Description
For as long as humans have gathered in cities, those cities have had their shiningor shadowycounterparts. 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. Its neither a history of grand plans nor a literary exploration of the utopian impulse, but rather something different, hybrid, idiosyncratic. Its a magpies book, full of characters and incidents and ideas drawn from cities real and imagined around the globe and throughout history. Thomas Mores allegorical island shares space with Soviet mega-planning; Marco Polo links up with James Joyces 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 thats where Imaginary Cities becomes more than a mereif ecstatically entertainingintellectual 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 Calvinos Invisible Cities and Jane Jacobss Death and Life of Great American Cities, theres no other book quite like Imaginary Cities. After reading it, youll walk the streets of your cityreal or imaginedwith fresh eyes.
Author: Darran Anderson
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 04/06/2017
Pages: 576
Weight: 1.5lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.40w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9780226470306
Language: English
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