Tales from a Contested City

Peter Cookson Smith is a long-time resident of Hong Kong. In 1977 he founded URBIS – one of the first specialist city-planning, urban-design and environmental consultancies in South-east Asia, where the company has carried out more than 3,000 projects over the years. He directed some of the first new town and urban regeneration studies in Hong Kong and has directed an extensive range of projects across Asia. He was one of the first design professionals from the West to carry out city planning and urban revitalization projects for the PRC government during the early 1980s following the ‘Open Door Policy’. Over the past twenty years he has acted as an adviser on development strategy for large parts of the Greater Bay Area. For several years he was an Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Architecture and is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is a Past-President of both the Hong Kong Institute of Planners and the Hong Kong Institute of Urban Design. He writes and lectures widely on the subject of urban design, and is the author and illustrator of eight books: The Urban Design of Impermanence (2006) about Hong Kong; The Urban Design of Concession (2011) about the growth and development of Chinese Treaty Port cities; The Urban Design of Intervention (2014) about Asian cities; Seeking Savannah (2018) about American Urbanism; An Enterprising Path to Barrio Chino (2019) on the planning history of Barcelona; After Dante – Divine, Design and the Cosmos (2020), which focuses on Dante’s poetic narrative and the philosophical, artistic and scientific forces that engaged with the emerging culture of the Renaissance; Shaping Canton (2022) focusing on the history and modernization of Guangzhou; and Writings on the Asian City (2023) covering the different urban cultures, commonalities and urban forms of Asia.

Tales from a Contested City is Peter’s first book of fiction.