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Soft City
"A tour de force" (Jan Morris) from the winner of the national book critics circle award. Jonathan Raban's vivid, often funny portrait of metropolitan life is part reportage, part incisive thesis, part intimate autobiography, and a much-quoted classic of the literature of the city. In an age when the big city has fewer friends than ever, this is a passionate and imaginative defense of city life, its "unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom." Soft City, first published in 1974, records one man's attempt to plot a course through the urban labyrinth. Holding up a revealing mirror to the modern city, Raban finds it a stage for a demanding and expressive kind of personal drama. Readers of Arabia (1979), Old Glory (1982), Hunting Mister Heartbreak (1990), and, more recently, Badlands (1997) will be delighted to discover this early work by one of the most inventive and enjoyable writers of our time.
246 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
About the author
Jonathan Raban
37 books179 followersBritish travel writer, critic and novelist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan...
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
October 17, 2014
Written in 1974, this ambitious study of the modern city in its psychological significance is still an exciting and illuminating read 40 years on, even though its mission - to capture the impact of the overwhelming diversity of the city-experience on the individual 'citizen' - must have been as impossible to achieve in a finite text then as it clearly is today. If the effort is ultimately doomed, then Raban is the right guide to follow on the attempt. He brings to the task the audacity of a 30 years old independent writer, a readiness to disclose his personal intimate experience together with detached erudition, and an incisive analytical mind. The author states the premise of his endeavour in the introduction:
"Signals, styles, systems of rapid, highly-conventionalised communication, are the lifeblood of the big city. ... The city, our great modern form, is soft, amenable to a dazzling and libidinous variety of lives, dreams, interpretations."
The book then proceeds by a sequence of independent chapters that investigate different facets of the soft city - London, mostly - as it employs methods from discussions of urban planning-literature and cultural criticism to original literary fiction based on Raban's personal experience (in "The Foreign Girl"). Chapter Two, "The City as Melodrama" argues that city dwellers often stage-act in a way that emphasizes moral extremes - much against common rationalistic or dystopian models of the city population. "Greenhorns" traces the fate of the immigrant in the city, with his/her heightened expectations - Raban was one of them. "The Emporium of Styles" emphasizes the importance of surfaces and appearances in the city - an issue that has become only more pressing by now (2013). "The Moroccan Birdcage" is an investigation of urban diversity, rich in concrete descriptions from 1974 London strets. "No Fixed Address" discusses isolation and coping strategies such as partner-search agencies. "The Magical City" shows that magical modes of thinking are a coping strategy to deal with the overwhelming complexity of the city environment, thwarting the utopias of the city as rationalistic cultural counter-weight to primitive nature in the countryside. In "Two Quarters" and the subsequent "One American City", Raban describes his experiences of Islington, Earl's Court, and Boston, respectively, trying to contrast different types of Place in the city. While limited by the concreteness of the When and Where, the contrast between the accounts of Islington and Earl's Court is nevertheless intriguing:
"It is possible to tell the story of the square in [Islington]; it has a history, and its fortunes have been relatively consistent ... But the square in Earl's Court does not lend itself to narrative. Its history stopped when householders could no longer afford squads of servants - somewhere between 1920 and 1930. Now it needs a patchwork quilt of intrusions, guesses and observations to get anywhere near its truth. It is diverse, random, out of time, even out of place (it is too many different times and places)."
In the final chapter, "A City Man", the author confesses
"I belong to the city in a way that I have been able to belong to very little else. I respect its rules and special skills. Competence in the uniquely imaginative and creative life of a big city is something to be proud of, and even the oddest, most ramshackle characters can possess it. More than anything else, I would like, sometime, to be a capable citizen. ... each city-life is an intricate pattern of belonging interspersed with these stretches of locomotion when one is stripped of credentials and credibility, when on sees oneself as just another moon-face in the crowd. ... Home, alone, is a place for picking thorns out of one's skin, for finding oneself again."
