Slow Space.

By Michael Bell and Sze Tsung Leong. New York: Monacelli Press, 1999, [pounds]25

Many commentators don't like this book's intended topic: the allegedly formless aspects of American cities and their peripheries, the expanses of parking lots, discount sheds, malls, and so on. But they think they should. They see it is the way things are going. They do not want to be associated with the alternative, the cinnamon-flavoured toytown of the New Urbanism. And they feel that hyper-sprawl, interpreted correctly could represent not only the no-nonsense, moving-on impulse of the American spirit but a double attraction - the decentred subjectivity of the post-human condition.

Slow Space comprises 20 or so essays. Its editors claim that 'immanent' in each text is 'a transformed subject enmeshed in the ecologies of urban assemblages'. Aaron Betsky certainly contributes an astute and well-informed survey of the attitudes struck by various observers towards 'edge city' and its relatives. But most contributors wander freely off the editorial track. Among the most thought-provoking and readable are Dana Cuff on the terms in which public rights join debate with private property rights, Hubert L. Dreyfus on Heidegger's attitude to technology, Elizabeth Burns Gamard on Schwitters' Merzbau and Fares el-Dahdah on a haunting (and haunted) exhibition in the war-scarred ruins of the Beirut National Museum.

Herd together a score of texts on 'contemporary architectural discourse', mostly by academics, and you can bet that some will be written in Heavy American. Sure enough, on the book's second page, the editors, wanting to make the commonplace (perhaps too commonplace) observation that 'capital now flows internationally', write instead that 'the liquidity of capital [has] long ceased correlating itself to cartographic delineations'. Later a writer admires a photograph of a mullion. He notes that the photo is over-exposed - or, as he puts it, 'the haptic qualities of matter emerge in a postvisual field of optic dissolve'. He also notes that the mullion, made of stacked bars, looks as if it might fall over - or rather, 'Form's quantitive outline is undermined by the immanence of a structural failure induced by gravity's incessant pull ... The stacking instigate[s] an unnerving vertical instability. A simple lateral push of the slightest magnitude would disable the design ... The bars have a formal immanence towards toppling'. One gets the immanent point, but the verbal millstone grinds on laboriously. This makes Slow Space an often sluggish read.

The reason for this creaking gravity is that Slow Space takes itself very seriously. Wit or intellectual sparkle - still less humour or self-deprecation - are streng verboten. One suspects that for some of the writers, normal diction seems not elevated enough to match the imperial pretensions of Architectural Theory. The grander the claims, though, the greater the disillusion when they cannot be fulfilled: one contributor congratulates architectural theory for 'brilliantly' exploring 'gender oppression and the mind/body distinction' (no less) but finds it 'obscene' that 'even after years of deconstruction' it has failed to 'participate in the struggle against HIV'. He doesn't suggest how architectural thinking on the disease might improve matters, but clearly thinks it should.

Those tempted to buy the book just for its come-and-get-me title, to find out how space can be 'slow', should save their money. The introductory essay hints vaguely that, in the context of the modern city, 'fast space' is manifest in local, abrupt changes arising from individual profit-motivated decisions, while 'slow space' concerns longer-term cumulative transformation. But 'slow space' then disappears until, on the book's next to last page, it makes a mercifully fast farewell appearance.

PHILIP TABOR