The City and the World
Gregor Hens
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From the publisher
Translated by Jen Calleja
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.
‘Whether walking, swimming or reading, Hens is an inspiring guide and a patient teacher. I love the way he sees the world, as and in its cities.’
— Jon Day, author of Homing
‘Gregor Hens combines memories and reflections, reportage and theory to create an impressive book about the phenomenon of the city…. The appeal of the book, however, lies not in the diversity of the topics addressed, but in the seemingly effortless and almost somnambulistic way in which Hens combines his own memories and reflections, reportage and theory.’
— FAZ
‘This book is a blessing…. In a mixture of essay, autobiographical recollection and dream travelogue, the Cologne-born author takes us into all these exciting storehouses of stories and history in his richly illustrated book.’
— RND
‘This is the driving principle of his book: by virtue of his imagination, his sensibility and his readings, the author succeeds in spinning a web whose individual threads touch and extend into the distance.’
— Deutschlandradio Kultur