Imaginary Cities
A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between
9780226470306
9780226470443
Imaginary Cities
A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between
For as long as humans have gathered in cities, those cities have had their shining—or shadowy—counterparts. Imaginary cities, potential cities, future cities, perfect cities. It is as if the city itself, its inescapable gritty reality and elbow-to-elbow nature, demands we call into being some alternative, yearned-for better place.
This book is about those cities. It’s neither a history of grand plans nor a literary exploration of the utopian impulse, but rather something different, hybrid, idiosyncratic. It’s a magpie’s book, full of characters and incidents and ideas drawn from cities real and imagined around the globe and throughout history. Thomas More’s allegorical island shares space with Soviet mega-planning; Marco Polo links up with James Joyce’s meticulously imagined Dublin; the medieval land of Cockaigne meets the hopeful future of Star Trek. With Darran Anderson as our guide, we find common themes and recurring dreams, tied to the seemingly ineluctable problems of our actual cities, of poverty and exclusion and waste and destruction. And that’s where Imaginary Cities becomes more than a mere—if ecstatically entertaining—intellectual exercise: for, as Anderson says, “If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined.” Every architect, philosopher, artist, writer, planner, or citizen who dreams up an imaginary city offers lessons for our real ones; harnessing those flights of hopeful fancy can help us improve the streets where we live.
Though it shares DNA with books as disparate as Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities, there’s no other book quite like Imaginary Cities. After reading it, you’ll walk the streets of your city—real or imagined—with fresh eyes.
This book is about those cities. It’s neither a history of grand plans nor a literary exploration of the utopian impulse, but rather something different, hybrid, idiosyncratic. It’s a magpie’s book, full of characters and incidents and ideas drawn from cities real and imagined around the globe and throughout history. Thomas More’s allegorical island shares space with Soviet mega-planning; Marco Polo links up with James Joyce’s meticulously imagined Dublin; the medieval land of Cockaigne meets the hopeful future of Star Trek. With Darran Anderson as our guide, we find common themes and recurring dreams, tied to the seemingly ineluctable problems of our actual cities, of poverty and exclusion and waste and destruction. And that’s where Imaginary Cities becomes more than a mere—if ecstatically entertaining—intellectual exercise: for, as Anderson says, “If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined.” Every architect, philosopher, artist, writer, planner, or citizen who dreams up an imaginary city offers lessons for our real ones; harnessing those flights of hopeful fancy can help us improve the streets where we live.
Though it shares DNA with books as disparate as Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities, there’s no other book quite like Imaginary Cities. After reading it, you’ll walk the streets of your city—real or imagined—with fresh eyes.
576 pages | 5-3/8 x 8-1/2 | © 2017
Architecture: Architecture--Criticism
Geography: Urban Geography
History: History of Ideas, Urban History
Reviews
Table of Contents
The Men of a Million Lies, or How We Imagine the World
Plato's Cinema
The Deceptions of Memory
Cartography and the Canvas of Blank Spaces
Faust the Imperial Architect
The Dialectics of Inspiration
In Morphia Veritas
Here be Cities
Dentata
Robinsonade
Where the Wild Things Are
No North, No South, No East, No West
The Tower
The Sun King
Proteus
Perfecting the Shipwreck
The Sublime, Twinned With the Abyss
Apocalypse Then
The Urbacides
Houses of Vice and Virtue
New Jerusalem, or Nevertown
Kurtzville
The Ancient Modernists
The Map is the Real
Blueprinting Eternity
Babel
The Living Ruins
The Return of Mammon
City of Angels
Disovering the Diagonal
The Lightning Rod
Skyscraper Mania
Elevators Through the Stratosphere
The Golem
Vertical Suburbs
Sanctifying the Secular
Lift Off
It Came From the Depths
The Evaporating Cities
A Glowing Future
The Alchemical Cities
Cities Made Without Hands
Foundations
The Wrath of God
The Drowned World
Seasteading
The Seven Invisible Cities of Gold
The Abiding Desire For No Place
The Thirteenth Hour
Cockaigne
The Biological City
Possessed
The Jungle
The Glass Delusion
The House of Constructions
Books Versus Stone
Remembering the Future
The Mechanical Heart
Further Sleepwalking
Of Steam and Clockwork
Micropolis
Tomorrow Will Continue Forever
Accelerator
Pow
Sealess Ships, Grounded Spacecraft and the Curse of
the Genie
Home is Where the Harm Is
The Cinematic Dystopia of the Everyday
In Love With Velocity
On the Road
The Crystal Palaces
Plotting the Stars
Flux Us
The Megalomania of Cells
Revolution! Revolution! Revolution!
Releasing the Golem
The Turk
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Gothic Trojan Horse
Neo-Neanderthals
The All-Seeing I
In Defence of Cali ban
The Gaze
The Blind Watchmakers
Guest List
The Magic Kingdom
The Last Laugh
Waste
No Man's City
Conquest
Of Wealth and Taste
Pandemonium
Nothing Ever Happens
Flotsam and Jetsam
The Fall
The Wounds of Possibility
Terraforms
About the author
Plato's Cinema
The Deceptions of Memory
Cartography and the Canvas of Blank Spaces
Faust the Imperial Architect
The Dialectics of Inspiration
In Morphia Veritas
Here be Cities
Dentata
Robinsonade
Where the Wild Things Are
No North, No South, No East, No West
The Tower
The Sun King
Proteus
Perfecting the Shipwreck
The Sublime, Twinned With the Abyss
Apocalypse Then
The Urbacides
Houses of Vice and Virtue
New Jerusalem, or Nevertown
Kurtzville
The Ancient Modernists
The Map is the Real
Blueprinting Eternity
Babel
The Living Ruins
The Return of Mammon
City of Angels
Disovering the Diagonal
The Lightning Rod
Skyscraper Mania
Elevators Through the Stratosphere
The Golem
Vertical Suburbs
Sanctifying the Secular
Lift Off
It Came From the Depths
The Evaporating Cities
A Glowing Future
The Alchemical Cities
Cities Made Without Hands
Foundations
The Wrath of God
The Drowned World
Seasteading
The Seven Invisible Cities of Gold
The Abiding Desire For No Place
The Thirteenth Hour
Cockaigne
The Biological City
Possessed
The Jungle
The Glass Delusion
The House of Constructions
Books Versus Stone
Remembering the Future
The Mechanical Heart
Further Sleepwalking
Of Steam and Clockwork
Micropolis
Tomorrow Will Continue Forever
Accelerator
Pow
Sealess Ships, Grounded Spacecraft and the Curse of
the Genie
Home is Where the Harm Is
The Cinematic Dystopia of the Everyday
In Love With Velocity
On the Road
The Crystal Palaces
Plotting the Stars
Flux Us
The Megalomania of Cells
Revolution! Revolution! Revolution!
Releasing the Golem
The Turk
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Gothic Trojan Horse
Neo-Neanderthals
The All-Seeing I
In Defence of Cali ban
The Gaze
The Blind Watchmakers
Guest List
The Magic Kingdom
The Last Laugh
Waste
No Man's City
Conquest
Of Wealth and Taste
Pandemonium
Nothing Ever Happens
Flotsam and Jetsam
The Fall
The Wounds of Possibility
Terraforms
About the author