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Imaginary Cities - A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between (Paperback)
Loot Price: R575
Discovery Miles 5 750
You Save: R96
(14%)
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Imaginary Cities - A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between (Paperback)
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List price R671
Loot Price R575
Discovery Miles 5 750
You Save R96 (14%)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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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. 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. After reading it, you'll walk the streets of your
city--real or imagined--with fresh eyes.
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