‘Celebrating the City’, a 2007 symposium held at the British Academy in London, hosted presentations that resulted in the reflections comprising this book-length meditation. The goal for this collection of essays was to stimulate additional Anglo-Mexican scholarly exchanges; the organisers wanted to celebrate the city rather than examine its problems or provide a complete history of its past, so they asked authors to write episodic chronicles of topics that appealed to them. As a result, for anyone desiring a comprehensive history of Mexico City, this volume does not suffice; it is a collection for those who know the outlines of the city's past well enough to enjoy the different essays. Each author, given broad, general topics, received encouragement to provide an individual, particular interpretation which, when placed together with the others, it was hoped would represent a mosaic rather than an integrated image of the city. The editors provide a helpful discussion of the conference and an introduction to the volume. They discuss the book's provenance, which explains the diversity of styles and approaches of the essays as the authors meditated on this great icon of urbanity.

The late Carlos Monsivais, who unfortunately died in 2010, opened consideration of the city in a prologue that provides tone to the anthology. Writing in his typical, lyrical style, he discussed the metro and Mexico City as at least a virtual frontier city, commentary that is impressionistic, opaque and insightful, with tidbits such as the fact that there are about an equal number of residents of the capital as there are Mexicans in the United States. ‘Turmoil is the repose of the city dweller’, Monsiváis wrote, with his characteristic gymnastics of words that vibrate with allusions drawn from his clear understanding of a 500-year-old culture marked by a popular, unique Catholicism. Here the reader hears echoes of the Mass with prayers for the ‘repose of souls’, referring to those in the torment of Purgatory. His never-mentioned image remains an allusion throughout his discussion of his fellow citizens as he offers an unsaid entreaty for the great capital and the residents who, by implication, dwell like souls in an undiscussed purgatory.

All six of the other contributors each meditate on unique aspects of the city and its residents. Warwick Bray ponders the five extant eyewitness accounts of Mexico City at the time of the conquest (The Letters of Hernán Cortés and the works of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Andrés de Tapía, Francisco de Aguilar and an anonymous soldier) and provides insightful information on the early colonial problems such as flooding. David Brading brings to his reflections on the viceregal capital his careful research on the Virgin of Guadalupe, the colonial church and the environmental challenges. For the modern city, Diane Davis focuses particularly on the years from 1950 to 2010, especially the politics of the city's built environment. Examining special themes, Vicente Quirarte, Hugo Lara Chávez and Magali Tercero proffer their thoughts respectively on the City Poetic (surveying poetry from Temilotzin at the time of conquest to Lizalde's on the city in 1982, with discussion of Ramón López Velarde's ‘La suave patria’ among other classics), the City Cinematic (films during the 30 years beginning in 1977 that confirm the author's conclusion that Mexico City is a city of surprises) and the City Photographic (the impressions of the photographer Maya Goded of La Merced, the historical district of the city, in 1996), each with refreshing approaches to the capital that enlighten readers with their humanistic commentaries. Overall these authors emphasise the city in the second half of the twentieth century. For those satisfied with meditations on the city this is an excellent volume.

It is not for those seeking a more complete mosaic of the capital, however. Gaps exist that are too large to allow the city and its historical and cultural contours to emerge. What of the nineteenth century, particularly the second half, when the French-imposed Emperor Maximilian reconstructed much of the capital city in the image of Paris, especially with a broad, ceremonial boulevard, called, following the Emperor's execution, La Reforma? Or of the major construction projects of the Porfirian era (1876–1911), led by the completion of the drainage system, begun in the colonial period, and including the addition of electricity and street cars, the placement of statues of the heroes of the nation lining La Reforma and located in its traffic circles, the monumental homes that prompted the capital's name, the City of Palaces, the new suburbs, railway stations and government buildings? These do not appear, and this leaves a major silence in the discussion. Certainly scholars were available for the Anglo-Mexican conference who could have written on this subject. Immediately one thinks of Erika Pani, Paul Garner, Michael Johns, Claudia Agostoni, Barbara Tenenbaum and others. What of the city during the Revolution, 1910–1950, when its population, through refugees and births with high survival rates, both revolutionary processes, increased from fewer than a million persons in 1910 to around 2.9 million in 1950, creating a megacity? While historians have not examined much of this process, the book's essays on films and photographs offer suggestive approaches for these developments beyond mere statistics. Finally, the soundscape of the city requires discussion in order to create not a chronicle, but a mosaic of the capital. The bells, traffic, vendors, music, radio news, blaring advertisements, shouted conversations so loud they form a hum disrupted by rainfall, shouts of demonstrators, rumble of earthquakes… musicologists, ethnographers, folklorists and journalists have dealt with these sounds, and one such account might have been included. These required discussions for a mosaic notwithstanding, as provocative meditations on the capital, the collection remains outstanding and leaves the reader seeking repose, as Monsiváis would have it, in the city's turmoil. These contemplations of the capital raise enough questions about life in the city for a succession of future conferences.