a tour of dream cities, nightmare cities, and everywhere in between Anderson, Darran creator author. text ilu 2017 First published monographic eng

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370 p. 22 cm. 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. Contents: The Men of a Million Lies, or How We Imagine the World 15 -- Plato’s Cinema 15 -- The Deceptions of Memory 18 -- Cartography and the Canvas of Blank Spaces 24 -- Faust the Imperial Architect 28 -- The Dialectics of Inspiration 31 -- In Morphia Veritas 34 -- Here be Cities 37 -- Dentata 40 -- Robinsonade 47 -- Where the Wild Things Are 54 -- No North, No South, No East, No West 57 -- The Tower 63 -- The Sun King 65 -- Proteus 75 -- Perfecting the Shipwreck 82 -- The Sublime, Twinned With the Abyss 87 -- Apocalypse Then 90 -- The Urbacides 96 -- Houses of Vice and Virtue 99 -- New Jerusalem, or Nevertown 104 -- Kurtzville 107 -- The Ancient Modernists 111 -- The Map is the Real 114 -- Blueprinting Eternity 118 -- Babel 121 -- The Living Ruins 128 -- The Return of Mammon 134 -- City of Angels 138 -- Disovering the Diagonal 140 -- The Lightning Rod 141 -- Skyscraper Mania 144 -- Elevators Through the Stratosphere 147 -- The Golem 150 -- Vertical Suburbs 154 -- Sanctifying the Secular 156 -- Lift Off 159 -- It Came From the Depths 163 -- The Evaporating Cities 171 -- A Glowing Future 177 -- The Alchemical Cities 181 -- Cities Made Without Hands 181 -- Foundations 189 -- The Wrath of God 192 -- The Drowned World 198 -- Seasteading 209 -- The Seven Invisible Cities of Gold 213 -- The Abiding Desire For No Place 225 -- The Thirteenth Hour 225 -- Cockaigne 229 -- The Biological City 233 -- Possessed 245 -- The Jungle 247 -- The Glass Delusion 258 -- The House of Constructions 266 -- Books Versus Stone 272 -- Remembering the Future 277 -- The Mechanical Heart 277 -- Further Sleepwalking 281 -- Of Steam and Clockwork 289 -- Micropolis 312 -- Tomorrow Will Continue Forever 314 -- Accelerator 318 -- Pow 323 -- Sealess Ships, Grounded Spacecraft and the Curse of the Genie 326 -- Home is Where the Harm Is 334 -- The Cinematic Dystopia of the Everyday 342 -- In Love With Velocity 358 -- On the Road 369 -- The Crystal Palaces 375 -- Plotting the Stars 390 -- Flux Us 397 -- The Megalomania of Cells 416 -- Revolution! Revolution! Revolution! 419 -- Releasing the Golem 436 -- The Turk 441 -- The Pit and the Pendulum 447 -- The Gothic Trojan Horse 450 -- Neo-Neanderthals 459 -- The All-Seeing I 465 -- In Defence of Caliban 468 -- The Gaze 470 -- The Blind Watchmakers 475 -- Guest List 479 -- The Magic Kingdom 502 -- The Last Laugh 504 -- Waste 506 -- No Man's City 510 -- Conquest 521 -- Of Wealth and Taste 525 -- Pandemonium 527 -- Nothing Ever Happens 542 -- Flotsam and Jetsam 545 -- The Fall 551 -- The Wounds of Possibility 559 -- Terraforms 561 -- About the author 572 -- Darran Anderson. Imaginary places Architecture City and town life Public spaces Utopias Cities and towns Cities and towns Architecture Imaginary places in literature Imaginary places in art Imaginary places Religious aspects GR940 A53 2017 398/.42 9780226470306 2016042849 pucpr 160916 20241024132918.0 eng