dism. It has an overwhelming vanity: not
how did the dead bunny feel, but how did I
feel having deaded the bunny? Everything
is filtered through the damp, springy soft-
ness of the author’s sensitivity — and hav-
ing argued about the ethical bit of the title,
I should grinch by questioning the carnivore
bit. There is a barely any passing pleasure in
eating, no sense of the one thing that does
connect us all to every other meat-eating
animal: the daily satisfaction of consuming
each other.
I suspect that this book was written
as self-help therapy and to impress her dad.
Highly undesirable
Hugh Pearman
The Language of Cities
by Deyan Sudjic
Allen Lane, £25, pp. 240
Vertical: The City from
Satellites to Bunkers
by Stephen Graham
Verso, £20, pp. 416
Most of us just live in cities, or travel to see
them and take them pretty much as they
come, for good or bad, save for moaning
about how much better they used to be.
Does anyone ever say of their home city how
greatly it has improved? But aside from all
the travel writers, there is a cadre of critics
and academics which is endlessly fascinat-
ed by cities as physical organisms. This field
of study is very distinct from, and considers
itself rather grander than, mere architecture,
from Stalinist housing estates to the wreck-
age of post-industrial Detroit. Its status has
increased since the moment was reached,
some time in the early 21st century, when
finally more of the human race lived in cities
than in agricultural communities. But does
writing about this make anything better,
given that even those with power to wield
have been trying and largely failing to rein
in the irrational exuberance of cities since at
least the time of James I?
Deyan Sudjic is the director of the
Design Museum, but has long also been a
fine architecture critic at the journalistic
more than the academic end of things. Cit-
ies are his thing, and have been ever since
his The 100 Mile City in 1992 attempted to
analyse the sprawl of some of the world’s
great cities (in those days all western ones,
plus Tokyo). He is a tireless traveller to,
and trudger round, the cities of the world:
when he describes a place, you can be pret-
ty sure he has been there.
The Language of Cities revisits this
territory a quarter of a century on, cast-
ing its net both wider and shallower. It is
a series of six essays which have different
titles (What is a City, How to Make a City,
How to Change a City, The Government
of Cities, The Idea of a City and, finally,
Crowds and their Discontents). But there
is not really much to distinguish these sec-
tions, all of which consist of Sudjic ram-
bling knowledgeably on about the way
cities develop over time and cope, or fail to,
in various ways. He is especially scathing
about London for seeming to have given
up trying to control, well, anything really.
His book is easily digestible but not very
memorable: he says he wrote it over the
course of two summer holidays in a Tuscan
farmhouse and it certainly has a relaxed,
glass-of-chianti-at-the-elbow feel. The final
short chapter on crowds, which you might
expect to tackle the causes and aftermaths
of riots from London to the ‘Arab Spring’,
touches only briefly on this before veering
off into the well-worn subject of mass tour-
ism. He concludes:
A successful city is an entity that is continually
reconfiguring itself, changing its social struc-
ture and meaning, even if its contours don’t
look very different.Unarguable, but scarcely enlightening.
Stephen Graham’s Vertical is a denser
and much more academic affair, as you’d
expect from a professor of cities and society
at Newcastle university’s School of Architec-ture. There are footnotes, and
plenty of them. Instead of two
summer breaks, he’s spent
some ten years putting this
together. He takes the view
that we’ve been looking at cit-
ies all wrong, all laid out like
maps, when what we should
be doing is taking vertical slic-
es through them instead.
He doesn’t just mean from
the tip of the skyscrapers
to the metro tunnels below
ground: he means from the
circling satellites round the
planet right down to bunkers,
sewers, mines. It’s a compel-
ling conceit, and one he sim-
plifies further into just two
sections: ‘Above’ and ‘Below’.
And of course he begins with
Dubai, which Sudjic also has a
fair bit to say about. All urban
commentators must start with
Dubai, that unnecessary, arti-
ficial city, the workings of
speculative capital vertically
(and in the case of its artificial
islands and peninsulas) hori-
zontally expressed.
Graham sees the world in
Ballardian terms, a stacked
society where the super-rich
and privileged are up there
in penthouses, planes and
helicopters while the under-
class toil down below, even
in mines up to four times as deep as the
tallest skyscrapers are tall. Elites, he says,
are increasingly abandoning their edge-
of-town compounds in favour of the tops
of supertall towers. The multilevel city,
as forecast in Metropolis and Blade Run-
ner, is happening now. And he considers
bombers and drones, raining death and
destruction from the sky. He has a lot to
say about war and death. Higher up is
not always good — many of the deaths
of elderly and poor French people in the
heatwave summer of 2003 were, he says,
because they were roasting up in the attics
beneath the roofs. In Paris, the street still
reigns supreme.
Graham’s chapter headings fit closer to
the subject matter than Sudjic’s but there
is the same sense of an informed guide
bumping to and fro, from one area of inter-
est to another — in his case including sew-
ers, favelas, American air bases and gold
mines — rather than coming to any par-
ticular conclusion. If you want a shortish,
easy read, choose Sudjic’s. If you like the
world of obscure and scary facts over 400
pages, choose Graham’s. And if you’d rath-
er not know how we are wrecking our world
through rampant urbanism, read neither:
because to be honest, the future doesn’t look
too great.A drone hovers between two tower blocksGETTY IMAGES