Discussion
THREAD
1/
I rarely do book reviews but this book was so good I needed to share.
Some books give you ideas, some books give you beautiful writing, very occasionally, you get both at once and then rarer still, you get an author who is also willing to tell you exactly what they think. How to Build a City by Gabriella Bennett is that book.
#Books #BookReview #Writing #WritingCommunity #Scotland #News #Germany #Japan #Sweden #Architecture
2/
Bennett travels to cities under pressure and in each place she finds people doing the very human work of trying to make change. In Kiruna in the far north of Sweden, a mining company is moving an entire town away from damaged land while the mine continues to eat into indigenous life. In Japan, she examines loneliness and architecture's part in that.
3/
In Germany, how cities can be gendered - subway routes, underpasses, living spaces designed without women in mind - and what is being done to change that. In Ukraine, regeneration in the middle of devastation. And woven through all of it, her own hometown of Glenrothes which is where Bennett's thinking about the built environment began.
4/
This is nonfiction that is genuinely expansive, you learn an enormous amount, but it never loses its human scale. And change is not simply presented as a series of successes, the full complexity is on the page, the challenges and disappointments are in every chapter as honestly as the progress is.
It's a book full of hope but at no point does Bennett simply tell you to feel hopeful, instead she shows you what people are doing in these places, and the hope arrives on its own.
5/
Nonfiction can hedge, disappear behind the material but Bennett has clearly thought hard about complicated dynamics: colonialism, displacement, belonging and she is willing to say what she believes. She is, plainly, someone who cares and that takes integrity
It's rare to read writing this good. Every page had me smiling at turns of phrase, the precision, the humour and I got that feeling we all get as writers when someone nailed it, jealousy that it was someone else who wrote it and not me
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
