Dr Peter Cookson Smith is an architect, planner and urban designer. He has been resident in Hong Kong since 1977 and founded URBIS - one of the first specialist planning, urban design and landscape consultancies in South-east Asia. He has directed a number of studies in China over the past 30 years. For several years he was an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre of Asian Studies. He is Vice-President of the Hong Kong Institute of Planners and the Hong Kong Institute of Urban Design.

He is the author of The Urban Design of Impermanence — Streets, Places & Spaces in Hong Kong (2006).

Treaties enforced on China during the mid-nieteenth century led to the establishmen of the Treaty Ports as beachheads of foreign influence around the coast of China, reflecting aperiod of Western expansionism and commercial ambition.

The Concession Areas within theses port cities became places of urban settlement and trade, both transforming attitudes to modernization and, almost inadvertently, fueling changing political attitudes. Foreign influence in city planning, architectural design and construction offered an alternative urbanism outside prevailing tradition and state control. Peter Cookson Smith discusses nieteenth century ideologies and the background leading to foreign incursions, the evolution of port cities, and China's changes and upheavals leading to its recent reemergence into the global market place through new trade-led development models.

By focusing on the twelve main Treaty Ports — Shanghai, Amoy (Xiamen), Canton (Guangzhou), Dalny (Dalian), Foochow (Fuzhou), Hankow (Hankou), Harbin, Nanking (Nanjing), Ningpo (Ningbo), Swatow (Shantou), Tientsin (Tianjin), and Tsingtao (Qiangdao), Peter Cookson Smith illustrates, through writing and sketches, these modernizing cities alongside the imprints of older places and spaces from an earlier time.