metropolitan world atlas

I was recently credited, by no less an "authority" than wordspy.com "the word lover's guide to modern culture", with the invention of a new word, "architourist". I used it to describe a growing trend of people travelling from city to city primarily to visit prominent new work by architects such as Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas and the like. "Architecture groupies" would be another way to describe them.

Wordspy.com's most popular modern culture word (is there a contest?) is "metrosexual" which frankly, never did a thing for me. It refers to a kind of generic city-dwelling male and implies that the question of which city is irrelevant - as though the world's metropolises are indistinguishable from one another and their inhabitants are as well.

We are more likely to be, as Useful + Agreeable is, obsessed not with architecture and architects, but with cities themselves. The internet gives us instant video and images from around the world 24/7 and discount airlines give us unprecedented opportunities to visit other cities, often for the price of lunch. So we are given the impression, at least, of easy global access.

But where do we want to go today? What cities offer the kind of experience we seek? Which ones afford a kind of disaster tourism, gawking at mind-boggling density and urban chaos, and which ones are beacons of efficiency and rich urban cultures with lessons for us to bring back home?

With this in mind, it may be time to come up with a new word for those of us who spend our idle moments comparing the cities we live in (often unfavourably) with elsewhere, and wishing we could be somewhere else or at least that our city could be more like some other city we know or think we know. For us, the grass is not only greener on the other side, but the air is cleaner, the traffic moves faster, the economy is stronger and on and on... Just watching the international weather report can have us contemplating a move.

Let's call our tribe of habitual urban malcontents "Metro-Obsessives" or, perhaps more worryingly, I could name a new mental condition to describe the phenomenon - how about "Urban Fixation Disorder".

To help my fellow "Metro-Obsessives" is a timely new book ambitiously titled "Metropolitan World Atlas" by Dutch author and editor Arjen van Susteren . Within the atlas' 314 effeciently designed pages are a veritable world of information - at least all that fits. Using information compiled largely from internet based sources such as demographia.com, publicpurpose.com and weatherbase.com the book sets out for itself the unenviable task of cataloguing the totality of the world's relevant urban facts. It is an impressive and noble project in a time when comprehensive internationalist projects appear to be less popular than "us-vs-them" cultural analysis.

Beyond the laudable undertaking generally, extra credit must be given to the atlas' designer, Joost Grootens, who previously designed the KAN Atlas in 2003. With ingenious clarity and rare intuitive graphic based layouts the whole of human urban statistics can begin to be digested. On two page spreads over the last third of the book are world maps consisting primarily of variously sized orange dots representing the degrees to which a given city compares to others in each category. It is a bravely simple concept and refreshingly strong at communicating difference at a glance.

This and much more information is available in the "World Factbook" at cia.gov (yes, THE CIA, not the Culinary Institute of America, whose insights into cities would interest me more). It is not quite clear why the CIA would need such detailed information on Tehran, Pyongyang and other cities. Maybe they're metro-obsessives like me.

But if this information is available to all for free on the internet, it begs the question whether the new role for books is as editor and compiler of the web? In Useful + Agreeable's version of paper-rock-scissors, internet beats paper - every time. But the fact remains that the web is a terrible mess, so there is good value in employing an effective editor to it. For the most part, van Susteren has picked topics and set parameters intelligently. However, the maps which accompany each city in the first 226 pages all scream out for a "zoom in" button.

Like the CIA site's priorities, these maps are far too widely drawn and seem more interested in nearby infrastructure such as strategic sea ports and major and minor airports. However, for those of us considering only a touristic invasion, the real interest in cities lies within their streets and neighbourhoods - and their individuals - but perhaps that is Useful + Agreeable's territory.

If you are looking for a concise, well designed compilation of urban facts in book form, then click on the publishers' link below to get your hands on the Metropolitan World Atlas. If you are a metro-obsessive like me and yearn for a more intimate and privileged access to "the great cities of the world and the people who make them great", then you're already here...