The New Yorker: “An odd, fascinating new book…”

In the current issue of The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann takes stock of the recent(-ish) crop of urbanism books, alternately praising and dismissing Richard Florida, Edward Glaeser, Joel Garreau, and John Kasarda as too boosterish and dogmatic, while saving his kindest words for Arrival City author Doug Saunders (who wrote a truly mind-opening book) and… me. Aerotropolis is “an odd, fascinating new book,” Lemann writes, odd because of its schizoid personality, and fascinating when seen through my eyes. As he adds later:

The second book contained within the covers of “Aerotropolis” is Lindsay’s, and it is an enthralling and only intermittently dogmatic tour of some of the gigantic, no-context sites that globalization has created, such as the all-night flower auction in Amsterdam that gets roses from Kenya to Chicago before they’ve wilted, the FoxConn factory in China where iPods and iPhones are made, and the mega-hospital Bumrungrad in Bangkok, which performs cut-rate major surgery on the uninsured from all over the world. You can get some feeling for the bizarreness of this new world from Lindsay’s description of New Songdo: “an English-speaking island stocked with prep schools from Boston, malls from Beverly Hills, and a golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus… New Songdo cherry-picks the signatures of universally beloved cities and recycles them as building blocks. The city trumpets itself as an amalgam of New York, Venice, and Savannah.”