For as long as humans have gathered in cities, those Cities have had their shining--or shadowy--counterparts.
After reading it, you\'ll walk the streets of your city--real or imagined--with fresh eyes..
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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\'s a magpie\'s book, full of characters and incidents and ideas drawn from Cities real and imagined around the globe and throughout history.
It\'s neither a history of grand plans nor a literary exploration of the utopian impulse, but rather something different, hybrid, idiosyncratic.
This book is about those 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.
Imaginary cities, potential cities, future cities, perfect cities.
For as long as humans have gathered in cities, those Cities have had their shining--or shadowy--counterparts
