This evocative collection of texts by Richard Plunz, professor in architecture and urban design at Columbia University, departs from fieldwork and workshops, spanning almost a quarter of a century, to offer what we might call "situated knoeledge" on a specific cities. Though economics is high on agenda - and cities are economical machines in the first place - Plunz looks all the same for an ethos of the city. This ethos is found not in maps and images but is an essence located rather in words, pointing to something that cannot be seen cartographically. The concreteness of his descriptions reveals the less visible dynamics of these sixteen cities, their dramas, their catastrophes, and their potentials. In the end the diagnosis is clear: Urbanity, the affirmation of heterogeneity and difference, density and size (not bigness!), is our only hope, not only ecologically but socially. The beauty of Plunz's approach - a sort of time travel - is that it provides us a valuable intellectual diary of the state of the city in the last decades.
