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The City and the World
In The City and the World, Gregor Hens explores the city in the twenty-first century – a space we shape and are shaped by in turn – and our place within it. Travelling from Berlin to Las Vegas, Shenzhen to Santiago de Chile, he moves through these pulsing, ever-expanding cityscapes, reading, walking, swimming, riding the metro and catching the bus, bearing witness to the strange vitality of urban life. Everywhere, catalysts for new understandings emerge. Pushing his young daughter's pram turns Berlin upside-down. Students' exercises in getting lost and reorienting themselves throw into question notions of centre and periphery. Google Maps becomes an unexpected gallery, offering new ways of encountering art and architecture. Buildings hold their own histories and secrets, illuminated by chroniclers of Hens's cities, from Virginia Woolf and Georges Perec to Rem Koolhaas and Valeria Luiselli. Even libraries become cities in their own right. Blending memoir, travelogue and philosophy with photography and literary insights, The City and the World is a witty, captivating, illuminating and expansive journey into the heart of the modern city.
297 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
November 17, 2025
The City and the World is an essay translated by Jen Calleja from the original Die Stadt und der Erdkreis: Erkundungen by Gregor Hens.
The essay is focused around our experience of the modern metropolis and draws on various thinkers and writers - Hens himself particularly acknowledges his debt to Stephen Graham (Vertical), Robert Macfarlane (Underland, The Wild Places), Esther Kinsky (River), Darran Anderson (Imaginary Cities), Lauren Elkin (Flâneuse), Matthew Beaumont (Night Walking), Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost) and Rem Koolhaas (Delirious New York, S,M,L,XL), and other key references points include Sebald (photographs feature in the text although more specific/deliberate than Sebald's 'found' photos), Will Self (a walking companion of the author) and, of course, Thomas Bernhard:
During a walk along the Graben in Vienna (a trench that was filled in centuries ago), a distance of barely 200 metres, the nameless narrator of Thomas Bernhard's novella Walking, published in 1971, listens to a report by his friend Oehler about another walk along the Graben, which Oehler had taken - in the opposite direction - with a friend named Karrer. Karrer goes mad when he visits a men's outfitter who he believes is trying to sell him inferior goods. Karrer is the brain within the brain; the reader understands intuitively that this can't go well, especially not when the inner brain projects onto the outer one.
The nesting component of the narrative's construction is also a commentary on the subject of the city: all it takes is a single path, the most predictable and exposed of all walking routes from a Viennese perspective, in order to wind the spool of thought structures that comprise our intellectual existence in conversation, and then unravel it again through a mental breakdown. In fact, the Graben is a kind of coiled core or coil bobbin around which the urban magnetic field of Vienna builds. Perhaps psychologically it's something like the dog bone of Austria, the already postulated double dead-end - the black hole of a galactic metropolis that lost its spiral arms in 1918. No wonder that walking this short distance - and its corresponding synchronized thinking - ultimately leads to madness (Thomas Bernhard was effectively the author of ultimates).
This from Gehen, Walking in Kenneth Northcott's translation, and for me the ur-Bernhard novel, his first work where he really found his voice and which contains the more Bernhardian of sentences:
Perec is another reference not least - and I assume this is true - the author claims that the “in the distance, two boys in red anoraks” who makes a cameo appearance in Perec's, At Attempt At Exhausting A Place in Paris (based on his observations over 3 days in October 1974) were, in fact, the author and his brother on a visit to the city.
Other favourites quotes from the book:
The Cologne-born author, visiting a theme park in Chile, and reminscing about Phantasialand in North Rhine-Westphalia, which I also visited as a child in the 1970s on my first trip abroad:
The queue in front of the amusement park's ticket booth is long. We wait on cracked concrete paving slabs and step on each other's toes to pass the time. A single cloud floats by, the shadow eats its way through the city from south to north, wiping out entire districts, the wide boulevards, the city hill. From the outside, the amusement park looks like it has fallen out of time; it has the same attractions and rides that I know from my childhood, the same colours and even the same sounds. It rattles and squeaks, children throw their arms in the air and let out shrill screams. In fact, I now remember that as a child I visited a mini world near Cologne a few times that was called Phantasialand, just off by a few letters, it stretches over decades, from my Rhenish childhood to the present time of this dream.
