Here I am, on top of a building in Hong Kong facing three kids who hold a selfie stick. It's making me go vertigo big time. I feel it in my chest, alongside my admiration for the fact that their legs don’t tremble like mine. In a second the picture of my kids pops up just as I close the browser. And it’s another strong stream of emotions that flushes through my body. A body that is still sitting on the same chair in Caffe Nero.
Life in the city is made possible by a fragile web of mutual trust, though a filigree of unspoken pleasantries, and an intricate meshwork of altruistic gestures. A permanent exchange of mute interrogations and minute nods between strangers forms a complex language that ensures the common conditions for survival. Of course we can see bodies looking past other bodies, trying to walk though, overtake, get there before them, without knowing very well where exactly is there, or whether there is in fact a desired place, or if what there is to do there is actually what needs doing. But that is always what is emphasised when talking about the city, isn't it, the rat race. It's a gross version of urban metabolism in which life and its processes are reduced to competition between contained unities, as if one had just arrived from a rushed reading of the theory of evolution and had forgotten how life is sustained by a convuluted tangle of symbiotic connections with other animals, pla...