It might seem little more than a commonplace to assert that ‘hurry’ constitutes an inescapable element of modern urban life. The exact nature of hurry, however, and its place within the broader history of urban modernity, has itself remained largely unexplored. What then are we to make of hurry – that overwhelming sense of needing to hasten from place to place in the pursuit, it seems at times, of something the nature of which we are ourselves only half-aware?

This engaging, interdisciplinary collection of essays attempts to address this neglect, outlining both a theoretical framework through which hurry might be understood and, in a series of short yet insightful case-studies, the means of tracing its workings. The overarching framework deployed here rests firmly upon that interpretive approach to urban modernity developed by historical geographers over the last few decades, and there is much here that will be familiar to those already acquainted with the intersection of such work with the fields of urban history and cultural history alike. Likewise, the theoretical influences at play here, cited in the editors’ introductory essay, will come as no surprise – amongst them Marshall Berman, David Harvey and, the ur-type of them all, George Simmel. Commendably, the ‘architectures of hurry’ suggested here provide a means of considering the often overlooked complexity and nuance contained within these broader accounts of modernity's unfolding. For hurry proves itself to be something of the joker in urban modernity's pack, forming the ‘subjective, emotional and less-than-rational’ counterpart to the search for speed and efficiency by which modernity is driven – and being expressive, in contrast, of many of its absurdities and contradictions. Crucially, as a subjective experience, hurry is also framed here as more than the mere result of phenomenological change. As this collection's epilogue notes, it is perhaps also connected to our own search for fulfilment, and thus to another of modernity's other great cornerstones: our equally restless search for happiness and contentment.

Passing from the ‘modes’ of hurry to its infrastructures and practices, these essays range in time from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Their geographical spread is equally wide in nature, stretching from the subways of Buenos Aires, through the cities of nineteenth-century North America and onward, by way of Britain, to the traffic of contemporary Beijing. Taken together they paint, through hurry's lens, the picture of a modernity riddled with contradiction and contingency, not least in its repeated tendency to produce the very opposite of those outcomes which its underlying forces purportedly seek. Also to be commended is the manner in which this collection moves beyond the obvious (if essential) arena of ‘the street’ to consider the manner in which hurry and its ‘unhurried’ counterparts manifested themselves within the interior spaces of the city. In a similar vein, the use of life-writing in Colin G. Pooley and Marilyn E. Pooley's work on the representation of speed and haste marks a welcome foregrounding of a form of writing which often seems to suffer from relative neglect in comparison to other more avowedly literary forms.

For all the many strengths of this collection, there are two issues which are, I would suggest, deserving of further consideration. The first is the question of where, precisely, the boundaries of the ‘architectures of hurry’ lie. Is it right to suggest, as the editors of this work do, that the ‘whole built environment of modern cities was designed not only for hurry but by hurry’ (p. 18)? Certainly, if one were to look only at those sites emblematic of hurry's realm, one would have no grounds to doubt that this was, and remains, so. As noted above, however, the essays in this collection offer a broader and more nuanced focus than this. And yet, save for Phillip Gordon Mackintosh's study of fin de siècle Toronto, the suburban experience – itself equally constitutive of urban modernity – remains here largely unexplored. The suburb might of course be viewed as the greatest of hurry's contradictions – a supposed realm of ‘unhurry’, respite and contentment paradoxically sustained by hurry's modes: the subway, the tram, the automobile. And yet it was possessed too of its own rhythms and practices, and a distinctive urban imaginary, all of which, whilst tied to the ‘architectures of hurry’, remained perhaps at one remove from them. Nor is it correct, I think, to label – as Mackintosh does – suburban antipathy towards hurry as ‘anti-modern’. For surely the struggle between urban hurry and suburban ‘unhurry’ is not so much one between the ‘modern’ and the ‘anti-modern’, as the struggle of modernity against itself?

Secondly, the issue of the relationship between hurry and emotion might also have benefited from deeper consideration. It is certainly telegraphed as central to hurry itself and, as noted above, the connection made between hurry and self-fulfilment is a significant one – one which is moreover reinforced by the findings of several of the essays in this book. But the nature of this relationship, and the precise role of emotion within it, remains to be fully resolved. What is required perhaps is an approach to emotion in keeping with the theory and methodology which underlie that account of varied modernity provided here – one in which emotion is accorded an active role as both ideal and narrative, practice and experience. Yet such an approach already exists. It is one explored at length by more recent work on the history of emotions, and some engagement with this scholarship might have done much to illuminate further the nuances of hurry itself. To give but one example, Adam Potkay's account of the history of joy reveals it to be an emotion possessed of its own sense of temporality and rhythm, a staccato expression of rapture, in contrast to the slower, recurrent rhythms of happiness. What better embodiment of joy could there be, then, than the figure drawn here by Christina E. Dando of the ‘scorcher’, those American women cyclists of the late nineteenth century who found liberation in each momentary burst of speed. But the culturally embedded practice of joy long preceded the material ‘mode of hurry’ which in this instance enabled it. Might it be then that, here as elsewhere, and not least in the elemental connection between hurry and self-fulfilment, emotion itself serves to structure, differentiate and render intelligible hurry, rather than merely resulting from it?

Significant though these questions are, they should not be seen as wholly detracting from the worth of what remains a valuable collection of essays, each in their own way a thought-provoking contribution to their field.