This is a predicament that many readers will be able to relate to, and the book left me with a sharpened sense of my existence as a city-dweller. The inherent difficulty of a book like "Soft City" is that whenever we try to fix the time and place of a description of the city - "now", "here", "me" - the substance of diversity is immediately lost, and some of Raban's 40 year old descriptions do ring a bit irrelevant now. But this is a necessary failure, and one from which the reader can learn.
"Signals, styles, systems of rapid, highly-conventionalised communication, are the lifeblood of the big city. ... The city, our great modern form, is soft, amenable to a dazzling and libidinous variety of lives, dreams, interpretations."
The book then proceeds by a sequence of independent chapters that investigate different facets of the soft city - London, mostly - as it employs methods from discussions of urban planning-literature and cultural criticism to original literary fiction based on Raban's personal experience (in "The Foreign Girl"). Chapter Two, "The City as Melodrama" argues that city dwellers often stage-act in a way that emphasizes moral extremes - much against common rationalistic or dystopian models of the city population. "Greenhorns" traces the fate of the immigrant in the city, with his/her heightened expectations - Raban was one of them. "The Emporium of Styles" emphasizes the importance of surfaces and appearances in the city - an issue that has become only more pressing by now (2013). "The Moroccan Birdcage" is an investigation of urban diversity, rich in concrete descriptions from 1974 London strets. "No Fixed Address" discusses isolation and coping strategies such as partner-search agencies. "The Magical City" shows that magical modes of thinking are a coping strategy to deal with the overwhelming complexity of the city environment, thwarting the utopias of the city as rationalistic cultural counter-weight to primitive nature in the countryside. In "Two Quarters" and the subsequent "One American City", Raban describes his experiences of Islington, Earl's Court, and Boston, respectively, trying to contrast different types of Place in the city. While limited by the concreteness of the When and Where, the contrast between the accounts of Islington and Earl's Court is nevertheless intriguing:
"It is possible to tell the story of the square in [Islington]; it has a history, and its fortunes have been relatively consistent ... But the square in Earl's Court does not lend itself to narrative. Its history stopped when householders could no longer afford squads of servants - somewhere between 1920 and 1930. Now it needs a patchwork quilt of intrusions, guesses and observations to get anywhere near its truth. It is diverse, random, out of time, even out of place (it is too many different times and places)."
In the final chapter, "A City Man", the author confesses
"I belong to the city in a way that I have been able to belong to very little else. I respect its rules and special skills. Competence in the uniquely imaginative and creative life of a big city is something to be proud of, and even the oddest, most ramshackle characters can possess it. More than anything else, I would like, sometime, to be a capable citizen. ... each city-life is an intricate pattern of belonging interspersed with these stretches of locomotion when one is stripped of credentials and credibility, when on sees oneself as just another moon-face in the crowd. ... Home, alone, is a place for picking thorns out of one's skin, for finding oneself again."
This is a predicament that many readers will be able to relate to, and the book left me with a sharpened sense of my existence as a city-dweller. The inherent difficulty of a book like "Soft City" is that whenever we try to fix the time and place of a description of the city - "now", "here", "me" - the substance of diversity is immediately lost, and some of Raban's 40 year old descriptions do ring a bit irrelevant now. But this is a necessary failure, and one from which the reader can learn.
March 5, 2018
A frustrating read, partly because I was expecting it to be so good (and much of it was very good). His analysis is often really on point and he has a lot of great observations about how we interact with and live in the city. But he also seems like a man I really wouldn't like. I guess it's because a lot of what he's observing he's also very judgemental about, in a way he always frames as something inapplicable to himself. He talks about the shallowness of people's dress, objects, materialism and such as a way for them to be defined. But he also then talks about how a commitment against materialism and in favour of simple living is another faddish way to live shallowly (and goes on about the ugliness of the Hare Krishnas and digs on vegetarians and people who smoke "a joint of marijuana"). Rather than being open-minded a lot of the time he sees himself as being solely correct. For example, he digs on a lot of the Bohemian type for being "uninterested in politics", their literary tastes are "fads" or "crazes", and his class and race politics are also pretty shoddy. Though there are plenty of things to like in this book, the author isn't one of those things.
