Book review: Cities are Good for You, by Leo Hollis
Leo Hollis - who has written two books about London, where he lives - sees the city as a landscape of limitless possibility that may hold the key to our survival, since we are increasingly "an urban species".
Leo Hollis - who has written two books about London, where he lives - sees the city as a landscape of limitless possibility that may hold the key to our survival, since we are increasingly "an urban species".
He explains: "In 2007 the UN announced that for the first time in human history 50 per cent of the world's population now lives in cities. By 2050, it is projected that 75 per cent of the world's populations will live in cities."
When Hollis refers to this expanding urban population, he's not talking about the traditional cities of the West. Indeed, he spends much of the book discussing cities such as Shanghai, Singapore and Dubai, which operate according to a different model.
His thesis is that the city "is not a rational, ordered place but a complex space that has more in common with natural organisms such as beehives or ant colonies" - complexity theory, in other words, which means our cities are less inventions than entities, evolving from the ground up.
Unfortunately Hollis spends too little time in the street. His accounts of various cities skim over the question of what they feel like, what we call their quality of life.
