|
|
Loading... | 177 | 1 | 154,604 | 
(3.34) | 7 | 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. … (more) |
▾LibraryThing Recommendations ▾Will you like it?
Loading...
 Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. ▾Conversations (About links) No current Talk conversations about this book. » See also 7 mentions ▾Series and work relationships
|
|
| Canonical title |
|
| Original title |
|
| Alternative titles |
|
| Original publication date |
|
| People/Characters |
|
| Important places |
|
| Important events |
|
| Related movies |
|
| Epigraph |
"The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind"
-Albert Camus  Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is different, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
-Ital Calvino, 'Invisible cities' | |
|
| Dedication |
To Christiana, Caspian and the future. | |
|
| First words |
|
| Quotations |
|
| Last words |
|
| Disambiguation notice |
|
| Publisher's editors |
|
| Blurbers |
|
| Original language |
|
| Canonical DDC/MDS |
|
| Canonical LCC |
|
▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English
None ▾Book descriptions 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. ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description
| Book description |
A Hubristic Flea consists of an excerpt of the diary Darran Anderson kept whilst living in Cambodia. As he explains, "I had left my camera behind in London and I thought I'd follow one of my favourite writers Christopher Isherwood and try to make myself a camera; a ludicrous thing to do but one that kept me busy and, in a strange way, from completely destroying myself. Given it reflects real people's lives (including my own), with romances and heartbreaks, glories, debaucheries and terrors, I'm not sure that it will ever be published in full. Perhaps it'll be a time capsule and in thirty years someone can look back to see what has happened to all the people involved, people who I was lucky enough to know and a country I fell in love with, despite myself." Inspired by the surreal accounts of the explorer and 'man of a million lies' Marco Polo, Imaginary Cities charts the metropolis and the imagination, and the symbiosis therein. A work of creative nonfiction, the book roams through space, time and possibility, mapping cities of sound, melancholia and the afterlife, where time runs backwards or which float among the clouds. In doing so, Imaginary Cities seeks to move beyond the cliches of psychogeography and hauntology, to not simply revisit the urban past, or our relationship with it, but to invade and reinvent it. Following in the lineage of Borges, Calvino, Chris Marker and Kenneth White, the book examines the city from global macrocosm to the microcosm of its inhabitants' perspectives. It proceeds through opium dreams, sea voyages, the hallucinations of prisoners, nocturnal decadence, impossible Soviet skyscrapers, marauding golems, subterranean civilisations, apocalyptic prophecies and the work of architectural visionaries such as Antonio Sant'Elia, Archigram and Buckminster Fuller. It rethinks the ideas of utopias and dystopias, urban exploration, alienation and resistance.It claims that the Situationists lacked ambition when they suggested, "Beneath the paving stones, the beach. " Instead, beneath the paving stones, we may just be able to discern the entire universe. Imaginary Cities demonstrates that each city dreamt up by artists, writers, architects and lunatics has a real-life equivalent and that the great Marco Polo was no liar. Imaginary Cities need not simply exist in fiction or the mind. We already inhabit them. [Amazon.co.uk] | |
|
|
Current DiscussionsNone Google Books — Loading... |
1
Darren Anderson curates a very interesting Twitter feed called Oniropolis, each tweet (or thread) of which usually features a collection of images from a given source or artist or city. It's simple, thought-provoking, and very well-spotted. Unfortunately, this book exists almost as a prose version of the same. Anderson flits from one book to a trio of films to the art of a noir painter without describing the works in any meaningful way. But the limitations of print mean that, despite such a visual analysis of the built environment, of art and architecture, it is the words that must suffice in lieu of pictures. But while Anderson's allusions are dense and heavy, they are also fleeting, with a captivating reference to something immediately moved on from, leaving the reader with little grasp of what that reference is or how to learn more about it.
Coming from Anderson's fertile mind, the sheer abundances of sources and references that go unexplained also means that much can escape the reader. For instance:
What is the plot in these? The subject? What do they share save a "cross-section" view of the city? Do they even come from a common period? With this book, you're left wanting for detail, the cumulus clouds of the word tags floating far overhead, casting only a shadow. This isn't to say that the book isn't interesting; indeed, these frustrations are so precisely because one would like to know more about the referred-to material. But in the absence of that detail - or, as I'll address, an easy means of finding it - Imaginary Cities confounds as often as it provokes.
I've saved the most pedantic for last, but the citation structure in Imaginary Cities is lamentable. It's astonishing that the University of Chicago Press, inventors of the ur-standard for citation formatting, seems to have skipped editing this volume entirely. Footnotes follow no given standard; whether or not they even end with a period is a crapshoot. Sometimes the author is included, sometimes the title, never the date. On occasion, without sufficient reference in the text itself, the footnote won't include anything more than a page number (edition? Publication date? Absent entirely). Half of the most interesting allusions in the text aren't even cited! Quotes from separate volumes will follow each other and yet only one given a partial citation. (And to be even more pedantic, sometimes the citation superscript is properly placed outside of punctuation; more often though, it inexplicable comes before even the period.) In short, as much as this book might prompt broader explorations of the material within, its inadequate references and citations make it difficult to further examine the source material. (