More than half the world, as you may have heard, now lives in cities. It is becoming one of the most bandied facts of our time, prompting the likes of Andrew Marr to tour the world for TV series on the subject. It is undeniably impressive and epochal, and has also prompted a genre, the weighty tome on cities that tries to harness its wonder, and address the vastness of theme. Two new ones weigh on my desk: The New Blackwell Companion to the City, and Living in the Endless City. It is as if the boggling size and multiplicity of the urban must prompt a literary equivalent, as if endless cities must lead to endless publishing.
Living in the Endless City is a product of something called the Urban Age Project, a work of the London School of Economics and the Deutsche Bank's "centre for independent thinking", the Alfred Herrhausen Society. The project has been touring the world with mighty conferences, and the results of three of them, in Mumbai, São Paulo and Istanbul, form the core of this book.
Its approaches run from the apparently objective to the anecdotal, by way of intellectual reflection. The book delivers the shock and awe of imposing statistics (on waste per capita, airline routes, murder rates, risks of disaster) rendered with full-bleed photographs of teemingness, hugeness and contrasts of rich and poor, that verge on a sort of inequality-porn. In between are essays of varying degrees of thoughtfulness.
These include a piece by Justin McGuirk that elegantly skewers the statistics, arguing that they can be made to prove almost anything, and that their shifting parameters (such as how, exactly, the boundary of a city is defined) make them hard to use. The always intelligent Saskia Sassen points out that cities, so often portrayed in terms of crisis and collapse, are more enduring than countries. She argues for the importance of their "deep histories" against the "glamour zones", a nice coinage which describes the new, shallow, "homogenised" development inserted in cities' midst.
Suketu Mehta, on Mumbai, articulates the fundamental dilemma of urban improvement. No matter how appalling the overcrowding and squalor might seem, the city will continue to attract yet more people because it still offers things, such as freedoms and opportunities, that the countryside cannot. And, therefore, according to a planner quoted by Mehta, "the nicer you make the city, the larger the number of people that will come to live there". From this one might argue that the best way to improve cities is first to increase the attraction of rural life.
The New Blackwell Companion to the City, meanwhile, is a collection of 65 academic essays, covering everything from the role of dance in shaping cities to race and class in South Africa to the application of military techniques to city planning. Inevitably, given such a sprawl, it combines nice nuggets with essays of wilful opacity. The destructive effects of global capital and neo-liberal politics are much explored; less so in Living in the Endless City, perhaps out of respect for the sponsoring bank.
Certain themes emerge from both books, such as a suspicion for simple over-arching solutions, horror at inequality and division, support for intelligent public transport systems over super-highways driven through poor neighbourhoods. Mixing and interaction, in zones that Richard Sennett calls "borders" rather than "boundaries", are held to be a good things. There is appreciation of the wisdom of previously despised places, such as favelas and slums, which turn out to have a robust logic born of desperate necessity.
Both books have their value, by throwing out striking insights and facts, and they are probably useful and necessary responses to significant changes in the world. But they prompt a thought: if more than half the world is urban, and if much of the remaining less-than-half exists to serve cities (as it does), what does it mean to address the problem of "the city"? One is really addressing the problem of "the world" or "humanity", in which case it becomes an insanely portentous project, and one incapable of meaningful solutions.
No book, and no series of volumes, can be equal to the subject. The Companion could have 650 essays, not 65, and still only scratch the surface. Better, perhaps, to narrow the field, and dig deeper, and look at one place or one phenomenon at a time. If enough people do this, in as many different ways as possible, useful knowledge might emerge.
Rowan Moore is the Observer's architecture critic.
