A weary traveller arrives in a town at night. He is a stranger from afar, and he is alone. He knocks at doors, asking where he can stay, until he finds someone who has room to house him for the night. He is given food and lodging, and stories are exchanged: stories of here, and stories of there. The traveller leaves again in the morning to resume his journey.

Perhaps the traveller reveals himself to be a king, or a magician, and the host family receives an astonishing reward. Perhaps he is a figure of darkness, a disturbing new presence in the town's otherwise humdrum life. Either way, a tale can begin from there.

Contemporary, capitalist, society is conspicuous in its indifference to the virtue of hospitality, which has lain at the centre of most other cultures. Across history, and in many different places, the idea of providing food, shelter and cash to strangers in need has played an obvious and important economic role. More than this, it has brought together strangers in intimate settings, and provided a vital channel for news, culture and ideas to be exchanged.

The magnificence of many of the caravanserais built across the medieval Muslim empires lay not in the private quarters provided to travellers, but in the prominence of the poets, musicians and philosophers who congregated in the courtyards to talk to guests and provide entertainment. Through the sarais, musical styles travelled across enormous geographical zones, politics and new technology were transmitted and discussed, poems and stories were spread, and philosophical ideas were communicated.

The ethos of hospitality was considered to be central to those earlier forms of globalisation, not just because it made journeys economically viable for those who could not afford to pay for weeks or months of accommodation, but also because it demanded a certain openness of spirit, both in those who provided hospitality and in those who received it. It demanded that both parties expose themselves to the foreign and walk away, possibly, changed.

Ironically, this same culture also worships the extraordinary creativity that sometimes arose from an earlier ethos of hospitality. Many of the great modern European thinkers and artists, if they were not independently wealthy, were only capable of their achievements because other people took care of their material requirements. Marx was supported throughout much of his life by his friend Engels. says

"His expert borrowing skills kept him from ever becoming completely destitute ... In Paris, Maria and Eugene Jolas nursed Joyce during his long years of writing Finnegans Wake. Were it not for their unwavering support (along with Harriet Shaw Weaver's constant financial support), there is a good possibility that his books might never have been finished or published."

while the says

"The central figure in Vincent van Gogh's life was his brother Theo, an art dealer with the firm of Goupil & Cie, who continually and selflessly provided financial support."

That the much-maligned "freeloader" actually lies at the centre of European culture, and has been responsible for some of its most profound ideas and works of art, reminds us of a number of things.

Firstly, that any idea of freedom must include the freedom to be poor - that a free society cannot call itself such if it removes every possibility for people without money to create an existence for themselves. Secondly, that in seeking to do away with the need for such dependencies as those enjoyed by Marx, Joyce and Van Gogh, European societies also struck at the heart of their own creativity. And thirdly, that contemporary societies might have much to learn from all those other cultures in which willful poverty - as chosen by hermits, ascetics, monks etc - and the hospitality that sustained it were prominent social forms.

To this I add just a few notes:

-- in India are among the most wealthy and successful businesspeople. They control the majority of the diamond trade, and are prominent in most industries, and have a culture of money and display. In line with the ascetic, non-violent strain that is also crucial to their culture, however, it is not uncommon for Jains to give away their entire fortune and to wander for the rest of their lives as ascetic monks, sometimes electing, as an ultimate form of non-violence against the world, to end their lives through starvation. Suketu Mehta's recent book, , contains an amazing account of a billionaire diamond merchant from Bombay who, with his entire family, has renounced life, given away their money and become travelling Jain monks who walk barefoot across India. Quite obviously, this ascetic way of life has its own culture and lifestyle, and a large body of people inside and outside it who create it, help it, and allow it to exist.

-- When I was in Turkey I discovered that most of the academics I met in Istanbul were sponsored by other people: friends, ex-lovers, patrons. The $400-a-month wages at the state universities are inadequate for a city whose prices are not much lower than Barcelona, and yet corporate wages may be very high. A number of people doing corporate jobs supplement the wages of friends doing academic jobs so that they may devote themselves to this work.

-- Squatting has been in the news a lot recently ( and ). This is not the place to give a history of squatting in the west - the is a start - but it is clear that squatting is a deeply interesting counter-culture in the current context. Like the culture of , which is closely associated with it, squatting calls into question the nature of the property-society, the accepted goals of people in such societies (e.g. to own property), and the idea of scarcity that underpins much of the rhetoric of such a society. Like free software again, squatters have tried to resurrect ideas of sharing and hospitality in societies where those ideas have been significantly marginalised.

This has been the long-term focus of the work of .

