A dark view of urban humanity is conveyed through Yazaki Shigeshi's 1928 cartoon, called ‘Kanraku nokage: Ginza shoken’ (In the Shadow of Pleasure, A Ginza Sighting) (p. 199). It caricatures a grotesque urban ‘family’. A ‘massive’ blind female shamisen-player (a stringed instrument), blotchy-faced and wearing a patched robe, is led by the sleeve by an emaciated boy with an oversized shaved head, and is followed by a man with a dull-witted expression, dishevelled hair and a tattered hat. The trio stands against a backdrop of modern high-rise buildings. The street musician and her entourage are in full frontal view, occupying the city centre. The ‘shadow of pleasure’ of the title refers to an urban paradox of early modern Tokyo: in the glamorous and pleasurable modern city, the unsettling presence of the street population. Readers of Tōkyō pakku (Tokyo Puck) are reminded by the cartoon that, beyond the modern city of spectacle and consumerism, of jazz and newfound sexual liberation, the city is also haunted by figures like the pedlar, the busker or the (child) beggar – grotesque figures which spoil the flâneur's pleasure in traversing the modern city.

As I read this book, I increasingly relished the range of reflections offered by this collection on noir images of the city – in Germany, Austria, Japan, Mexico, India, Africa, China and the United States. Cities attract, yet disturb and disgust. Bright lights and the infectious buzz of social interaction attract people to cities, yet their undersides and dark spaces are both strangely attractive and repulsive. The discursive, problematized readings presented of developing and developed cities in India, China, Europe and Japan are mostly ambivalent about dystopia, excepting the case of Johannesburg, South Africa, where Jennifer Robinson argues for an anti-dystopian stance, and calls for ‘spaces of hope’ (David Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 2000). Noir Urbanisms is concerned primarily with the visual imagery of dystopia in the twentieth-century city, through film, photography, art and popular culture. Noir, a term for a cinematic genre, is employed here for a wider purpose, of studying light and dark spaces – visual and metaphorical – in the context of urban dystopia. These essays complemented my recent readings of Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Disenchanted Nights (1995) and Joachim Schlör's Nights in the Big City (1998), extending narratives of the diurnal in modernity, from the increasingly illuminated urban night into images of urban noir. Noir images of cities are similarly created by writing, historiography and, in the case of James Donald's essay about Vienna, ‘Sounds like hell’, by urban noise. Images are a form of representation which, in modernity, have become inseparable from the production and circulation of ideas about urbanism and the city. Noir images of urban dystopia are examined in this collection as a form of urban criticism, with its origins in the film and photography of the city.

The book presents a broad spectrum of material which will appeal to interdisciplinary readers. A random sampling of the 13-page index yields this patchwork image from A to Z: Aesthetics of noise, Zygmunt Baumann, the Citroën Factory, Dombivli Fast, the EPIC campaign, flânerie, Germany, Harvey's Spaces of Hope, interiors, Japan, Kaplan's Women in Film Noir, Daniel Liebeskind, the Mafia, newspaper reporting, organized crime, place and placelessness, rhizomes, salarymen, Twin Towers and urban crises, vigilante films, Warning from Space and Xiao Wu, the newspaper Yomiuri Shinbun and the TV series Zone Fighter.

Prakash introduces this line-up of 10 essays, united by their focus on representations of the city. The essays move from considering the images of the city to the imagined city: from ‘urban imaginations to urban imaginaries’. The contributors, based in four continents, are connected through interdisciplinary academe – History, Sociology, Geography, Anthropology, Film, Development and Latin American Studies, all urban studies in some form. Some authors trace the papers to a conference on Urban Dystopias held at Princeton in 2007 (Ambaras and Zhang). There are three themed sections of essays in the book; Modernism and Urban Dystopia, the Aesthetics of the Dark City and Imaging Urban Crisis. The first unpacks Lang's ‘Metropolis’ and Weimar (Kaes), with Donald on Noise, and Gallo on Mexico City. The dark city theme spans from post-socialism (Zhang) and Japanese pop culture (Tsutsui) to Delhi cinema (Mazumdar) and cinema geographies (Shiel). Then there is the section on imaging urban crisis, in which Delhi (Sundaram), Johannesburg (Robinson) and Tokyo (Ambaras) feature. Images of urban crisis function as urban allegories, expressing the fear of the unintended city, the city of slums and the media sensorium (p. 13). The kinds of urban crises addressed in this book range from the distresses of the modernist housing in the Tlatelolco disaster, Mexico City (Gallo) to friction, collision and the grotesque in Bombay Cinema (Mazumdar).

A highlight of the book for me is James Donald's essay ‘Sounds like hell’, which explores the dystopian noise of Vienna in early modernism (p. 31). As early as 1844, the philosopher Schopenhauer in Nuremberg had decried the ‘truly infernal’ sound of whips cracking in the narrow streets, and Theodor Lessing's 1908 book Noise: A Tirade against the Sounds of Our Life (Today) followed the protest. By 1910, Viennese professionals and intellectuals had formed an ‘Anti-Rowdy Campaign against Noise Brutality and Lack of Culture’. Vienna's streets were being given over to motorized traffic, and there was considerable resistance to the resultant urban Rüpel (rowdiness). Robert Musil wrote of the streets of Vienna in the 1920s, where ‘automobiles shot out of deep narrow streets into the shallows of bright squares. Dark clusters of pedestrians formed cloudlike strings.’ Musil then describes the sounds of noir urbanism: ‘Hundreds of noises wove themselves into a wiry texture of sound with barbs protruding here and there, smart edges running along it and subsiding again, with clear notes splintering off and dissipating’ (p. 37). Not merely an image of a dystopian urbanism, but a lesson in how to survive painfully the modern city of Vienna, David Vogel's 1928 Hebrew-language novel Married Love (p. 48) would describe the rays of an orange coloured light issuing from the luxurious cafes. It was a glaring arrogant light, so bright that when you entered it, your eyes shrank and blinked momentarily in pain. The sound image he describes is poignant: ‘Fragments of jazz, foxtrots and tangos came reeling from all directions, flying around you like invisible bats and leaving you slightly stunned, your arms and legs throbbing in time to the tunes. In the middle of all this the solitary policeman idly patrolling the street looked superfluous, pitiful and forlorn.’