Sitting on a sun-baked cliff in Majorca, most people's thoughts would not normally turn to the Cowley Road in Oxford. But the holiday sun had a strange effect on James Attlee. He said: "It was incredibly hot and no one wanted to do anything. I went off and sat on a rock on the cliff and looked out, and I found myself thinking about the Cowley Road. I felt like I wanted to go on a journey, but I didn't have a great amount of time, so I chose a journey in my own neighbourhood. I discovered that it could be just as rewarding."

His book, Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey, is a mixture of history, reportage, pilgrimage and literary musings. Where some people see a rundown, dirty area, he sees a vibrant street scene with a charming aesthetic. While in the sex shop, he quotes from Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy; seeing a pub sign of Munch's The Scream, he wonders if the scream no longer symbolises alienation but "the combination of fear and exhilaration that is the drug of choice for the young male".

As an art publisher, he had written about cities before, having produced a book on the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, best known for sawing a suburban house in half. "I started reading about how cities change. In the 1970s in New York they were knocking down dense local communities and putting up tower blocks. I like books where cities are the main character - Les Miserables, Crime and Punishment, life on the streets. The US writer Jane Jacobs said: 'There's nothing you can't learn about life from observing a city'."

He moved to the Cowley Road ten years ago from London, via the Midlands, having grown up in a Kent village which, he says, was not really in the countryside, but part of London's hinterland. Perhaps surprisingly, he was attracted to Oxford by the low property prices, and commutes each day to his job in London. "I wanted to live somewhere with an identity. I didn't want to live in the suburbs of London and still travel for an hour to get to work," he said.

His job in the industry made it easier to find a publisher. "An editor at Chicago Press asked me what I was working on and when I told her she said: 'Send it to me'. I was quite pleased because it means that they felt the book was of interest to people all over the world. The stories that people told me, and the dynamics of what is happening in the area, are universal. You could hear similar stories from first-generation immigrants in Brooklyn."

The title, Isolarion, comes from a detailed 15th-century map of a particular area. "People came back from journeys with their individual maps, but there was no way that they could be made to fit together. My idea was to look in detail at one place as if it was a little world, learning lessons which help you to understand the whole world."

He researched the book in 2004, during consultation about plans to smarten the area and slow traffic to cut road accidents. He threw himself into the debate with enthusiasm. He took issue with residents' complaints about rubbish left in the street by traders, and then campaigned against an idea for a "gateway" to mark the beginning and end of Cowley Road.

It is not that he is in favour of rubbish, he explains, but he was worried that smartening the area would change it, and put the rents up beyond the reach of local shopkeepers.

He said: "It is not that I have any sentimental attachment to decay, or nostalgia for the past. I don't like the way local high streets are being destroyed by rent increases that drive out small businesses, which are then taken over by multinational businesses so that every shopping street is the same. If you shop at a huge supermarket, you miss the little interactions with the baker or greengrocer, which integrate you into your local community.

"There are people from all over the world working in the Cowley Road, but once you start talking to them, you realise they are worried about the same things as everyone - how their kids are doing at school and so on."

He elaborates on the rubbish, saying he likes reading the labels on discarded fruit boxes: "It's much more interesting, if you are moving through a street, if you have to move around the piles of boxes or someone selling something. I felt they were trying to create a character for something that already has a character. A street can be a work of art."

Every nation on earth is represented, he says - "Jamaican, Bangladeshi, Indian, Polish, Kurdish, Chinese, French, Italian, Thai, Japanese and African restaurants, sari shops, cafés, fast-food outlets, electronics stores, a florist, a Ghanaian fishmonger, pubs, bars, three live-music venues, tattoo parlours, betting shops, a Russian supermarket, a community centre, a publisher, the headquarters of an international NGO, musical-instrument vendors, butchers (halal and otherwise), three cycle shops, two video-rental stores, post offices, two mosques, three churches and a Chinese herbalist". There is also "a police station, two record shops, two centres of alternative medicine, a 24-hour Tesco, an independent cinema, call centres, three sex shops, numerous grocers, letting agencies, a bingo hall, and a lap-dancing establishment that plies its trade on Sundays".

As he says in his book: "Why make a journey to the other side of the world when the world has come to you?"

James Attlee is at the Oxford Literary Festival tonight at 7.30pm and at the QI club, Turl Street, at 7.30pm on Tueday. Isolarion is published by Chicago Press at £12.