One of a number of cases where the author quotes the architect, architectural theorist and urbanist Rem Koolhaas (including his fascinating Exodus), highlighting the only sensible road in Manhattan:
Long before the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, which laid out a 2,028-block grid for large parts of Manhattan - Midtown, Uptown and Harlem - the city was already arranged in the imagination. The potential blocks, which, according to Rem Koolhaas, represent the 'superiority of mental construction over reality', can already be seen to some extent in early maps of New Amsterdam. And the diagonal cutting through the grid, from which Broadway was to be created, was already visible in the seventeenth century; it led from the settlement over an imaginary city wall to the beach of Inhambane. It seems to me as if this Broadway was only set out to show city wanderers who had escaped from the centre of Amsterdam or another developed agglomeration - which today we would call the Old Town - that it's worthwhile to walk on the hypotenuse.
A comment on the male-domination of the profession of flâneur - which Hens corrects by including writers such as Woolf, Elkin, Solnit, Calle and Kinsky.
More than any other mode of transport or form of movement available to us in the city, walking seems to provide an opportunity to develop a feel for topographical conditions and distances and to sense and reflect on the urban environment, which is why the history of (psycho-geographic) urban exploration is primarily a history of strolling and urban wandering. In its early days, leisurely promenading was primarily practiced by middle-class white men - who had the means and opportunity to while away entire days and nights, and who also didn't need to fear attacks, particularly after sunset, from the opposite sex. The story of the flâneur, as it has been told for a long time, is therefore also the story of a certain gaze.
At times I rather lost the thread of Hens argument, and sometimes he felt he tried to pack too much in, but as the text spirals like Robert Smithson’s Jetty, which inevitably makes an appearance, it was usually possible to pick up the line of reasoning again a few pages later. And if not 100% successful for me, certainly a read with many stimulating points.
The essay is focused around our experience of the modern metropolis and draws on various thinkers and writers - Hens himself particularly acknowledges his debt to Stephen Graham (Vertical), Robert Macfarlane (Underland, The Wild Places), Esther Kinsky (River), Darran Anderson (Imaginary Cities), Lauren Elkin (Flâneuse), Matthew Beaumont (Night Walking), Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost) and Rem Koolhaas (Delirious New York, S,M,L,XL), and other key references points include Sebald (photographs feature in the text although more specific/deliberate than Sebald's 'found' photos), Will Self (a walking companion of the author) and, of course, Thomas Bernhard:
During a walk along the Graben in Vienna (a trench that was filled in centuries ago), a distance of barely 200 metres, the nameless narrator of Thomas Bernhard's novella Walking, published in 1971, listens to a report by his friend Oehler about another walk along the Graben, which Oehler had taken - in the opposite direction - with a friend named Karrer. Karrer goes mad when he visits a men's outfitter who he believes is trying to sell him inferior goods. Karrer is the brain within the brain; the reader understands intuitively that this can't go well, especially not when the inner brain projects onto the outer one.
The nesting component of the narrative's construction is also a commentary on the subject of the city: all it takes is a single path, the most predictable and exposed of all walking routes from a Viennese perspective, in order to wind the spool of thought structures that comprise our intellectual existence in conversation, and then unravel it again through a mental breakdown. In fact, the Graben is a kind of coiled core or coil bobbin around which the urban magnetic field of Vienna builds. Perhaps psychologically it's something like the dog bone of Austria, the already postulated double dead-end - the black hole of a galactic metropolis that lost its spiral arms in 1918. No wonder that walking this short distance - and its corresponding synchronized thinking - ultimately leads to madness (Thomas Bernhard was effectively the author of ultimates).
