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Book Review: Optimistic point-of-view on concrete jungles
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In "Cities Are Good for You," Londoner Leo Hollis aims to see the positive side of urban spaces, places Henry Ford thought could only be solved by being emptied and left behind by its residents. (Shutterstock/File)
I
f you follow the news, you might have a skewed perspective of modern cities. They are painted as places under constant threat of all manner of social ills, polluted to the core and filled with malevolent psychopaths hell-bent on causing chaos.
Peruse social media during rush hour and you can find a flood of frustrated comments documenting traffic and transportation delays. Sit at the nearest Starbucks for an hour and try keeping track of the number of business meetings that start with small talk on how long it took for each person to arrive. An hour? Two hours? Three hours?
Inhabitants of a city, especially one like Jakarta, would almost always rather be elsewhere. We dream of living on the quieter, more slow-paced island of Bali and escaping to the sleepy town of Ubud where many people ‘rediscover’ themselves far from crowds and congestion.
Surely there are some upsides to living in a city?
In Cities Are Good for You, Londoner Leo Hollis aims to see the positive side of urban spaces, places Henry Ford thought could only be solved by being emptied and left behind by its residents. “Get people into the countryside, get them into communities where a man knows his neighbors,” Ford argued.
Hollis sees things differently. While admitting that seeing the good in what everyone else may see as a pile of problems may not be easy, he challenges the reader to consider whether the public’s misunderstanding of metropolitan areas has negatively affected the way cities are brought together.
In one chapter, Hollis considers the city as a home for creativity, arguing that while some find their ideas in the quietness of rural regions, the hustle and bustle of a concrete jungle has seen an equal amount of creative art and technological innovations grow from within. Cities remain a melting pot, bringing in a range of diverse thinking, creating the perfect environment for healthy competition and a dose of much needed inspiration.
With an increasing number of people in the world migrating to cities, perhaps it is time to take a step back and reconsider our surroundings. Cities Are Good for You is a great place to start. (kes)
Click here to read the book.
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Title: Cities Are Good for You
Author: Leo Hollis
Published: 2013
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN: 978-1-40-882661-4
Pages: 416
Reviewed by: Christabelle Adeline Palar
