Ananya Vajpeyi’s Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities offers a presentness to the history of cities. In the introductory essay, Vajpeyi describes feeling a “shadow of the past falling across the daylight of the present.” Yet the essays also move in the opposite direction, showing how the present continually reanimates the past.

Through pieces written over 25 years, Vajpeyi walks her reader through 13 different cities across the globe. The anthology is divided, in no particular order, primarily between the author’s time as a student in the US, across different cities in India, and her research escapades across Europe. Each essay revisits the architectural history of a city, recounts the author’s first encounters with it (in some cases, repeatedly), and reflects on the psychic impressions those encounters left behind on the author.

For instance, when comparing Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi, San Giorgio’s Church in Venice, and Cihangir Mosque in Istanbul – structures built roughly around the same time – Vajpeyi reflects on how each appears through the lens of the different renovations they had undergone. Like the memories of a loved and lost person, these buildings too, were a “reminder – and a remainder – thereof in the present.” There is a sense that the wholeness of such...

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