Urban historians are at first likely to be frustrated by The City and the World. Gregor Hens is an essayist and translator – and, as his successful 2015 book Nicotine explored, a smoker – before he is an academic sociologist of cities. His latest non-fiction title reads more like a rummage through the diary of a Debord enthusiast than it does a robust scholarly argument. Its bibliography includes notorious city dreamers like Italo Calvino, Michel de Certeau and W.G. Sebald, and it bears the influence of rambling urban wanderers like Iain Sinclair and Will Self. Yet, if Hens treads the fine line between insight and indulgence that has always pestered psychogeographic writing, The City and the World also trips over that genre’s brooding circuity into something more expansive. Fitzcarraldo Editions attract readers with a high tolerance for indirection and the book requires both patience and persistence. But for all its narrative ambulation, Hens in the end weaves his fragments of text and image into a totality that will reward even the most rigorously empirical of urban historians.

The City and the World is a history of urban phenomenology: the question Hens asks is not ‘Is it worth looking for traces of our reality in maps?’ but ‘Wouldn’t it make more sense to search cities for traces of these maps?’ (p. 52). He is more interested in how we know the city than he is in any particular city itself, and it is apt that the book begins in Berlin’s public library. Its opening pages introduce the conceit that the world’s cities might all be knitted together in the same way that each library book must eventually connect to every other through the vast network of their footnotes and references. Moving us out of the reading room and through cities from Paris and Las Vegas to Tokyo and Shenzhen, it soon becomes apparent that the rest of The City and the World is an experiment to test out this principle. The statue of Simón Bolívar in front of Berlin’s Ibero-American Institute becomes a portal to Havana and Ottawa, where copies of the monument also stand (p. 18); the author’s childhood memories of a motorway junction on the outskirts of Cologne lead to the abandoned parking lots of Los Angeles and the ‘ouroboros’ of the Thames in central London (p. 42). Such sudden sidesteps between spaces that are formally comparable but geographically distant are made yet more disorienting by the omission of chapter numbers or headings. Hens’ dogged commitment to accuracy and anecdote feeds on an academic eye for detail, but he repeatedly refuses to order the chaos of urbanity. Instead, by tracking how ways of seeing have repeated across cities, with subtle similarities and differences in each location, The City and the World offers a contrapuntal take on conventional historiography. If there is meaning in Hens’ montage, this is never spelled out, but left to percolate in the seams that link it all together.

Perhaps Hens’ most powerful achievement is the way he compels his reader to ‘experience’ his book as though they were a pedestrian making their way through a twenty-first-century megalopolis. Such is the scope and scale of today’s global cities that we can never see these environments all in one go. Forever eluding this single snapshot, we can only intuit the urban totality through an accretion of instances, and the accumulating fragments of The City and the World – including its 105 photographs – are clearly designed to imitate this process. And yet, a meta-structure does slowly reveal itself as we move through the book, which begins with the street-level wanderings of the Situationists, lifts to the aerial views of urban planners like Le Corbusier, and rises further still into the atmosphere where Google Earth unrolls the planet’s surface like an urbanizing carpet. Hens revels in this pursuit while also lamenting the lived texture that is disappeared with each ascending perspective: The City and the World is a history of the human desire to see the whole city and the technologies that have promised – though never quite managed – to provide it.

Though it does not dominate the narrative, The City and the World is also guided by a dose of autobiography. About one hundred pages into the book, we realize Hens is writing during the COVID-19 lockdowns, which he treats not as a policy of population management, but a phenomenological event of global proportion. The pandemic was in some ways a photograph of both the city and the world, a slice of static time in the otherwise ceaseless rhythms of urbanization. Hens seizes it as an opportunity to intimate the totality that his own writerly composition reminds us can never be grasped outright, and he could be commenting on his own project when he writes that ‘art shows us something that the reality of our lives can only confirm theoretically’ (p. 169). The City and the World is no conventional urban history, but a meditation on how the city comes to know itself. It is one of those unusual books that stands up to scholarly reading while retaining the interested playfulness that makes urbanity such a source of hope.