When play happens in cities it can enhance collective world building projects, shaping social imaginaries through its speculative, imaginative, generative qualities. Urban play situated within public space often appropriates and defamiliarises its codes and rules through the lens of a game world.

The recent 'painting over' the large mural-esque images that make up much of Hosier Lane's artwork was an important critique of the co-option of street art and a commentary on who ascribes value. Its point was missed by the very people it sought to critique. That Melbourne City Council is now seeking to criminalise those artists demonstrates that their appreciation of street art dissipates when it presents a challenge to their authority.

After a picturesque rail journey from Glasgow to Kings Cross station, I was in shock when confronted with the crowds, and not happy about lugging two suitcases up several flights of busy staircases. There was further affective congestion to come as I stayed in university accommodation near Oxford Street, took the packed tube to be a tourist and see friends, and struggled to enjoy walking on the hustling streets.

It is the eighth anniversary of the earthquakes that devastated Christchurch, and much of the rebuild is now complete. The brash new complexes in the retail core scream ‘progress’, with multiple outlets competing for the high-end clothing dollar, while craft beer bars and gastropubs overlook the Avon River as it meanders through the city. This is Christchurchland, a city that hums with dystopian unease, with new developments that erase not just the history but also the very purpose of the city.

Streets give an illusion of permanence; their concrete slabs and rows of buildings fixed addresses with immutable histories. In fact, streets change names, open or close off, and disappear altogether. Sydney is unique in that it grows without plan or direction. There is a difficulty in reading old maps of Sydney, because it has gone through more changes than any other city in Australia. Names disappear when ideas transform.

Is Sydney the worst city to live in Australia? This is the question set on fire in a recent op-ed published on the ABC – ‘The truth about living in Sydney: Everyone has an escape plan’ – where writer Andrew Street has tapped into the fertile soil of parochial mudslinging, population debate and our economic stagnation by declaring that he is seeking to escape the beautiful but torturous harbour city of Sydney.

In this book we are shown perspectives of lesser-known places on Sydney’s suburban fringes such as Hornsby, Warragamba and Turramurra; sleepy shopping arcades in Penrith; an abandoned theme park in Lansvale and a 1970s floating restaurant slowly disintegrating in Snails Bay. What emerges in these deftly observed urban essays is far more than a simple description of urban space and reminiscence.