This from Gehen, Walking in Kenneth Northcott's translation, and for me the ur-Bernhard novel, his first work where he really found his voice and which contains the more Bernhardian of sentences:
Just as Karrer in general, says Oehler, called everything "so called", there was nothing that he did not call only so-called, nothing that he would not have called so-called and by so doing his powers achieved an unbelievable force...things in themselves are only so-called or, to be completely accurate so-called so-called, to use Karrer's words, says Oehler.
Perec is another reference not least - and I assume this is true - the author claims that the “in the distance, two boys in red anoraks” who makes a cameo appearance in Perec's, At Attempt At Exhausting A Place in Paris (based on his observations over 3 days in October 1974) were, in fact, the author and his brother on a visit to the city.
Other favourites quotes from the book:
The Cologne-born author, visiting a theme park in Chile, and reminscing about Phantasialand in North Rhine-Westphalia, which I also visited as a child in the 1970s on my first trip abroad:
The queue in front of the amusement park's ticket booth is long. We wait on cracked concrete paving slabs and step on each other's toes to pass the time. A single cloud floats by, the shadow eats its way through the city from south to north, wiping out entire districts, the wide boulevards, the city hill. From the outside, the amusement park looks like it has fallen out of time; it has the same attractions and rides that I know from my childhood, the same colours and even the same sounds. It rattles and squeaks, children throw their arms in the air and let out shrill screams. In fact, I now remember that as a child I visited a mini world near Cologne a few times that was called Phantasialand, just off by a few letters, it stretches over decades, from my Rhenish childhood to the present time of this dream.
One of a number of cases where the author quotes the architect, architectural theorist and urbanist Rem Koolhaas (including his fascinating Exodus), highlighting the only sensible road in Manhattan:
Long before the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, which laid out a 2,028-block grid for large parts of Manhattan - Midtown, Uptown and Harlem - the city was already arranged in the imagination. The potential blocks, which, according to Rem Koolhaas, represent the 'superiority of mental construction over reality', can already be seen to some extent in early maps of New Amsterdam. And the diagonal cutting through the grid, from which Broadway was to be created, was already visible in the seventeenth century; it led from the settlement over an imaginary city wall to the beach of Inhambane. It seems to me as if this Broadway was only set out to show city wanderers who had escaped from the centre of Amsterdam or another developed agglomeration - which today we would call the Old Town - that it's worthwhile to walk on the hypotenuse.
A comment on the male-domination of the profession of flâneur - which Hens corrects by including writers such as Woolf, Elkin, Solnit, Calle and Kinsky.
More than any other mode of transport or form of movement available to us in the city, walking seems to provide an opportunity to develop a feel for topographical conditions and distances and to sense and reflect on the urban environment, which is why the history of (psycho-geographic) urban exploration is primarily a history of strolling and urban wandering. In its early days, leisurely promenading was primarily practiced by middle-class white men - who had the means and opportunity to while away entire days and nights, and who also didn't need to fear attacks, particularly after sunset, from the opposite sex. The story of the flâneur, as it has been told for a long time, is therefore also the story of a certain gaze.
At times I rather lost the thread of Hens argument, and sometimes he felt he tried to pack too much in, but as the text spirals like Robert Smithson’s Jetty, which inevitably makes an appearance, it was usually possible to pick up the line of reasoning again a few pages later. And if not 100% successful for me, certainly a read with many stimulating points.
January 28, 2026
I really enjoyed this fascinating book, despite it not really being a page-turner and it taking me a while to get through.
Every page provided something to ponder on, hidden aspects of our cities and how to read them. Not a traditional history, by any means, Hens leads us through the development of our major settlements and how this has happened through quirks of physical geography, by accident, architecture, planning and violence. There are stops along the way to consider works of art, film and literature and also a nod to the flâneur and flâneuse who have added to the understanding of our surroundings.
Excellent.
