Slow Burn City
09 March 2017Synopsis
With a new introduction for the paperback.
London is a supreme achievement of civilization. It offers fulfilments of body and soul, encourages discovery and invention. It is a place of freedom, multiplicity and co-existence. It is a Liberal city, which means it stands for values now in peril.
London has also become its own worst enemy, testing to destruction the idea that the free market alone can build a city, a fantastical wealth machine that denies too many of its citizens a decent home or living.
In this thought-provoking, fearless, funny and subversive book, Rowan Moore shows how London’s strength depends on the creative and mutual interplay of three forces: people, business and state. To find responses to the challenges of the twenty-first century, London must rediscover its genius for popular action and bold public intervention.
The global city above all others, London is the best place to understand the way the world’s cities are changing. It could also be, in the shape of a living, churning city of more than eight million people, the most powerful counter-argument to the extremist politics of the present.
Details
09 March 2017
9781447270201Reviews
Moore knows London better than most. There is a great argument in this book - and an important oneSunday Times
Rowan Moore's Slow Burn City: London in the Twenty-First Century is an architectural study in the noble tradition of Ian Nairn: a vivid, knowledgable, argumentative tour of a city changing perhaps faster than at any time in its historyDavid Kynaston, Observer
A political book in the best sense - helping us to imagine a better world, reminding us that ideas shape how we live and plotting a better future for London. It's also full of intriguing facts, always beautifully written and adventurously illustrated. Rowan Moore should be MayorAlain De Botton
Offers a tour of our streets that will make you look at London in a new light . . . Moore's book is impressive for what he is saying, and the way he says it . . . He gives the reader a new understanding of our metropolisCamden New Journal
