, could this really be the same Austin everyone's been talking about? Late in the book, Hannaford quotes a local entrepreneur named Fred Schmidt as invoking "tons of really wonderful next-tier cities — new Austins waiting to be discovered," and some of them do a little better on the Street View test. Take, for instance, Sacramento, California, which, like Austin, is a state capital with a public university (albeit a much less well-regarded one), solid coffee shops, and for those who know where to look, high-quality tacos (if not usually of the breakfast variety).

Not that I imagine Sacramento developing the kind of culture that won over Hannaford on his road trip back in 1999. Even I next manage to take an American road trip of my own — about which I've come fantasize much more vividly since leaving the U.S. — I'll be tempted to stop in Austin in general, and Cisco's on Sixth Street in particular. "It's easy, when you're midway through your third cup of black coffee and your belly's full of migas, to look around this room of mismatched furniture and photographs of celebrities and politicians who regularly paid it a visit over the years and forget Austin's changed much at all," Hannaford writes of that beloved eatery. With no direct experience of how things used to be, I'd have no need to forget. I wouldn't fear Austin letting me down; I'd fear that I'd like it.

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His current projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, or on Facebook.

Every so often on the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, discourse erupts about the relative merits of Europe versus the United States. The arguments always seem to come down to the value of individual earning potential versus overall quality of life. "Amerifats" always to point to the large salaries earned in their country by software developers — or even Buc-ee's car-wash managers — and "Europoors" always counter that the high cost of living in the U.S. cancels out the difference in pay. The latter aren't wrong about everything being more expensive in America, in part due to a host of hidden costs of which they probably aren't even aware. But the former have a point about the almost comical difference between a decent American salary and its equivalent in even the most prominent European countries. There's really no comparison; the U.S. wins on that score.

In the eternal struggle between U.S. and Europe, I chose Asia. Yet if I couldn't live here, I'd certainly look into Europe first. That has to do in part with my not belonging to a highly compensated profession in any region of the world, but also because I find it increasingly difficult to stomach the prospect of living in an American city again. Los Angeles remains one of my main subjects of interest, but after nearly a decade of living in Seoul, where nobody demands money from you on the street and where every subway station has usable restrooms, I suspect I'd struggle to reacclimate. It doesn't help that the cost of rent, restaurants and the like, already burdensome when I left America, have since risen to what I've heard is the very edge of tolerability (to say nothing of other recent undesirable phenomena, like the proliferation of Fentanyl addicts).

Though I've defended U.S. cities in the past (even the likes of Oklahoma City struck me as pretty cool, in its way), I have to admit that they don't measure up to the global standard. Speaking recently at a retrospective of his films in New York, the Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To wondered aloud how a rich city could look so poor. One could always respond by insisting on the inseparability of its apparent dysfunction and its distinctive vitality — I've made similar arguments about Los Angeles — but the fact remains that neither New York nor any other American city has achieved the level of density that generates that kind of vitality while also remaining satisfactorily accessible, functional, and orderly. In the world's richest country, this obviously doesn't owe to a lack of resources; the problem must lie elsewhere, perhaps in the American attitude toward cities themselves.

Read more

Stewart Brand isn't the first public intellectual one associates with cities. In fact, he's probably closer on the grand map of cultural phenomena to the rejection of cities, specifically the post-hippie ethos-impulse to go back to the land, albeit equipped with the highest possible technology. This owes, as anyone who's heard Brand's name understands, to his having founded the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968. As it happens, I wrote about that publication's online archive for Open Culture last year, and in so doing lost a fair few hours browsing its digitized issues. The sheer quantity of both curatorial attention and sheer information that went into them makes them into a kind of time machine. Not having been around to experience "the Sixties," however broadly defined, I felt as if, like Firesign Theatre albums, Whole Earth catalogs brought me as close as I'll ever get to doing so.

I was, however, around to experience the nineties, when the Zeitgeist turned Brand's way again. His long enthusiasm for the personal computer (a term said, incredibly, to be his own coinage) had been vindicated and then some by the wide adoption of the internet. But in a grander sense, the technologically astute West Coast bohemians of the sixties had, by that point, taken the helm of the culture, or at least risen to prominence within it. In 1996, when Brand and computer scientist Danny Hillis established the Long Now Foundation, with its 10,000-year clock, people took notice. Appreciative attention had also been paid, two years earlier, to Brand's book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built, a title that piqued my curiosity every time I ran across it over the decades. Only now, thirty years after its publication, have I actually read it.