"The fact that most contemporary military operations are staged in cities suggests an urgent need to reflect on an emergent relationship between armed conflicts and the built environment. Contemporary urban warfare plays itself out within a constructed, real or imaginary architecture, and through the destruction, construction, reorganization, and subversion of space. As such, the urban environment is increasingly understood by military thinkers not simply as the backdrop for conflict, nor as its mere consequence, but as a dynamic field locked in a feedback-based relationship with the diverse forces operating within it – local populations, soldiers, guerrilla fighters, journalists and photographers, and humanitarian agents. This essay belongs to a larger investigation of the ways in which contemporary military theorists are conceptualizing the urban domain. What are the terms they are using to think about cities? What does the language employed by the military to describe the city to themselves (for example, at international conferences dealing with urban warfare) and to the general public (most often through the media) tell us about the relationship between organized violence and the production of space? What does this language tell us about the military as an institution? Not least important is the question of the role of theory in all these operations."

Great cities like London, New York and Tokyo loom large in our imaginations. They are the places people still associate with fortune, fame and the future. They can dominate national economies, and politics. The last half century has been their era, as the number of cities with more than 10 million people grew from two to 20, as now famous names like Rio, Mexico City and Mumbai joined the list. But with all respect to the many science-fiction novelists who have envisioned a future of increasingly dominant urban giants, their day is over. The typical growth rate of the population within a megacity has slowed from more than 8 percent in the '80s to less than half that over the last five years, and their number is expected to stagnate in the next quarter century. Instead, the coming years will belong to a smaller, far humbler relation—the Second City.

Ghaziabad, for instance, the Indian "boom town" it mentions, may bear a different name from Delhi, and even lie in a different state, but it is fully part of the Delhi metropolitan zone, whose apartment blocks, warehouses, wholesale markets, truck stops and factories continue unbroken for hours as you drive out of Delhi proper.

Once again, I would refer readers to for a sense of how such massive metropolitan zones operate. At a time such as this, when cities are so dominant in world systems, it is important to think about the main metropolitan hubs as global force fields, rather than simply as delimited geographical zones.

These thinkers were not convinced that the European idea of the nation state would be the best one for . The ways of life in the country were too varied. There were tribal communities in the country, whose legal system was based on the blood feud. The Sunni Muslim majority had elements that supported law, and others that imagined a system of liberal laws. There was no way of bringing these things together.

The only solution, therefore, was to imagine a system of local, provisional legal systems. The nation would be imagined not as a single legal zone, but one with several overlapping legal modes. This was to some extent the idea behind a .

There is an assumption that many problems are so big and complex and cross-border (think climate change) that they cannot be solved by a single country, or by a group of countries, and that a sort of global governance is the only possible vehicle for solving them.

Let's call it "global federalism", she suggests, as in the opposite of "global government": "Many countries have not signed the Kyoto protocol because at a national level it's often too difficult to commit to such engaging policies. But we could start experimenting with smaller-scale global agreements - among cities or regions". The idea is that big cities and regions, more than nations and international institutions, can be the engine of problem-solving on a global scale.

On his excellent blog, , Dan Hill comments,

It's actually an attractive idea as there's a genuine sense of meaningful, local, civic value involved at the scale of the city - and thereby rejecting individualist or libertarian politics. It certainly tends to find fertile soil within mainland Europe, with a history of city state organisation, and a robust, respected, metropolitan urban culture. The more powerful idea is the sense of shared urban experience from Amsterdam to Sao Paulo, Sydney to Helsinki, Manchester to Milan, Seattle to Shanghai, and so on. The notion of a network of cities extending their history of trading partnerships more progressively into areas of cultural and political collaboration is too delicious to ignore. So it's just a little bit thrilling to hear the mayor of Milan beginning to make the case.

The architecture of Yamasaki and its unfortunate dance with death has one more crucial piece that you forgot to add in your notes. He was also the well-intentioned (as always) designer of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis Missouiri, built in the late 50s. A modernist dream dedicated to social engineering, the housing project was to be the bromide that would solve racial segregation, urban poverty, lead to a brave new world...

The interesting post-narrative here is that that Mohammed Atta—the terrorist who flew one of the planes into the WTC—had trained as an architect before embarking on his short-lived career as pilot-terrorist. And it may not be too much of a stretch to imagine that he had some knowledge of Yamaski’s work and its suicidal tendencies.

So the question really becomes what kind of politics is embedded in our international style of architectural terrorism?

The towers were designed by Minoru Yamasaki, an American architect born to Japanese parents in Seattle in 1912. His parents were poor, and could not afford to send him to university. Who knows if this is why he seemed to become so impressed by wealth and influence. He came to specialise in buildings symbolising total, impregnable power, and he liked to work with the people in charge of the world.

