PD Smith

"In his dystopian novel The Sleeper Awakes, begun in 1899, HG Wells portrayed a future world in which vast machine-like cities were linked by air travel. Since then, no vision of the urban future has been complete without ubiquitous air transport, from Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926), in which gnat-like aircraft soar among the skyscrapers, to the police spinners of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982). In 1997 JG Ballard predicted that "the airport will be the true city of the 21st century". Now John Kasarda, an American management consultant and academic, is jetting around the world showing politicians and business leaders how Ballard's prediction is about to come true."

My Guardian review of Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next by John D Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, and The New North: The World in 2050 by Laurence C. Smith is here.

The Times Literary Supplement has just published my review of the Encyclopedia of Urban Studies, ed by Ray Hutchison, a major two volume reference work.

My piece is not online but you can read a somewhat longer version here on my site.

Now the whole world can see the chaos out of which my writing emerges, thanks to Kate Donnelly who has interviewed me for her fascinating website fromyourdesks.com.

Writing a book is a solitary process. For months and often years, the book only exists in the writer's mind. Sometimes, as you write, that book can seem like a mirage on the horizon, its form shimmering and changing before your eyes. Believe me, it's disconcerting. But you press on.

Over time, as the words flow and the pages increase, the book takes shape and becomes more substantial, more real. But for me the book doesn't really come alive until it has a cover. I've been working on my current book - a history of cities - for about three years now. It's more or less written, although there are still a few straggling, wayward sections to finish.

And now it has a cover. My editor at Bloomsbury Publishing emailed it to me a day or so ago. I'm very pleased with it. In fact, I think it's rather wonderful.

Pre-order at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

As part of my research on cities I've been reading Restless Cities, edited by Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart, just published by Verso. It's a wonderful series of meditations on the experience of the city that communicates "a sense of the metropolis as a site of endless making and unmaking". Contributors include Chris Petit, Marshall Berman, Patrick Keiller, Geoff Dyer, Michael Newton, and Iain Sinclair.

Michael Sheringham's piece on "Archiving" was immensely rich and suggestive in its exploration of the city as a repository of memories, as "layer upon layer of compacted material detail". I was particularly struck by his idea that as well as the written history of a city, there is a unique and personal history experienced by each inhabitant - the Tube station where you met your lover on the first date, the street where a grandparent used to live, the anonymous office block where you used to work. The city's street corners are dense with histories both written and unwritten. The city, says Sheringham, is "a memory machine."

It reminded me of Calvino's beautiful fantasy, Invisible Cities, in which he says that a city’s past is written into its fabric like the lines on a labourer’s hand, “in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”

You can read my review of Restless Cities on the Guardian's website.