Litany of Loss: Review of Disappearing Cities by Tony Fry

Tony Fry’s Disappearing Cities is a catalogue of loss and deprivation, a litany of the many ways in which the contemporary city might meet its end. However, to the active reader, the book is an invitation to critical engagement with the legacy of Western modernist urbanism. It reveals that the infrastructures that currently support the city are precious and precarious and asks readers to understand how much an ethical practice of architecture rests on mitigating risk, and how much this is undermined by contemporary epistemes. Most importantly, it asks the reader to become an active storyteller with Fry, revealing and intervening in the ontological assumptions that structure contemporary urbanism.