For several reasons, that delay was to the good. I now possess the "lived experience," as the kids say, of what thirty years feels like, and in How Buildings Learn, that practically constitutes a basic unit of time. I've also become organically familiar with the work of figures in Brand's cultural orbit: Brian Eno, for instance, over whose published diary A Year with Swollen Appendices I obsessed in high school even before having heard many of his albums. Brand is a major presence in A Year with Swollen Appendices, and Eno credits his e-mailed words of wisdom ("Why don't you assume you've written your book already — and all you have to do now is find it?") with getting him started writing it. Eno, in turn, was one of the "muses" Brand selected to preside over the project of How Buildings learn, alongside Hillis and an architect named William Rawn.

Had I also read How Buildings Learn back in high school, I wouldn't have been to practically any of the places where Brand finds examples of learning and non-learning buildings. (He does write about Sausalito, in northern California, where he lived while working on the book and seems to live still today. I spent a few childhood years just up the road, but if I ever set foot in Sausalito proper, it didn't make a lasting impression.) Nor would I have read any of the books he references, some of whom I've at this point reviewed here on Books on Cities: Brand claims that Joel Garreau's study of new-built exurbs Edge City "reveals more of present-day American reality than any other book I can think of," and he quotes heavily enough from conversations with A Pattern Language lead author Christopher Alexander to make him practically a collaborator on certain chapters.

Much like A Pattern Language, How Buildings Learn is a book primarily concerned not with cities but individual structures, which Brand groups into three broad categories. He enthuses over cheap "Low Road" buildings "that no one cares about" for the seemingly infinite opportunities for improvisatory renovation and customization they offer their occupants. Examples include MIT's Building 20, hastily put together during World War II as a "temporary" structure but ultimately extant for 55 intellectually and technologically productive years, and a considerably less-celebrated shipyard warehouse of similar vintage in which Brand's wife once ran "an equestrian mail order catalog business." Against Low Road buildings, by their nature "successively gutted and begun anew," Brand sets the "High Road" buildings that are "successively refined" over decades, even centuries: George Washington's Mount Vernon; Thomas Jefferson's Monticello; Chatsworth, the expansive seventeenth-century estate now in the possession of the (extensively quoted) Duchess of Devonshire.

Though Brand gives these two types of building a great deal of attention for the ways in which they change over time — how they "learn" — they together constitute only a small part of the built environment. "Most Buildings have neither High Road nor Low Road virtues," he writes. "The very worst are famous new buildings, would-be famous buildings, imitation famous buildings, and imitation imitation buildings." These inflexible "No Road" structures, in his view, suffer a kind of inflicted learning disability. Target number one of his criticism here is also located on the MIT campus: the I. M. Pei-designed Wiesner building, constructed in 1985 to house the MIT Media Lab (itself the subject of Brand's previous book), with its "vast, sterile atrium" that "cuts people off from each other," its interior concrete walls that make running cable difficult, and its classrooms prematurely optimized for technologies that never caught on.

Whatever its shortcomings as a research facility, the Weisner building also looks surprisingly banal for the work of the most famous architect in the world at the time. But Brand seems to have a bone to pick with starchitecture per se, objecting particularly (and startlingly, given what one would imagine as their similarly capacious human-oriented sensibility) to the work of Richard Rogers. In the case of Lloyd's Tower in London, also from 1985, "the vaunted adaptivity in the building was high-tech and at a grandiose scale, oblivious to the individual worker and workgroup"; exteriorizing its services "in order to open interiors for flexible space planning led to attractive but expensive exterior detailing and burdensome maintenance costs." Brand makes much of a survey that revealed that three-quarters of Lloyd's employees "preferred their former building," conducted though it was only three years after the company had moved into the new one.

Even when Brand was writing How Buildings Learn, Lloyd's Tower had stood for less than a decade, making it still practically fresh by London standards. Since fast-tracked to Grade I listing, it seems to have become a well-respected work of architecture, if not a particularly cheap one to keep up. Brand also takes to task the somewhat longer-established Centre Pompidou in Paris, which Rogers designed in collaboration with Renzo Piano and Gianfranco Franchini. Ostensibly designed "to accommodate all manner of change," this "spectacular inside-out arts complex" has nevertheless become "an exorbitant scandal of rust and peeling paint" that testifies to the folly of exposing services. Indeed, the whole building had to close down for more than two years of renovations soon thereafter, and I only got the chance to see it myself last year because another, four-year-long closure had been postponed due the upcoming Olympics.

