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It is not just menace that awaits us on the wrong side of the tracks; there are simply those times when you sort of slip into the wrong insterstices; when the city becomes distended and elusive and uncooperative. I set off from my hotel in Kuala Lumpur to walk to the Petronas Towers (tallest building in the world). I can see it about eight miles away from the top of my hotel; two shimmering steel fuselages, side by side in the heat haze. This is a Mad Dogs and Englishmen stuff. I walk, as I always do, undeterred by heat, traffic, distance in as straight a line as possible right across the (enormously attenuated) city watching the little silver needles appear, then sink back again behind another structure and then, to reassert themselves, a little bigger, after a mile, to be lost once again. But I have made a serious error; the road I was walking turns itself into a sliproad onto a massive expressway; and by now the bank alongside the sliproad is too steep to climb up again, and cars are pouring down and I am constrained to tramp in the teeth of six lanes of traffic thundering citywards, for a mile and a half to the next interchange: shorts, baseball cap, dark glasses, map; and in the midday sun. Just how conspicuous is it possible to get? But finally, out of this compact wall of hurtling traffic, I manage to elicit a taxi, to the credit of the driver, a gloomy Sikh who thinks me mad but who knows that I am good for a big tip. He sets me down shaking his head sadly.

The city eludes and confuses us. Sometimes it seems to have a perverse existence if its own. (Ron Heron had plans for a Walking City: basically little more than an idea for the cover of a sixties future fiction paperback. In fact the paperback cover probably got there first!) But the city moves anyway; daylong, nightlong it seethes with movement. Day to day the very fabric of a city changes; in some cities this is dramatic; 25% of Tokyo is destroyed and rebuilt every five years. I have seen 100% of Tokyo from the summit of City Hall. It has five times the coverage of Mexico City; am I to believe that this granulated texture extending to each horizon will by the year 2005 have metamorphosed by a quarter? I almost feel I should, here and now, from the City Hall observatory floor detect a perceptible twitching to the city beneath me, hear its surface creak with activity.

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