Dream Cities is a lively, unique and accessible cultural history of modern cities which allows us to view them through the planning, design, architects and movements that inspired and built them. It explores our urban areas in a new way - as expressions of ideas, often conflicting, about how we should live, work, play, make, buy and think - and tells the stories of the people who imagined the cities that became the blueprints for the world we live in. Starting in the nineteenth century and continuing to today, what began as visionary concepts - sometimes utopian, sometimes outlandish, always controversial - were gradually adopted and constructed on a massive scale in cities around the world, from Dubai to Ulan Bator, London to Los Angeles. Our leafy suburbs, city skyscraper districts, infotainment-driven shopping malls and 'sustainable' eco-developments are seen here as never before, from the fantasy villages of Bertram Goodhue to the superblocks of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City. In this elegantly designed and illustrated book, Graham uncovers the original plans of brilliant, obsessed and sometimes megalomaniacal designers, revealing the foundations of today's varied urban environment. Dream Cities is nothing less than a field guide to our modern world.

Braided Waters sheds new light on the relationship between environment and society by charting the history of Hawaii's Molokai island over a thousand-year period of repeated settlement. From the arrival of the first Polynesians to contact with eighteenth-century European explorers and traders to our present era, this study shows how the control of resources-especially water-in a fragile, highly variable environment has had profound effects on the history of Hawaii. Wade Graham examines the ways environmental variation repeatedly shapes human social and economic structures and how, in turn, man-made environmental degradation influences and reshapes societies. A key finding of this study is how deep structures of place interact with distinct cultural patterns across different societies to produce similar social and environmental outcomes, in both the Polynesian and modern eras-a case of historical isomorphism with profound implications for global environmental history.