The historian Martin Staum once recommended a book to me, not because it contained the most insightful analysis, or the most up-to-date facts, but rather because of the way it was written. The author, Will Durant, wrote with such a sweeping majesty that the reader felt surrounded by the grandeur and pageantry of his subject, Louis XIV. It reminded us why we fell in love with history in the first place. Mark Kingwell begins Concrete Reveries with a similar passion for urban planning and architecture. His opening chapter is a love letter written perhaps to one of his favourite cities, New York, and it is hard not to yearn to spend an autumn there, strolling briskly down the streets he so carefully details. Similarly, his tales of getting lost on the soulless streets of Shanghai offer a different pedestrian experience.

In the following chapters, Kingwell attempts to dissect these two experiences and tease out the principles that made, for him, New York and Shanghai such contrasting cities. While each city represents an attempt to impose an artificial sense of order, a significant part of a citizen's experience in the city, he argues, rests in the role that boundaries, borders and traffic play. Thus, while similar books might focus on a city's buildings as an example of a particular architect or design movement, Kingwell focuses on the spaces between buildings, such as parks, plazas and boulevards that help people navigate and negotiate in the city. The chapters on New York and Shanghai are filled with wonderful examples of how this does and does not work.

Unfortunately, Kingwell is unable to keep up the grounded style of his earlier chapters. The abundance of abstract arguments, wrestling with the impact of the Cartesian grid, or the ideas of Heidegger on urban planning, cleave Concrete Reveries in two. The first half is warm and welcoming, but the second is too much cold argument. Just as Kingwell suggests that cities need rational conceptualization bonded by human experience, his later chapters would have been much tempered by the continued injection of more personal experiences.