January 30, 2022
Soft City by Jonathan Raban felt like a natural predecessor to Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City. Published in 1974, many of his observations could have easily been written today in New York, London, or any other metropolitan city. Rather than Laing’s focus on individual lives, Raban takes a theory-based approach to study the kind of intense isolation bred by cities. He contrasts the imagined “soft city,” in which we imagine the constant presence of crowds must translate directly into connections and friendship, to the real place, which in many ways can feel more isolating than true, physical remoteness.
“To live in a city is to live in a community of people who are strangers to each other. You have to act on hints and fancies, for they are all that the mobile and cellular nature of city life will allow you. You expose yourself in, and are exposed to by others, fragments, isolated signals, bare disconnected gestures, jungle cries and whispers that resist all your attempts to unravel their meaning, their consistency. As urban dwellers, we live in a world marked by the people at the next table, the man glimpsed on the street with a bowler and a hacksaw and never seen again, the girl engrossed in her orgasm across the stair-well. So much takes place in the head, so little is known and fixed.”
“To live in a city is to live in a community of people who are strangers to each other. You have to act on hints and fancies, for they are all that the mobile and cellular nature of city life will allow you. You expose yourself in, and are exposed to by others, fragments, isolated signals, bare disconnected gestures, jungle cries and whispers that resist all your attempts to unravel their meaning, their consistency. As urban dwellers, we live in a world marked by the people at the next table, the man glimpsed on the street with a bowler and a hacksaw and never seen again, the girl engrossed in her orgasm across the stair-well. So much takes place in the head, so little is known and fixed.”
December 2, 2016
A very frustrating read, particularly because it is clear that Raban is a capable writer, and probably some sort of capital-I intellectual. Clearly, the latter is not always a good thing. The whole thing is terribly overwritten, and soused in a by-the-by dédain for almost everyone who is not Jonathan Raban (in particular hippies: Raban really does not like hippies... I am guessing Raban was a four-cornered mathematical figure in those days).
Most of all, what is the point? After all those pages I'm not quite sure. Something about the fluidity of the city, its state of flux, its fluxicity: flux-city. Hardly a contribution that adds something to the discussion. What it is, really, is vast swathes of directionless prose. By chance I was rewatching Adaptation while I read this, and in that film Charlie Kaufman (as played by Nicholas Cage) denounces the book he is adapting (Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief) as "that sprawling New Yorker shit". That seems pretty apt here. Denounce is the wrong term though, because "shit" here should be read as a kind of catch-all classifier rather than as denunciation (Note the difference between "That game was exciting.. a lot of shit happened!" and the zen-ish mantra "Shit happens." Two different things. (Then of course there's also "the shit", which is actually positive, but I see no reason to go into that here.)) (At least I have the courtesy of using parentheses when I slip into diversions... when I sprawl.) So not a denunciation per se, and not a denunciation of Orlean, but let me be clear: I would be more than happy to denunciate Raban. So there.
And if you thought that last paragraph did not go anywhere: don't read Soft City.
Most of all, what is the point? After all those pages I'm not quite sure. Something about the fluidity of the city, its state of flux, its fluxicity: flux-city. Hardly a contribution that adds something to the discussion. What it is, really, is vast swathes of directionless prose. By chance I was rewatching Adaptation while I read this, and in that film Charlie Kaufman (as played by Nicholas Cage) denounces the book he is adapting (Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief) as "that sprawling New Yorker shit". That seems pretty apt here. Denounce is the wrong term though, because "shit" here should be read as a kind of catch-all classifier rather than as denunciation (Note the difference between "That game was exciting.. a lot of shit happened!" and the zen-ish mantra "Shit happens." Two different things. (Then of course there's also "the shit", which is actually positive, but I see no reason to go into that here.)) (At least I have the courtesy of using parentheses when I slip into diversions... when I sprawl.) So not a denunciation per se, and not a denunciation of Orlean, but let me be clear: I would be more than happy to denunciate Raban. So there.
