Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.47 (712 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B06X9WPKBF |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 237 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-07-11 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"A compendium of fantasy cities that takes its cue from Marco Polo via Italo Calvino’s InvisibleCities, this remarkable survey reveals the influence that the metropolis of the mind has had on the real thing."
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. Imaginary cities, potential cities, future cities, perfect cities. 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. 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. It is as if the city itself, its inescapable gritty reality and elbow-to-elbow nature, demands we call int
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