Every month, five million people move from the past to the future.
Pouring into developing-world instant cities like Dubai and
Shenzhen, these urban newcomers confront a modern world cobbled
together from fragments of a West they have never seen. Do these
fantastical boomtowns, where blueprints spring to life overnight on
virgin land, represent the dawning of a brave new world? Or is
their vaunted newness a mirage?
In a captivating blend of history and reportage, Daniel Brook
travels to a series of major metropolitan hubs that were once
themselves instant cities St. Petersburg, Shanghai, and Mumbai to
watch their dress rehearsals for the twenty-first century.
Understanding today s emerging global order, he argues, requires
comprehending the West s profound and conflicted influence on
developing-world cities over the centuries.
In 1703, Tsar Peter the Great personally oversaw the
construction of a new Russian capital, a window on the West
carefully modeled on Amsterdam, that he believed would wrench
Russia into the modern world. In the nineteenth century, Shanghai
became the fastest-growing city on earth as it mushroomed into an
English-speaking, Western-looking metropolis that just happened to
be in the Far East. Meanwhile, Bombay, the cosmopolitan hub of the
British Raj, morphed into a tropical London at the hands of its
pith-helmeted imperialists.
Juxtaposing the stories of the architects and authoritarians,
the artists and revolutionaries who seized the reins to transform
each of these precociously modern places into avatars of the global
future, Brook demonstrates that the drive for modernization was
initially conflated with wholesale Westernization. He shows, too,
the ambiguous legacy of that emulation the birth (and rebirth) of
Chinese capitalism in Shanghai, the origins of Bollywood in Bombay
s American-style movie palaces, the combustible mix of
revolutionary culture and politics that rocked the Russian capital
and how it may be transcended today.
A fascinating, vivid look from the past out toward the horizon,
A History of Future Cities is both a crucial reminder of
globalization s long march and an inspiring look into the
possibilities of our Asian Century."
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
