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In Chapter 3, Tsang Tsou-choi—named “one of the oldest graffiti artists in the world” by the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003—comes into the picture. As a self-proclaimed “king” since the 1950s, Tsang spent decades writing his family’s “(hi)stories” on different surfaces in the streets of Hong Kong, ranging from walls, lampposts and post boxes to electricity boxes. Alongside the writings he produced and the places he reinvented in the city, the connection Tsang made with the local territory and local history is examined in this chapter as a confluence of local relations which reverberate and fluctuate on their own according to different footprints and traces Tsang left in the city and in the mind of his fellow urban dwellers.

Chapter one maintains James's interest in Spiritualism emerged during late 1840s and early 1850s in his boyhood in New York City and London, and shows how it likely derived from his father's and father's friends' investigations of and conversations about Spiritualism.

In the 1990s, based on the wider recognition given to Los Angeles, Soja was invited to compare Los Angeles with other cities, beginning with the Centrum of Amsterdam. The central cities of Los Angeles and Amsterdam were and are about as different as any two central cities can be. But when examined from a regional scale and through the lens of urban restructuring, the city regions of Los Angeles and Amsterdam become much more comparable. A regional perspective is also applied to a comparative study of Los Angeles and New York City. As a Bronx native, Soja criticizes the overemphasis on Manhattan and on Wall Street in particular. The prevailing postindustrial perspective is also criticized, as the New York metropolitan region remains an industrial powerhouse. A comparison is made between the still-sprawling low-density suburbia of New York and the high-density suburbia of still, now the densest urbanized area in the United States. The densification of Los Angeles is explored further in a comparative analysis of sprawl in American metropolitan areas, showing Los Angeles as among the least sprawling and most compact. Finally, another comparison is made between the putative Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York “schools” of urban analysis.

Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project) was never a book. It is the name of a project, complex and variable, that Benjamin pursued during his last twelve years and that has since been sustained in an “afterlife” by its readers and interpreters. For Benjamin it was as way of finding a passageway back to the pre-history of the generation born around 1900, a generation still held in a state of mythic enchantment, as Benjamin believed, a condition from which it needed to be awakened in order to confront the historical crisis of the 1930s. Passagen/passages as architectural constructs began to appear throughout Europe around 1830–50. They became key indicators of a revolution in exhibition practices in the mid-century, harbingers of department stores and malls. For Benjamin they become emblematic for the evanescence of the commodities displayed there. Over and over he reflects on the status of cultural detritus, objects that survive use and exchange value and retain in the end nothing but a kind of symbolic signification.