And if you thought that last paragraph did not go anywhere: don't read Soft City.
January 12, 2023
This book is truly unlike anything I’ve ever read, alone in its style and perspective. This is an oddly personal story for me, because I bought this for a dollar at a used bookstore in Ithaca, NY, just because it had a pretty cover and the word “city”. I didn’t know how it would change things.
My previous points from the update still stand; however I truly appreciate the book as a whole outside of its dated content at times. If you’ve ever felt like an outsider, a foreigner, a lonely observer inside your own mind, or someone who looks to closely at others: this book is for you. It also talks A LOT about London so I’d suggest getting familiar with the general layout. Raban’s words are well crafted, and although a bit dense at times, it gave me a good think and perspective the whole time.
“Soft City” is one of those books that I think I’ll just keep coming back to for the rest of my life. I have always been continually fascinated by the intertwining of a human life and the environment that shapes it. Raban brings up the point that as much as humans like to create cities and spaces and culture, the elusive concept of a city shapes us just as much.
My previous points from the update still stand; however I truly appreciate the book as a whole outside of its dated content at times. If you’ve ever felt like an outsider, a foreigner, a lonely observer inside your own mind, or someone who looks to closely at others: this book is for you. It also talks A LOT about London so I’d suggest getting familiar with the general layout. Raban’s words are well crafted, and although a bit dense at times, it gave me a good think and perspective the whole time.
“Soft City” is one of those books that I think I’ll just keep coming back to for the rest of my life. I have always been continually fascinated by the intertwining of a human life and the environment that shapes it. Raban brings up the point that as much as humans like to create cities and spaces and culture, the elusive concept of a city shapes us just as much.
January 6, 2013
Read because of the following sentence in an article on "How digital is making maps personal" [http://www.theliteraryplatform.com/20...] :
"Author Jonathan Raban’s 1974 book ‘Soft City’ is a fascinating exploration of the relation between the imagined, personal, “soft city” and the physical built environment – the “hard city”"
I enjoyed the book as I was reading it, but I don't find it particularly memorable. It was written in the 1970s and it's interesting to read from a "how times have changed" perspective as well. Some interesting observations, particularly about the different perspectives different people (recent arrivals versus old timers) can have about the same place.
"Author Jonathan Raban’s 1974 book ‘Soft City’ is a fascinating exploration of the relation between the imagined, personal, “soft city” and the physical built environment – the “hard city”"
I enjoyed the book as I was reading it, but I don't find it particularly memorable. It was written in the 1970s and it's interesting to read from a "how times have changed" perspective as well. Some interesting observations, particularly about the different perspectives different people (recent arrivals versus old timers) can have about the same place.
September 9, 2019
'For at moments like this, the city goes soft; it awaits the imprint of an identity. For better or worse, it invites you to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape you can live in. You too. Decide who you are, and the city will again assume a fixed form round you. Decide what it is, and your own identity will be revealed, like a position on a map fixed by triangulation.'
Raban has very deep knowledge the issue that he is writing about and a swift, literary style of textual communication which creates a feeling that you are enveloped by the book and taken into the depths of the post-modern city (one of the first and best accounts to talk about it). In that sense, I would say the author is not grasping the subject but actually surfing on top of it.
Raban has very deep knowledge the issue that he is writing about and a swift, literary style of textual communication which creates a feeling that you are enveloped by the book and taken into the depths of the post-modern city (one of the first and best accounts to talk about it). In that sense, I would say the author is not grasping the subject but actually surfing on top of it.
November 5, 2012
i'm a big fan of raban's travel books, so came to soft city with some preconceived expectations. this is a totally different book than his travel adventures and it took me a chapter or two to really get into it, but i am enjoying it now. raban seems to be about the details in his travel books and that serves him well in soft city. he knows his cities and offers a down to earth narrative as to how a city operates, from a people point of view.