These buildings proved to be mouth-watering targets for terrorists.

-- In the early 1960s, Yamasaki designed an airport for Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. Dhahran was a secure city that housed the corporate compound of Saudi Aramco, the controllers of Saudi oil, and Yamasaki’s airport became an important Saudi and American military airbase. It played host, in 1996, to a massive truck bomb attack that killed nineteen American airmen.

-- Yamasaki built the tallest building in Madrid, the Torre Pablo Picasso (shown above). This building is still standing only because police intercepted in 1999 the enormous cache of explosives that ETA had intended for it.

-- And then, two years later, his towers fell in New York.

It is common knowledge that the desire to build the tallest building arises from a self-confidence that has parted ways with reality and become transformed into a mania for immortality. Such mania often destroys itself in less time than it takes to complete a tall building. This is why the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, conceived during the exuberant 1920s, were completed only amid the devastation of the Depression; and why the confident world that envisioned the World Trade Center and the Sears Tower was swept away in another crash before they opened. The triumphal Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur were completed amid the desolation of an Asian financial crisis.

As we know from the deep feelings and furious debate surrounding the fate of the site vacated by the World Trade Center, architecture is always political, even before terrorists decide to strike it. I suppose the question is: what kind of politics is embedded in our international style of soaring glass and steel?

The images that capture most interestingly the uncanny, amnesiac intensity of the contemporary global city come usually, for me, from China. Here I'll just mention two artists in this regard, but there are many others who spring to mind. One place to check out more such people is an interesting recent book, .

The image above is taken from Jia Zhangke's ("The World", 2004). The film depicts the lives of workers in a theme park outside Beijing where the world's great monuments are spectacularly recreated and where, as the park's slogan goes, you can therefore "See the world without leaving Beijing".

The film is not about homogenization. It is about a particular, wry, relationship to the fading urban grandeur of Europe. It stages, simultaneously, a Chinese awe for the iconic power of the urban past - from the pyramids to the Twin Towers - and the power of new Chinese productivity to easily replicate all those triumphs and thereby evacuate them of their aura.

In the soundtrack, Beethoven becomes muzak, a mere soundtrack to the theme park, which is a musical metaphor for what has happened visually through these buildings. The buildings - St Peter's in Rome, Pisa's leaning tower - are also recreated much smaller than original size, as if there is a literal belittling of the grandeur of the past. But the park's performers - from all over China and also Russia - are still struggling to hold their heads up to the world, for the cool spectacle conceals a human reality of great turbulence.

, whose photograph is shown above, is a young photographer whose interest is precisely this latter point. What kind of relationship can a human being have with this monstrous reality all around? How do the tender assurances of intimate life connect to the raging unpredictability of what lies beyond the window pane? His photographs stage the playful desires of our relationships to enormous cities, and the almost suicidal danger that accompanies them.

He has a beautiful way of understanding the ambiguity of the human being in this new urban environment. The human is poised between steel and flesh, always trying to keep up with the merciless ballistics of contemporary life, and yet so obviously, fundamentally, flesh.

The passion and intensity of this imagery is, I find, spellbinding. It raises the possibility for me that, much as China produces all the goods we consume, it might also begin to produce the ideas and images through which we can understand the world we have entered into. These ideas and images will be uncomfortable in many parts of the world, however. There is something in them that flattens out European history completely, for instance, and reduces Europe, humiliatingly, to empty cypher.

They’ve painted chevrons on the road.
You keep two
between you and the car in front
so the traffic doesn’t
bunch. It’s a little difficult at first, but
You soon get used to it,
and it
improves safety.

Safety needs improving:
You always need a new version
Of it.

They said it
Will be fine tomorrow. Cold, now: the vapour
moon already, and
A hundred aeroplane tracks:
White powder marks of the sky’s nails
Meshing the evening and dispersing
Into unreal clouds
Not cirrus nor cumulus.

It’s amazing how fast they work. I remember this place
before, and now look
At it.
A hill of mud with the lanes
already marked out, fluorescent plastic sprouting,
the exhausted machines silent at this hour. I suppose it
Will cut down journey times when it’s
Finished.

The forlorn larch.

Those words came into my head – there’s something
sometimes about our countryside, when you drive through it.
The way the moss covers the winter effigies
of trees, and turns velvet-green
their elbows, demented against the watercolour

sky, the crows flapping too slowly for real
flight, as if in the after-age. I look at those things, sometimes:
a dead tree can stand for years, an elm
with ivy over; and the poplars inching towards the sky,
cell by cell, clear of purpose.

