I conclude that he's gay, based on my sleuthing. The article follows.
The great champion of liberal democracy Thomas Jefferson was not fond of large cities. He wrote in 1787 that “when we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as in Europe.” The fathers of communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, also disliked urban life. In 1872 Engels proclaimed that “to want to solve the housing question while at the same time desiring to maintain the modern big cities is an absurdity. The modern big cities, however, will be abolished only by the abolition of the capitalist mode of production.” The communist disdain for cities had a devastating influence on the leadership of the Khmer Rouge, who in 1975 ordered the forced evacuation of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh—a city of two million people at the time—because of their conviction that large cities were anathema to the ideal communist society.
More than half of the world’s population now reside in cities, and while in 2020 there were 579 cities with more than one million people, cities are still often decried as places of filth, contagion, pollution, corruption and inequality. Cities—homes to so many of us—need champions who believe in them. Mark Vanhoenacker has crafted an eloquent personal tribute to them in “Imagine a City,” a love song to cities the world over.
This is Mr. Vanhoenacker’s third book, after “Skyfaring” and “How to Land a Plane”—two titles that help explain the author’s unique perspective on urban life: He is a commercial pilot who flew first a Boeing 747 and later a 787 from one large city to another, making short one- or two-day stops, and then taking off only to return again and again, sometimes as many as 50 times to a single city. “Imagine the view,” he writes of a typical aerial approach, “around dusk, from the camera of a low-orbit satellite moving above a densely populated part of the world, and how this perspective allows us to watch a glowing web of glowing cities, each flat, and etched as finely as circuitry.”
The author keeps a diary when he travels. He takes long walks, visits places that interest him and reads about the city. Like any airline pilot, he comes and goes, landing as a butterfly on a fragrant flower and then flying off again. “Our stays in cities—in so many cities!—are typically short but frequent,” he writes. “Twenty-four hours is common for long-haul pilots, more than seventy-two is not.”
This is not a scholarly book on cities, yet Mr. Vanhoenacker does enjoy digging into the literature on the cities he loves. He is thus able to tell wonderful stories: of Brasília’s architecture, Jeddah’s historic gates, Sapporo’s snow, the air in Nairobi, Cape Town’s fascination with the color blue, and Tokyo’s circular Yamanote train line. His own observations, as well as his research on cities, are always highly particular: They cluster around whatever aspect of a city has caught his eye and led him to explore the place further. The 11 chapters in the book are thus titled “City of Signs,” “City of Gates,” “City of Snow,” and so on, a structure that lends the book a certain original design.