AR Reading List 016: City Portraits part II

There are many ways to talk about cities. Raymond Queneau spoke of ‘the roofs of Paris, lying on their backs, with their little paws in the air’. We can’t help but be affectionate when we attempt to describe cities. Our emotions colour ideas about streets, buildings and neighbourhoods. Whether we have lived there or are observing from afar determines the level and topography of our understanding. Situation and knowledge, feeling and research.

The following essays comb through an array of complex urban ideas. There is a city of pearls, a city that is a man, a city composed of ‘separate and univalent islands’. Two cities stitched back together, aware of the past which blasted them apart. A city that was dreamed as an architectural utopia, a city once the financial capital of Europe now tussling with the reactionary right and a mediation on the future of a city, written in 1974. Delight in these intense and specific portraits and travel between cities, unravelling images and studying their ingredients.

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• String of pearls: preserving cultural heritage in Bahrain, AR May 2020, Manon Mollard
  ‘Residual traces are rediscovered, exposed and recomposed into a meandering 3.5km pearling pathway snaking its way through the lanes of the old city’

• Cork: the raingod’s green, dark as passion, AR June 2019, Kevin Barry
  ‘It is built on a marsh and it has a dampness that enters the bones. This has a tendency to turn one both tubercular and poetical’

• Milton Keynes and the urbanism of innocence, AR September 1980, Peter Buchanan
  ‘In Milton Keynes there is, and will be, no ‘central’ place, no heart, where many functions, civic, commercial, entertainment and so on come together in, or around a defined, coherent place’

• Becoming Berlin, AR November 2017, Sophie Lovell
  ‘This was a city whose citizens cared deeply about its history, about the lessons of the past, about politics and about its architecture’

• Brought to book: the Paju Book City story, AR January 2018, Dirk Somers
  ‘Wedged between the river and Simhak Mountain, it was envisioned as a new type of city as suggested by a Paul Klee painting from 1928, A Leaf from the Book of Cities, which evocatively conjured the view from the mountain, across Paju Book City, to the Han River’

• Zero tolerance Amsterdam: the cradle of capitalism, AR November 2018, Alex Raúl
  ‘Swampy farmland made way for a remarkable feat of city planning: the iconic canal ring, decorated with stately mansions embellished with the family crests of a rapidly growing elite’

• A future for Dublin, AR November 1974, Lance Wright and Kenneth Browne
  ‘We have chosen Dublin as the medium for putting forward this general proposition because she retains more of the earlier city pattern than any other metropolis’