Look how he drives, he better
Watch himself, get a stiff
fine for that kind of behaviour, and rightly so
He’s a menace!
They need to do something:
Just read the papers
People round my way
Things have changed.
You see it on the news, the morality,
the values. I have my own ideas what
They should do.

They sent me two water bills, both the same.
One had my name spelt wrong
By one letter.
It took months to sort that out.

They’ve put up a new McDonald’s,
Here
And that office block
Wasn’t finished last time I passed.

They said peanuts are good for you, I think,
On the radio,
and also broccoli.
Perhaps I should eat some broccoli.
Forty-six miles I should be home
In time.

That beetle’s done a complete tour of the car, I should think,
that ladybird. It’s walked across the dashboard twice already.
Nothing for it in here.
Can’t put it out the window though,
At eighty miles per
It will bounce and smash
like on the Ä¢¹½¶ÌÊÓƵ, in slow motion.
(How do they do that? Where do they put the camera?)
I’ll wait till I arrive and we can find some greenery to let it out on.
That will be nice.

All this countryside, and just the radio to keep you company.
They are saying China will be big. So funny when you think about it,
all the poor countries catching up, getting like us.
I just hope they do it right, with the right standards and everything.

Over here they’re so professional the way they run things.

Text and photographs: Rafael Estefania, Ä¢¹½¶ÌÊÓƵ Mundo. Thanks to David Garcia for forwarding this.

Jan Chipchase lives in Tokyo and runs a beautiful of photographs he has taken in cities all over the world: acutely observed details that help him read the cities he goes to. He calls , taken in Kobrasol in São José, Brazil, "Clues To Where People Sit."

, also from Kobrasol, is called "Traces of Enjoyment".

is a mobile sex shop from Chengdu.

His recent book, , is essential reading for anyone who wants to get a deep sense of what the future of the global city looks like. Essentially: it is crowded, it is built by hand out of corrugated iron and other such materials, it is dominated ideologically by radical Christianity and Islam, and it is a "warehouse" for the immense labour resources of the global economy.

I've posted a detailed summary of the book's argument by Mike Davis himself . Here is an extract:

The global forces pushing people from the countryside-mechanization in Java and India; food imports in Mexico, Haiti, and Kenya; civil war and drought throughout Africa; and everywhere the consolidation of small into large holdings-seem to sustain urbanization even when the pull of the city is drastically weakened by debt and depression. At the same time, rapid urban growth in the context of structural adjustment, currency devaluation, and state retrenchment has been a recipe for the inevitable mass production of slums. Much of the urban world, as a result, is rushing backward to the age of Dickens.

Yesterday my neighbour came to my door to show me the diary of one of his relatives, a Sikh fom Punjab who had fought in the British army in the second world war, and who was captured and interned in a prisoner-of-war camp. The man was a talented artist and draughtsman, and had filled his notebook with drawings of camp scenes. Men sunbathing in front of barracks, playing hockey, putting on theatrical performances. He wrote accounts of the camp's economy (with "one English cigarette" as the basic unit of currency) and stuck in newspaper clippings of Mussolini's death etc. His fellow camp inmates, among them , wrote poems and comments in the book, and painted pictures of "Jit Singh, the Indian painter" at his canvass. These comments bore witness to a deep intimacy and appreciation between the American, British, Canadian, French - and Indian - men who found themselves together.

They lived in great fear, believing that Hitler might soon invade the UK and that this enclosure might be one of his first targets. But the camp was full of Jewish artists and intellectuals, and nothing could stop the inevitable. Within weeks of their internment, there were camp newspapers, weekly lectures on nuclear physics, and regular concerts.

Three members of the future , all from Vienna, met in the camp. The quartet was founded in London immediately after the war, and endured until the death of violist Peter Schidlof in 1987. The Viennese composer was interned there, and wrote several works there. Perhaps readers know of other internees.

(See also the , written in the Stalag VIIIA prisoner-of-war camp in Germany.)

In many respects these camps were similar to cities. They inherited the civic cultures of places like Paris, Berlin and Vienna, and they brought together people from different backgrounds, with different skills and interests. But in other ways they were quite different. The notion of time was completely different, for the onward rush of urban time was taken away, and what was left was time as a still pool. Death was more proximate than in the cities (from which it had been exiled), and this gave a gravity, an earnestness, to conversation.

Creativity is one of the qualities that most reassures us about our humanity. What do the outbursts of creativity in internment camps, and even death camps, mean for our thinking about cities? Do they display the fortitude of urban culture, which continues unabashed even in such terrible circumstances? Or do they remind us that creativity is somehow linked to those things that cities are most concerned to stamp out - death and inactivity - and that sometimes it may be in the most unlikely places that the most astonishing human creations arise?