As I reached the final pages of the German writer Gregor Hens’s essayistic travelogue The City and the World, news of the blackout across Spain and Portugal snatched my attention. Madrid and Lisbon were at a standstill. Images of gridlocked round-abouts and commuters rushing out of pitch-dark subway tunnels plunged me into a fatalistic mood. When will it happen here? Hens, I realised, had nailed an important point: the ‘stunning complexity’ of modern cities makes them fragile. The metropolis, he writes, has become so intricate, its limits so stretched, that in it, ‘we are always living on the verge of catastrophe’.
A seasoned globetrotter who spent his formative years ‘guzzling jet fuel with abandon’, Hens has lived in cities around the world, from Berlin (his current home) to Los Angeles. He has visited a host of other far-flung locations, from Shanghai and Shenzhen to Las Vegas. Each place a person visits, Hens suggests, becomes plotted in the ‘galactic city’ of their mind, a network ‘whose intricately folded map actually offers the most surprising connections’.
This is urban wandering on a rather different scale to that of Charles Baudelaire, whose 1863 essay ‘The Artist, Man of the World’ paved the way for a host of successive writers, most notably Walter Benjamin, to delight in roaming a single city on foot. Hens takes stock of our modern technologically dictated movements within and across cities, investigating how these places have come to sprawl far beyond the possible step-count of even the most determined walker.
His understanding of the word ‘city’ encompasses entities that aren’t cities in the obvious sense: libraries, viruses, cemeteries and the brain.
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