I quite like the Pompidou, not least for the sharp contrast it makes with the practically frozen built environment of central Paris. (Then again, I appreciate the Tour Montparnasse for the same reason.) London, too, is to my mind a more interesting city for having Lloyd's Tower. Though Brand says nothing in How Buildings Learn about the Barbican, a favorite place of mine, I suspect he wouldn't love it; he makes reference throughout the book to what he sees as concrete's inflexibility and tendency toward unattractive aging, and at one point offhandedly describes Paul Rudolph's Yale Art and Architecture building as "infamously brutalist." Contrary to the miserable accounts so often cited about such buildings, part of me believes — no doubt irrationally — that, occupying a work of brutalism, I would feel feel not inconvenienced and depressed but satisfied, even ennobled.

"The destruction of brutalist buildings is more than the destruction of a particular mode of architecture," says the critic Jonathan Meades in his documentary Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry. "It's a form of censorship of the past, a discomfiting past, by the present. It’s the revenge of a mediocre age on an age of epic grandeur." Brutalism reminds us that "we don’t measure up against those who took risks, who flew and plunged to find new ways of doing things, who were not scared to experiment, who lived lives of perpetual inquiry." Meades' priorities apparently differ from those of Brand when the latter writes that "art flouts convention. Convention became conventional because it works. Aspiring to art means aspiring to a building that almost certainly cannot work, because the old good solutions are thrown away. The roof has a dramatic new look, and it leaks dramatically."

Leaky roofs come up again and again in How Buildings Learn, whether of James Stirling's Cambridge history-faculty building, Monticello, an ill-fated memorabilia warehouse in Emeryville, or every geodesic dome ever built. "As a major propagandist for Fuller domes in my Whole Earth catalogs," Brand writes, "I can report with mixed chagrin and glee that they were a massive, total failure." For the older, wiser Brand, these domes stand (such as they've managed to) as evidence of the superiority of what he calls evolutionary design over visionary design. "Evolution is always away from known problems rather than toward imagined goals. It doesn’t seek to maximize theoretical fitness; it minimizes experienced unfitness," Brand writes. "Evolutionary forms such as vernacular building types always work better than visionary designs such as geodesic domes. They grow from experience rather than from somebody's forehead."

On one level, this line of thinking leaves itself open to charges of philistinism — charges that may not be entirely without merit. But it also expresses a highly appealing kind of methodical, incremental pragmatism, one I associate with an America yet to be infested with subdivision-developers and house-flippers. "When you proceed deliberately, mistakes don’t cascade, they instruct," Brand writes. "Low risk plus time equals high gain. This strategy treats the fundamentals of the living investment with attention and respect. The lesson of realty laced with reality is: 'Get rich slow.'" But the possibilities of evolutionary design are severely undercut by the ways in which buildings tend to be financed, as explained in some of Brand's extensive quotation of Christopher Alexander, for whom "a mortgage-bought building tends to be an over-packaged illusion of completeness that defeats any kind of incremental approach."

Better, Alexander says in the 1997 How Buildings Learn BBC television series, to use "the money you've got" to build a basic, functional structure with an intent to expand, refine, and revise it as additional resources come available over time. As much sense as this makes, it is, unfortunately, a way of building against which a variety of modern incentives and imperatives militate. "Every building leads three contradictory lives — as habitat, as property, and as component of the surrounding community," Brand writes. "Maximizing market value means becoming episodically more standard, stylish, and inspectable in order to meet the imagined desires of a potential buyer. Seeking to be anybody’s house it becomes nobody's." He actually praises the much-sneered-at Levittowns of America, which since their rapid postwar construction have become "interesting to look at; people have made additions to their houses and planted their grounds with variety and imagination."

The key factor here is time, a requirement of the evolutionary process that has produced many a beloved structure and the urban spaces they constitute. "The most admired of old buildings, such as the Gothic palazzos of Venice, are time-drenched," Brand writes. "The republic that lasted 800 years celebrated duration in its buildings by swirling together over time a kaleidoscope of periods and cultural styles all patched together in layers of mismatched fragments." The resulting impressions have inspired recent cargo-cult practices in the design of modern buildings and cities both: "American planners always take inspiration from Europe's great cities and such urban wonders as the Piazza San Marco in Venice, but they study the look, never the process." The ersatz urbanism of Los Angeles developer Rick Caruso comes to mind, though sheer lack of organic alternatives has ensured that his projects turn out to be fairly well-liked by the public.

