Highly undesirable

Most of us just live in cities, or travel to see them and take them pretty much as they come, for good or bad, save for moaning about how much better they used to be. Does anyone ever say of their home city how greatly it has improved? But aside from all the travel writers, there is a cadre of critics and academics which is endlessly fascinated by cities as physical organisms. This field of study is very distinct from, and considers itself rather grander than, mere architecture, from Stalinist housing estates to the wreckage of post-industrial Detroit. Its status has increased since the moment was reached, some time in the early 21st century, when finally more of the human race lived in cities than in agricultural communities. But does writing about this make anything better, given that even those with power to wield have been trying and largely failing to rein in the irrational exuberance of cities since at least the time of James I?

Deyan Sudjic is the director of the Design Museum, but has long also been a fine architecture critic at the journalistic more than the academic end of things. Cities are his thing, and have been ever since his The 100 Mile City in 1992 attempted to analyse the sprawl of some of the world’s great cities (in those days all western ones, plus Tokyo). He is a tireless traveller to, and trudger round, the cities of the world: when he describes a place, you can be pretty sure he has been there.

The Language of Cities revisits this territory a quarter of a century on, casting its net both wider and shallower. It is a series of six essays which have different titles (What is a City, How to Make a City, How to Change a City, The Government of Cities, The Idea of a City and, finally, Crowds and their Discontents).