By Mark Kingwell. Viking Canada, 304 pp, $34, hardcover

Erudite and shapeless, Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City mirrors the teeming complexity and conglomerate growth of its topic—the world’s great urban centres.

“The average hyperindustrial modern city is a cluster—or more likely, sprawl—of diverse and unconnected interests, linked by phone lines and shared sewage systems but otherwise exclusive and mute,” writes Mark Kingwell, a University of Toronto philosophy professor and cultural critic. “The city centre is a site of mixed functions layered over one another, no longer, as in early modern cities, differentiated by a formal architectural vocabulary but all inhabiting the same multipurpose function-boxes and distinguishing themselves by logos or brand identities.”

This could well be a rough description of Concrete Reveries. No ordinary manifesto, with a clear aim and a logical structure, it is instead a loose collection of musings on topics as varied as the art of walking in Manhattan, the poetry of Robert Frost, and the “deleuzoguattarian” theories of the deconstructionists (named, by the way, for philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari). It’s no surprise to find out, in the concluding “Bibliographic Essay”, that some of Kingwell’s chapters began as magazine articles; Concrete Reveries is itself a multipurpose function-box into which the author has shoehorned his life’s obsessions. Kingwell may take the gritty civility of New York City and the instant-slum futurism of Shanghai as his contrasting urban exemplars, but his thoughts range all over the globe—and all over the map.

And yet his brilliance sparks off every page. Daunting though its format might seem to those hoping for a coherent analysis of the metropolis and its problems, Concrete Reveries will delight those who seek questions rather than answers. And, in the end, isn’t our experience of urban life a patchwork of fleeting impressions, momentary encounters, elusive pleasures, and short, sharp shocks? We might think that we know our city—and cities in general—but Kingwell’s book reflects our reality back to us from a multitude of startling, perplexing, and ultimately thought-provoking angles.