Every page provided something to ponder on, hidden aspects of our cities and how to read them. Not a traditional history, by any means, Hens leads us through the development of our major settlements and how this has happened through quirks of physical geography, by accident, architecture, planning and violence. There are stops along the way to consider works of art, film and literature and also a nod to the flâneur and flâneuse who have added to the understanding of our surroundings.
Excellent.
January 9, 2026
Good book on the psychogeographic experience of cities that recalls Sebald (superficially through form, genuinely through its approach to the compression of history and its contents). Namechecks plenty of fun sources from Walter Benjamin to Will Self so I got to experience the joy of recognition on nearly every page
July 31, 2025
Berlin pregame
June 24, 2025
A very intellectual beach read
July 31, 2025
To understand a city, Gregor Hens suggests, “you have to do it on foot, you have to ride it by bike or swim it.” The body needs to be sufficiently soaked in the urban landscape so that the mind can do its job: to think and connect this place with another, this time with another. When a pandemic locks down the body, for Hens, the mind may keep skipping in the cities across the world the body has been to, hence the genesis of this essay collection. These essays are not so much about walking and the literary and psychogeographical traces it engenders — evoked here are the voices of the flâneurs like W. G. Sebald and Walter Benjamin, and contemporary flâneuses like Rebecca Solnit and Lauren Elkin — as a method, in a poetic gait, of reading the city as text, land art, and a work of imagination.
Hens prioritizes a humanist approach to urban landscapes, an approach known in the scholarly world as Urban Humanities: an embodied mode of studying-, making-, and being-in-place. I wrote elsewhere, in a piece about Wuhan’s waterscape soon to be published: Urban Humanities “engages with the city as a site of an intellectually animated empirical common ground where, on one hand, the historicity of objects, literature, archive, and the politics of historiography complicate the aesthetics of structure, pattern, and form that deliver future visions. On the other hand, architecture, design, and planning spatialize the humanities, measuring its physical, material, immersive, and geometric dimensions in scales that leap from text, image, and sound.” From time to time, Hens wastes no time to juxtapose architects (such as Rem Koolhaas) with speculative novelists (the rank of J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick and William Gibson). Counterintuitive to many, “maps and city plans [...] do not depict a process, but eternity,” even after the city turns into rubbles. In this light, cities and architectures alike are not simply places to reside and make a shelter of, but speculative narratives that act upon us, as much as we act upon them.
Following this thread of thought, art/artificiality is as much in a museum’s light installation as in the Las Vegas Strip or Manhattan; the necropolitics of malicious architecture in Gaza and Arizona, the prison complexes of Alabama and Xinjiang are equally dystopic and realistically brutal. None of these designs lack speculative narratives just because they are exerting dreadful, destructive impact on life in real time. Once the scope of the conceptualization of design is broadened to include whole cities, dreams and horrors alike freely wander the street. The city is the theme park and we are all part of power’s plot. Even though not everything is planned or conspired, the city sets spatial, temporal, emotional, and material conditions for things to happen and tales to be told.
His humanitarian consciousness aside, Gregor Hens’ blatant Eurocentric standpoint is one of the book’s greatest misfortunes, an ailment that neither Urban Humanities and the gendered critique of “flâneur” has adequately grappled with. Hens is fascinated by turn-of-the-twentieth-century European cities. Paris was for strollers and psychogeographers; London — “the Dickensian city of murderers, prostitutes and petty criminals, of fishwives and street sweepers” — was for the night wanderers; and Berlin, “an ultra-modern, deafening industrial city,” was “the heart of a world whose life is belt drive and clockwork, piston rhythm and siren scream.” In contrast, Hens locates “generic cities” in Asia, China and Malaysia in particular, claiming groundlessly that “these cities do not need a tangible identity; they are more kismet than object.” Chongqing and Wuhan, two of China’s most iconic and historical megacities, are deemed unimaginable and unimaginative. Shenzhen’s gigantic miniature park, “Window of the World,” left a peculiar mark in the Cologne-born writer’s mind with its inconsistent (dis)play of scales of the world’s architectural landmarks. The rest of Shenzhen, like the rest of Asia, continued to recede to obscurity from the rooftop of his Berlin apartment. The Orientalist epidemic outlasted the coronavirus pandemic.