May 29, 2022
I didn’t enjoy Soft City. It’s basically part-memoir, part-urban history, part-anthropological commentary on the impact of city living on its inhabitants. On paper, it should have been right up my street. It covers some really interesting ground; essentially how city life has impacted and been impacted by its inhabitants - a topic I’ve never really stopped to consider before, but when I do seems absolutely ripe for analysis.
However, for a few reasons it really frustrated me. Firstly, and probably most importantly, the book is staggeringly over-written. Almost every sentence seems like it’s been fed through a thesaurus that was ordered to find the most obscure synonym available for every possible word. The structure of the book is also unnecessarily experimental, with different writing styles for each chapter. The overall feeling therefore is that it’s way too over-intellectualised.
For those reasons it never really held my attention. When it comes to non-fiction, I prefer to read writers who write for the sake of clarity of message. It feels like arrogance to do anything else, rather like you’re writing to deny people the opportunity to read your work if they don’t come equipped with a complex vocabulary. But that’s exactly how it felt to read this - like Raban was testing if I was worthy to read his work.
Another thing I didn’t really take from the book was it’s purpose. For a book that is trying to be a bit of everything, it doesn’t really succeed in being a good example of any of it. It’s a deeply impersonal memoir, combined with a vague anthropological commentary with woolly conclusions. Adding himself in to the book seems to add no discernible purpose as far as I can tell, and only highlights that I am missing detail about his life that would ordinarily be there in a memoir.
A disappointing book. 1 star.
However, for a few reasons it really frustrated me. Firstly, and probably most importantly, the book is staggeringly over-written. Almost every sentence seems like it’s been fed through a thesaurus that was ordered to find the most obscure synonym available for every possible word. The structure of the book is also unnecessarily experimental, with different writing styles for each chapter. The overall feeling therefore is that it’s way too over-intellectualised.
For those reasons it never really held my attention. When it comes to non-fiction, I prefer to read writers who write for the sake of clarity of message. It feels like arrogance to do anything else, rather like you’re writing to deny people the opportunity to read your work if they don’t come equipped with a complex vocabulary. But that’s exactly how it felt to read this - like Raban was testing if I was worthy to read his work.
Another thing I didn’t really take from the book was it’s purpose. For a book that is trying to be a bit of everything, it doesn’t really succeed in being a good example of any of it. It’s a deeply impersonal memoir, combined with a vague anthropological commentary with woolly conclusions. Adding himself in to the book seems to add no discernible purpose as far as I can tell, and only highlights that I am missing detail about his life that would ordinarily be there in a memoir.
A disappointing book. 1 star.
December 4, 2022
This book started out with some interesting insights into city life, specifically loneliness and expression of values/lifestyle in a society … but other than that I did not enjoy this read. To the modern reader, this book is extremely dated as questionable word choice and problematic societal and racial views litter the novel. I had to stop reading when the author used the N-word towards the end of the book. The structure of the book was awful and I found myself unsatisfied by most of the tangents. The “One American City” chapter was absolutely unreadable. For one, the author uses vastly different descriptions and observations when describing Boston compared to the rest of the book, which is focused on London. It was unnecessarily negative and harsh. I understand the book was written awhile ago so I sincerely hope the author has had a chance to visit the city again. The author makes critiques of American-specific urban landscape but is clearly woefully unequipped to have any meaningful discussion on the topic. I question why this chapter was added as it was a tone shift from the rest of the novel and was underbaked. Overall, there are way better books out there. Don’t waste your time on this one.
August 22, 2017
A philosophical treatise on the nature of cities. Written in 1974 and definitely feels dated. Also weirdly sexist and sexual in ways that it didn't need to be, which I think was partially the style of the time and partially just that weird older intellectual dude sometimes being a weird creep kinda deal. Aside from all that, it's super over-written and pretentious. There was a lot of really interesting stuff in here, but I think a lot of it was only interesting to me as an Urban Planning grad student and I couldn't in good conscious recommend this book to a friend.