Even leaving aside its town-square-shaped malls (which have, in any case, spread across the country), Los Angeles has long been reflexively criticized for having "no history." The charge is flimsier than it sounds: "Because it was first for so many years — it built the first freeway system, the first airport for jet airliners, the first mid-century modern baseball stadium, the first shoddy neoclassical cultural palaces — it is in many ways the oldest U.S. city," writes Los Angeles Plays Itself creator Thom Andersen in his liner notes to Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth. Some of its distinctive mid-century constructions stand still today thanks to the agitation of historical preservationists. Acknowledging that their cause amounts to a "secular religion" (which manifests in their willingness to, for example, "lie down in front of bulldozers to save a 1930s Art Deco bus station"), Brand also offers them surprisingly unqualified praise.

This same section contains some of the most straightforward acknowledgments of preservationist motivations I've ever read. "Widespread revulsion with the buildings of the last few decades has been an engine of the preservation movement worldwide," Brand writes. "Shoddy, ephemeral, crass, over-specialized, the recent buildings display a global look especially unwelcome in tradition-enriched environs." Fair enough. The architecture critic Paul Goldberger (here described simply as a preservationist) points to "our fear of what will replace buildings that are not preserved; all too often we fight to save not because what we want to save is so good but because we know that what will replace it will be no better." Brand puts the question to the reader: "Wouldn’t you rather go to school in a former firehouse, have dinner in a converted brick kiln, do your office work in a restored mansion?" Well, I don't not want to do that.

It's passages like these, I suspect, that have drawn How Buildings Learn accusations of being an elaborate but deceptively unsystematic defense of Brand's personal aesthetic preferences. One can hardly see the book any other way when reading him enumerate the renovations of his writing office, "a derelict landlocked fishing boat named the Mary Heartline" (a reference I wonder if anyone under 70 gets today); his library, "a shipping container twenty yards away"; and the Mirene, a 1912 tugboat laboriously (but, in his telling, lovingly) converted into his and his wife's residence in the Sausalito harbor. More relevant to my own interests is his description of the neighborhood surrounding that last, a place "where zoning has broken down, partly because it's on the border between city and county jurisdictions," which opened it to invasion by "illegal residential houseboats such as mine, eventually over 400 of them."

"From my door it is a short walk not only to my office but to: public storage, auto repair, boat supplies, bike supplies, office supplies, film supplies, tire service, a car- battery manufacturer, a gas station, a gym, a notary public, a supermarket, a convenience store, a deli, and seven restaurants," he writes, describing an urban scene by no means metropolitan but still surely alien in its sheer convenience to many American readers of 1994. "I visit friends in nice homes elsewhere and it feels as if they live in a desert, zoned out of a walkable way of life, stuck in a place where nothing ever changes." Ideally, in his view, a city will change gradually over time — neither paralyzed by poverty nor overwritten by "quick-buck speculation and abstract investment" — retaining and repurposing traces of its every previous stage of evolution.

"The flow of money through and around a building acts to organize that building," Brand says in the How Buildings Learn series. "Will the building be organized around the moment of sale, or the decades of use? The same goes for cities. Will they be organized around quick-buck markets and brittle theories, or around the steady accumulation of wisdom, utility, and delight?" If Brand offers a prescription for cities in this book, it's that buildings should be more like them. "Following the outrages of 'urban renewal' in the 1950s, neighborhood groups organized, took power politically, and hired the planners to work for them," he writes in an appendix. "City planning used to imitate architecture, and it failed because of that. If architecture now began to imitate city planning, it could learn to succeed better"; we could one day have "buildings that flex and mature the way cities do."

This strikes me as a fine idea, as do many in the book, though what purchase it's found in the built environment over the past thirty years is harder to determine. I also like the notion of contributing to a city's evolution — to its accumulation of "wisdom, utility, and delight" — but the prospect of owning a building feels about as within reach as that of owning the International Space Station, to say nothing of the additional costs of renovation, adaptation, and maintenance (the subject of Brand's next book). Even converting a boat into an office seems too bewildering and costly to contemplate. Where do people get the money? Brand mentions having spent a few years running a consultancy called Global Business Network, an experience that sounds lucrative enough (and inspires a chapter on "scenario planning" in building design). He wasn't writing a Substack, I'll tell you that much.

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His current projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, or on Facebook.