Hens prioritizes a humanist approach to urban landscapes, an approach known in the scholarly world as Urban Humanities: an embodied mode of studying-, making-, and being-in-place. I wrote elsewhere, in a piece about Wuhan’s waterscape soon to be published: Urban Humanities “engages with the city as a site of an intellectually animated empirical common ground where, on one hand, the historicity of objects, literature, archive, and the politics of historiography complicate the aesthetics of structure, pattern, and form that deliver future visions. On the other hand, architecture, design, and planning spatialize the humanities, measuring its physical, material, immersive, and geometric dimensions in scales that leap from text, image, and sound.” From time to time, Hens wastes no time to juxtapose architects (such as Rem Koolhaas) with speculative novelists (the rank of J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick and William Gibson). Counterintuitive to many, “maps and city plans [...] do not depict a process, but eternity,” even after the city turns into rubbles. In this light, cities and architectures alike are not simply places to reside and make a shelter of, but speculative narratives that act upon us, as much as we act upon them.
Following this thread of thought, art/artificiality is as much in a museum’s light installation as in the Las Vegas Strip or Manhattan; the necropolitics of malicious architecture in Gaza and Arizona, the prison complexes of Alabama and Xinjiang are equally dystopic and realistically brutal. None of these designs lack speculative narratives just because they are exerting dreadful, destructive impact on life in real time. Once the scope of the conceptualization of design is broadened to include whole cities, dreams and horrors alike freely wander the street. The city is the theme park and we are all part of power’s plot. Even though not everything is planned or conspired, the city sets spatial, temporal, emotional, and material conditions for things to happen and tales to be told.
His humanitarian consciousness aside, Gregor Hens’ blatant Eurocentric standpoint is one of the book’s greatest misfortunes, an ailment that neither Urban Humanities and the gendered critique of “flâneur” has adequately grappled with. Hens is fascinated by turn-of-the-twentieth-century European cities. Paris was for strollers and psychogeographers; London — “the Dickensian city of murderers, prostitutes and petty criminals, of fishwives and street sweepers” — was for the night wanderers; and Berlin, “an ultra-modern, deafening industrial city,” was “the heart of a world whose life is belt drive and clockwork, piston rhythm and siren scream.” In contrast, Hens locates “generic cities” in Asia, China and Malaysia in particular, claiming groundlessly that “these cities do not need a tangible identity; they are more kismet than object.” Chongqing and Wuhan, two of China’s most iconic and historical megacities, are deemed unimaginable and unimaginative. Shenzhen’s gigantic miniature park, “Window of the World,” left a peculiar mark in the Cologne-born writer’s mind with its inconsistent (dis)play of scales of the world’s architectural landmarks. The rest of Shenzhen, like the rest of Asia, continued to recede to obscurity from the rooftop of his Berlin apartment. The Orientalist epidemic outlasted the coronavirus pandemic.
June 20, 2025
DNF at about 60%.
I knew it was time to give up on this book when I made it to page 100 and realised that I could not summarise its main arguments. The City and the World is a very Continental European intellectual long essay, one of those long-winded texts where the author jumps from subject to subject without any clearly stated arguments or evidence to support them and quotes generously from similar Continental European intellectuals who came before him (gendering very intentional here). The subject matter is fascinating - I love cities and I love reading about cities. And, despite myself, I was drawn by the random references and snippets in this book, and I would have continued it if the ARC had been provided in Kindle format (as is, I can only read it on a laptop). Having to focus on a text reading it on a device not designed for optimising reading long texts for pleasure highlights all the issues (get on with it! get to the bloody point, if I wanted to be reading Walter Benjamin, I would have been reading him without your mediation!) and obscures its strengths - relaxing, almost lulling observations, messiness, deliberate unproductiveness.