March 3, 2024
Easily one of my books of the year (idec that it came out in the 70s). An immensely readable and quotable book on the nature of living in cities that draws from other literatures exactly when it needs to and otherwise lets Raban's screed breathe without allowing it to become pretentious or verbose. Impressively done, the perfect bridging point between semi-academic and autobiographical, a joy to read, an aspiration.
November 21, 2021
While the city as a subject could be any city, in this case it is mostly London in the 70s, and I admit I partially enjoyed it for the now historical descriptions of a city I would like to get to know better. This includes the details of of popular books at the time, fashion, and decoration (bamboo lamp shades in particular seem to have drawn his attention). But there are also some big ideas, and he returns to the idea that an individual's experience of the city is particular to their path through it. I found my mind going back through my own urban landscape and my emotional development through it, as a "greenhorn," a stranger, a resident, or a reinvention of myself. The fictional bit near the end lost me, and I agree with other readers that it's an uneven book, but I recommend it for all the ideas and evaluations it may trigger.
December 4, 2020
The best description of being new to a city I have ever read. When all is sound and light. And excitement.
I found myself skipping through the rest of the book which hasn't aged well but is a seemingly accurate depiction of what life in London in the 1970s was like.
I found myself skipping through the rest of the book which hasn't aged well but is a seemingly accurate depiction of what life in London in the 1970s was like.
December 26, 2017
As if Walter Benjamin hopped the channel, swapping Paris for London and the works of Karl Marx for those of Roland Barthes.
January 20, 2021
It's spectacular in some parts, but it's obvious that this man is a racist and rather a prude. Would be interesting to know what he thinks of London now.
September 21, 2021
A fruity mix of purple prose and a smattering of Barthes.
November 16, 2023
Norway
May 4, 2024
“[T]he very plastic qualities which make the city the great liberator of human identity also cause it to be especially vulnerable to psychosis and totalitarian nightmare”
January 13, 2023
At times the style is more complicated than it needs to be. Despite being written in the early seventies the subject matter seems even more relevant since the coming of the internet age. I wonder now though what is in the city's future as 'working from home' increases and people move back to the country and the greener suburbs.
January 27, 2016
Written in the early 1970's, The Soft City is a psychological look at the metropolis and its inhabitants, built around anecdote, impression and insight, almost exclusively based on London, with brief interludes into the America of Boston and New York.
The 'hard city' is the city of buildings and maps, the 'soft city' the one that "awaits the imprint of an identity...invites you to remake it". Essentially a series of related essays, Raban eschews the statistics that a sociologist would rely on and instead relies on his own experiences and a handful of sources and literary quotations.
As such, it's a hit an miss affair.
He nearly lost me in the first chapter where he used the example of an esoteric gang of thugs, The Envies, who attack random people just because they look relatively prosperous, to try and suggest that perhaps most muggings happen around entertainment areas like Soho because "the victims were chosen simply because they seemed to be enjoying themselves", rather than the more obvious reason that thy are out on the spend and have money in their pockets.
Things improve though, via an interesting look at the newcomer ('Greenhorn') to the city, and how it encourages us to make personas, become a character; like the fantasist Ronnie Kray projecting his elevated self-image as a 'gangster' onto the city, rather than appear as what he actually was, a slow-minded criminal thug.
Raban casts a few cursory looks at the thoughts and deeds of town planners and architects such as Mumford and Corbusier, mostly disparagingly, but on the whole the narrative comes from his own projections, his own 'soft city'. At times this leads to a faintly novelistic approach, even an overt one, such as the slightly unpleasant chapter about an Eastern European girl's fleeting visit to London.
Indeed Raban, though professing to love the city, does not seem to have much tolerance for his fellow citizens. One time he upbraids a source for adopting a tone of "unconsciously ferocious snobbery", and, though Raban might be conscious of his own snobbery, he often sneers at his fellow 'isolates'. The hippies and Hare Krishnas get a particular hosing down.
