The City and the World by Gregor Hens and Jen Calleja (translator)
| The City and the World by Gregor Hens and Jen Calleja (translator) | |
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| Category: Politics and Society | |
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Reviewer: Heather Magee
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| Summary: A holistic, informative, witty exploration of cities and what they represent within the world. | |
| Buy? yes | Borrow? yes |
| Pages: 312 | Date: May 2025 |
| Publisher: Fitzcarraldo editions | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1804271698 | |
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In The City and the World, Gregor Hens reveals how cities are as much imagined spaces as they are physical ones. With a deep affection for the urban landscapes that have shaped his life, Hens reflects on places like Cologne, Berlin, and Goch on the Lower Rhine with a blend of personal memory and thoughtful observation. His writing, at times abstract, captures not just architectural features but the emotional and mental geographies tied to each location, for example, his perspectives as a child as opposed to as an adult. From Belgium and Germany to Berkeley and Columbus, Hens traces a map of experiences, turning cities into reflections of identity and belonging.
Hens' seemingly offhand but oddly logical musings, such as the assertion that if you want to truly understand a city, you have to do it on foot, you have to ride it by bike or swim it, carry a kind of poetic authority. He adds that riding a bike in the city, in any city in the world, offers a cinematic experience, which reminded me of the Russian Cubo-futurist artwork Cyclist by Natalia Goncharova (1913) which tries to capture the sights and sounds of the rapidly modernising city as it rushes past at eye-level. We learn by reading the book that Hens is a keen jogger, and this way of exploring the city, too, offers its own unique advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages include feeling the hard asphalt in your knees, the cobblestones in your ankles, the fine dust in the apex of your lungs.
A particularly rich section of the book explores cartography and the eternalising nature of maps. Hens notes how some maps of North Korea reflect a totalitarian aesthetic through their sparseness, shaped by restricted access. He invokes Darran Anderson's observation that it's not the city that is real but the map, aligning with Hens' own assertion that maps and city plans [...] do not depict a process, but eternity. Even when cities are reduced to ruins, the map is the idea that doesn't fade. Whether through carpet bombing or natural decay, the physical city may crumble but its trace and grid survives in us. The city, in this view, is not just a built environment but an internalised, imagined order.
In this way, Hens draws extensively from psychogeography, the Situationist concept first formulated by Guy Debord (who features heavily in this book) which explores how urban environments shape emotional and behavioural responses. In Hens' hands, psychogeography is not a niche theory but a lived practice. Cities are not neutral backdrops, but instead they act upon us, just as we act upon them.
For readers who are well-versed in urban theory, The City and the World offers rewarding resonance. Henri Lefebvre's spatial triad (conceived, perceived, and lived space) is interesting to consider. While Lefebvre warned that lived space could be overtaken by conceived space (technocratic urban planning), Hens insists that lived experience persists and adapts. Through walking, watching, commuting, remembering, he shows that people don't just inhabit cities, they actually animate them.
There are strong resonances and intertextual references here with Italo Calvino, especially in pieces like The Traveller in the Map and The Written City: Inscriptions and Graffiti. I noticed that both authors mention the Peutinger Table, a medieval Roman map designed not for residents but for wayfarers, suggesting that cities are as much about passage as place.
Interestingly, Hens also approaches the city as art. A recurring image throughout the book is Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, which becomes a metaphor for the city: aesthetic, geological, shaped by intention and erosion alike. Hens even provocatively suggests that the most destructive interventions in nature, open-cast land mines, bunkers, war-created wastelands, contribute to the intricate flickering network of aesthetic moments that characterise our present era. This idea dialogues fascinatingly with Lefebvre's notion of the city as oeuvre, where oeuvre is thought of in terms of use value as opposed to the exchange value attributed to a product. While I hesitate to see the destructive interventions in nature, as Hens puts them, as art, I can accept that the city's morphing as a result of geological or human destruction is, at the very least, a captivating process of change.
At the end of his book, writing during the 2020 lockdown, Hens stands on a rooftop in Berlin and sees a city stripped of its usual rhythms. I am disappointed but remain forgiving, he concludes. What steadies him is not psychological and personal, but something physical and universal. Gravity and centrifugal forces, the invisible rhythms to which everything, everywhere, is subject, still offer him comfort. These forces, like the city itself, persist.
Overall, this is an ode to the city space in the modern day which left me contemplating my own relationship with the various cities I've lived in. Each one conjures a different sensation, which is determined by more than just the experiences associated with them, the architecture or the pace of life: it is something more intangible which distinguishes one city from the next.
In the book, Hens acklowdges the largely male tradition of observing cities through the flaneur, and I recommend Lauren Elkin's book Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London for a different take on the cities of the world. I would like to thank the publisher for a review copy.
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You can read more book reviews or buy The City and the World by Gregor Hens and Jen Calleja (translator) at Amazon.com. (Paid link)
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