I think I vastly prefer British/Anglophone non-fiction essay structure, but I can appreciate other ways of writing when the circumstances are right. They were not this time around.
I knew it was time to give up on this book when I made it to page 100 and realised that I could not summarise its main arguments. The City and the World is a very Continental European intellectual long essay, one of those long-winded texts where the author jumps from subject to subject without any clearly stated arguments or evidence to support them and quotes generously from similar Continental European intellectuals who came before him (gendering very intentional here). The subject matter is fascinating - I love cities and I love reading about cities. And, despite myself, I was drawn by the random references and snippets in this book, and I would have continued it if the ARC had been provided in Kindle format (as is, I can only read it on a laptop). Having to focus on a text reading it on a device not designed for optimising reading long texts for pleasure highlights all the issues (get on with it! get to the bloody point, if I wanted to be reading Walter Benjamin, I would have been reading him without your mediation!) and obscures its strengths - relaxing, almost lulling observations, messiness, deliberate unproductiveness.
I think I vastly prefer British/Anglophone non-fiction essay structure, but I can appreciate other ways of writing when the circumstances are right. They were not this time around.
December 15, 2025
How to rate this book? Felt it started off very slowly/densely, wasn’t sure if it was worth finishing. But ended up really appreciating the fragmentary, associative way this is written, which squares w his vision of cities not only as in dialogue w each other, but with history and with the countryside/non cities, in ways you’d never imagine. Did find the italics annoying though
Not a pounder but would potentially reread in like ten years
3.5 rounded up
Not a pounder but would potentially reread in like ten years
3.5 rounded up
November 6, 2025
There are some fantastic excerpts from this book, questioning how we interact with our cities, the role they have on our lives and how we are shaped by the city or vice versa. It just goes on for a bit too long.
July 6, 2025
(3.5) less of a thesis/linear work, more of a collation of references and memories- but good references and absorbing memories!
Read
September 30, 2025i found it hard to follow since I haven't been to many of those places. it's a very specific account (with a tinge of iykyk) with tips from his experiences in how to navigate various cities.
November 5, 2025
sooo many italics
February 24, 2026
idk it was alright
March 19, 2026
I had high hopes for this one, which at this point haven't been realized. The blurbs are clever little chunks of disassembly, probably because the people who wrote them didn't figure this book out either.
The easiest way to describe it is "W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn Goes to Town." The similarities between their voices are so stark as to be almost laughable. Sebald wandered around the English Fens and let his mind wander where it would and wrote charmingly of everything he'd learned in his life up to that point. Hens takes the exact same approach, except he's wandering around in large cities instead.
Confession: I'm only about 2/3 through this, but barring some jarring change of approach I suspect it'll remain in the skin it's currently wearing. I don't mind reading it, because it reminds me of the way my own mind works when I'm out walking -- random ideas float past like bubbles, usually scattering to the four winds but occasionally connecting and sticking together. I imagine I'll slowly finish this when I don't have the energy to string a lot of thoughts together.
I'm not knocked off my feet by this one, but I don't mind reading it either.
The easiest way to describe it is "W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn Goes to Town." The similarities between their voices are so stark as to be almost laughable. Sebald wandered around the English Fens and let his mind wander where it would and wrote charmingly of everything he'd learned in his life up to that point. Hens takes the exact same approach, except he's wandering around in large cities instead.
Confession: I'm only about 2/3 through this, but barring some jarring change of approach I suspect it'll remain in the skin it's currently wearing. I don't mind reading it, because it reminds me of the way my own mind works when I'm out walking -- random ideas float past like bubbles, usually scattering to the four winds but occasionally connecting and sticking together. I imagine I'll slowly finish this when I don't have the energy to string a lot of thoughts together.
I'm not knocked off my feet by this one, but I don't mind reading it either.
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