Because of this, despite his seeming detachment, an intolerant, fogeyish quality emerged at times.
The 'hard city' is the city of buildings and maps, the 'soft city' the one that "awaits the imprint of an identity...invites you to remake it". Essentially a series of related essays, Raban eschews the statistics that a sociologist would rely on and instead relies on his own experiences and a handful of sources and literary quotations.
As such, it's a hit an miss affair.
He nearly lost me in the first chapter where he used the example of an esoteric gang of thugs, The Envies, who attack random people just because they look relatively prosperous, to try and suggest that perhaps most muggings happen around entertainment areas like Soho because "the victims were chosen simply because they seemed to be enjoying themselves", rather than the more obvious reason that thy are out on the spend and have money in their pockets.
Things improve though, via an interesting look at the newcomer ('Greenhorn') to the city, and how it encourages us to make personas, become a character; like the fantasist Ronnie Kray projecting his elevated self-image as a 'gangster' onto the city, rather than appear as what he actually was, a slow-minded criminal thug.
Raban casts a few cursory looks at the thoughts and deeds of town planners and architects such as Mumford and Corbusier, mostly disparagingly, but on the whole the narrative comes from his own projections, his own 'soft city'. At times this leads to a faintly novelistic approach, even an overt one, such as the slightly unpleasant chapter about an Eastern European girl's fleeting visit to London.
Indeed Raban, though professing to love the city, does not seem to have much tolerance for his fellow citizens. One time he upbraids a source for adopting a tone of "unconsciously ferocious snobbery", and, though Raban might be conscious of his own snobbery, he often sneers at his fellow 'isolates'. The hippies and Hare Krishnas get a particular hosing down.
Because of this, despite his seeming detachment, an intolerant, fogeyish quality emerged at times.
July 1, 2016
The beginning sections of the book were well done, and the quick thumbnail sketch on the Kray brothers, and their many personae that city life facilitated was quite fascinating. The middle section was unfortunately dated and seemed to repeat the book's earlier thesis that city life opens the door to facile thinking about people and one's self. The closing Boston section was astute in its observations and pretty damned interesting in its argument that Boston isn't really a city on par with London or New York; rather it's a city that resisted the cacophony of big city life by instead allowing small towns and villages to keep their independent identities (Puritanesque thinking was Raban's conclusion) --ironically, today those folks who live outside of Boston proper will first tell strangers that they are from Boston rather than say Roxbury, or what have you. I rated the book three stars not because it was dated, but for the dog-chasing-its-tail quality that comes on strong in the middle of the book.
February 2, 2015
Soft in the title, refers to the people populating a city, in contrast to the hard construction materials of the built environment.
Raban seems to be saying, to understand the dynamics of a city, one should enter it as a migrant. Those born, and remaining, in a particular city and those arriving as tourists, are at a disadvantage. Their perceptions will not develop because they know the city too well, or not well enough, respectively.
Most of the book is about a London from the early 19th century to the mid 1970s. We are guided not only by Raban, but by Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth, along with numerous others from the cannon of city planning. There is a chapter on Boston, and many comments about New York.
Raban seems to be saying, to understand the dynamics of a city, one should enter it as a migrant. Those born, and remaining, in a particular city and those arriving as tourists, are at a disadvantage. Their perceptions will not develop because they know the city too well, or not well enough, respectively.
Most of the book is about a London from the early 19th century to the mid 1970s. We are guided not only by Raban, but by Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth, along with numerous others from the cannon of city planning. There is a chapter on Boston, and many comments about New York.
January 24, 2014
Beautifully written homage to the multi-faceted lives and possibilities offered by a city. Each chapter explores a different aspect of city life, and how it's characters build and enact their own 'soft city'.
January 28, 2014
A very accomplished book, left me with a lot to think about.
August 7, 2007
I read this book several years ago. A gentle reflection on city life.
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews