The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow

by Des Fitzgerald

We are living in one of the greatest periods of urbanisation in human history, with more cities in the world today than ever before. But is this definitely a positive thing? Are cities actually good for us? And what would the city of the future look like if we tried to make one that definitely was - would anyone want to live there?This book is about the fascinating and sometimes strange world of the people asking these questions - people trying to remake our cities from the literal ground up. It's the story of an attempt to get a hold of what the city of the future might look like according to some of the most influential and far-sighted people working to change it; to figure out when and how it was, exactly, that we all became convinced that city life was so bad for us. It's also a book about trees.

Genres: Nonfiction, Architecture, Society, Sustainability, Urbanism, Cities

288 pages, Paperback

Published February 13, 2025

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

I must have seen this recommended somewhere, possibly by John Grindrod, but certainly by the time I began I had misplaced any awareness I might have had that the title is sarcastic. Des Fitzgerald is not in fact of the opinion that the city as we now know it should be radically remodelled; rather, he wants to get to the bottom of why so many people think that. At its best, The City Of Today Is A Dying Thing gently unpicks assertions and assumptions too often unexamined, finds the holes in grand schemes – and as an inveterate manifesto-sceptic, I do enjoy a writer who will ask 'but what about..?', who isn't afraid to say when something is "pretentious bollocks" but also isn't Clarkson. At its worst...well, the first chapter in particular is prone to deploying 'otters' as a punchline in a way unpleasantly reminiscent of the appalling Rachel Reeves' disparaging references to newts and bats (he must have kicked himself that publication so narrowly missed being able to include a concrete counter-example to their benefits when that Malaysian jogger was savaged by a pack of the adorable little death machines). There's a tendency to dig up the creepy eugenicist and colonialist associations of apparently benevolent figures such as Ebenezer Howard by way of a gotcha. And to be clear, some of them are pretty bad – even if you're less intrinsically unnerved by Port Sunlight than Fitzgerald, its connections to the Belgian Congo should occasion a pause for thought. But compared to now, when we're still at the mercy of creepy rich racists exploiting forced labour in poorer countries, but they've entirely dropped even the intermittent benevolent paternalism, I'd probably still go with a Lord Leverhulme as the lesser evil. Equally, Fitzgerald tends to present utopian schemes as variously sinister alternatives to the existing city in all its messy vitality. But here he's surely engaging in a mirror fallacy to that on which he pulls up King Charles, who talks as though the city as he first saw it was natural, and any styles past that point are new and alien intrusions. Because Fitzgerald implicitly takes the city as continuing, unless misguided reformers intrude, to be gloriously heterogeneous, when clearly that isn't the case – vast tangles of bad incentives are seeing them hollowed out and smoothed down, remade on a grand scale but without any incentive beyond short-term profit. Similarly, he sometimes fails to acknowledge how much we owe to past utopians. Benjamin Ward Richardson's 19th century scheme for a healthy city called Hygeia "sounds mad – and of course, it is mad." But with its smokeless skies, its hot and cold running water, Hygeia accurately predicts many of the improvements in cities over the past 150 years. If Ebenezer Howard took a mixture of approaches, some dubious, and "crystallised it into the new discipline of city planning, something he had neither experience nor expertise in" – well, if it's a new field then surely by definition nobody has experience or expertise in it yet? Even when faced with the science suggesting that people find greenery more mentally restful than urban environments, Fitzgerald at times seems to be bending over backwards to find reasons to be sceptical: maybe that's just because they've spent so long having it drilled into them that cities are dangerous and bad? Which on one level is simply unprovable, but when he adds the kicker "even though that era of imagined decline, in most Euro-American cities at least, has long since ended, and indeed been reversed", becomes simply counterfactual. Who, except developers and estate agents, but I'm talking about humans here, thinks the city is currently thriving? The right thinks they're overrun with feral poor people and at war with the haves, the left thinks they're overrun with feral cops and at war with the have-nots, and everyone can see the fabric is crumbling. Similarly, when he talks about an "unquestioned" preference for old over new, it suggests that retro projects like Poundbury are the norm, rather than anomalies in a world of enormous shining follies, pseudo-modern rabbit hutch 'luxury' apartments, and utterly uninspired suburban sprawl.

But mention of Poundbury brings me back around to the book's strengths, too. First of all, the way (like Grindrod, or even at times Jon Ronson) with an evocative anecdote, as when Fitzgerald takes a trip there, and it's on Remembrance Sunday, and his son's sick on himself*. But also, when he talks to architect George Saumarez Smith about the place, Fitzgerald lets him have the last word, as if to concede the point that yes, uncanny as it is, it's probably better than what would have been built there otherwise. Similarly, when Fitzgerald goes to Sheffield, it's with an attitude where you can understand why friends teased him that he was writing a book about why trees are bad, but he ends up almost entirely on the side of the campaigners who stopped the council's high-handed, poorly evidenced and generally inexcusable campaign of mass felling. And it's this fair-mindedness, along with the fluent prose in a field often beset by jargon, and the sly wit (he's a devil with a well-placed '[sic]') that makes me like him even when I think he's wrong. We are in so many ways, almost all bad, far from that nineties spirit where we knew we'd won, but it did a liberal good to read some PJ O'Rourke once in a while to prevent flabbiness. The whole 'marketplace of ideas' notion has gone out of fashion as it's become clear that, as in the actual marketplace, quality counts for nothing and toxic trash with big money or seductive big lies behind it will generally win out. So it's refreshing, even nostalgic (for all that Fitzgerald narrows his eyes at nostalgia) to read a well-written and generally honest book with which one can politely, productively disagree.

Elsewhere, too, I do agree with him. It usually makes me warm to someone if they think Paris is massively overrated (though he and I have very different prescriptions when it comes to fixing that). He is profoundly distrustful of anyone who equates architecture and morality, even if he never grabs the obvious OMD joke, and in particular of the odious Roger Scrotum, I'm sorry, Scruton, which is again the basis for a firm handshake – even if I sometimes wished Fitzgerald had built out from his mockery of Scrotum's assertion that Georgian terraces are intrinsically correct and interrogated how much of his own paradigm rests on personally finding forests a bit sinister**. He knows that any proposal which amounts to 'in order to save the city we have to destroy it' is suspicious, and that the notion of 'natural' materials, unless properly qualified, is bunkum. Even when it comes to the vexed business of putting a market value on green spaces &c, I think he sums it up nicely: "And while it's true that, like most concepts that come from mainstream economics, ecosystem services and natural capital are broadly evil, they're used by people who are generally trying to do good." Ultimately, in a final chapter with the very Meades title The Twentieth Century Did Not Take Place, it becomes clear that what he'd really like is if we could just refrain from throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and maybe not write off modernism simply because it was so often underfunded from the start, and then actively undermined by Thatcherism and related afflictions. Which, sure, has an element of the special pleading you always get from true believers – sure, this failed, but maybe if we try it again, this time it'll all go to plan! But, gods help me, when I look at the Barbican compared to the crap that gets built nowadays, I can't help sympathising.

*I also particularly enjoyed his 'phone camera thinking Athens' Temple of Olympian Zeus was a barcode.
**He glances once or twice at cultural differences in response to environment, sometimes legitimately tying it to queasy racial elements in visions of the 'good city', but never quite grabs hold, and I found myself thinking that he'd probably get a lot out of Simon Schama's Landscape And Memory, which delves into exactly this.

[Alec Pompeo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gotta say I wasn't a fan of this one. There's some generally interesting ideas, but the author loves to strawman her opponents while offering up a really weak defense of modernism. Out of the 250 pages dedicated to calling street trees racist, she only bothers to acknowledge the incredibly real benefits of urban trees on shade and air quality in one paragraph hidden in the middle. Plus, the smug and elitist tone is funny at first, but beyond grating by the end. Only really finished this to see what stupid claims would be made next.

[Ellen O’Donnell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some really interesting points on urban design and mental health but then it just sort of descended into a diatribe about trees. Read like an extended uni essay with the odd bit of colloquial language thrown in for ‘accessibility’ but then didn’t really reach a clear conclusion? Would’ve got a low 2:1 at best.

[Ana Mayne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sorry to Des but this was so annoying. Amongst its many irritants the incessant comma splicing tops the charts. The cute lil paperclip Word grammar assistant would have improved this book so much. Close second to the dismissal of literally everyone else’s architectural ideals as fascist/conservative/dehumanising with no basis other than vibes. I’m here for a version of this book that wants to argue “neoclassical architecture is inextricably linked with neocolonialism”, or “20th century architecture is the best of all the architectures”. But he doesn’t make any of these arguments with a convincing through line, it’s just a random assortment of stuff he hates with no suggestion of what a better alternative might be. Kinda reminds me of uni when you didn’t do the reading, panic skimmed a few papers, then pretended to disagree with them for 3000 words.

[Richy Campbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compelling analysis and critique of where modern day cities are and what they could end up being. Intellectually challenging.

[Donaldinho14 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting book, but not sure I agree with all of the conclusions. Written with humour as well as strong analysis however, and it's always good to be presented with viewpoints different from your own x

[Natalie Bon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Main takeaways form this book:

1. Nearly every major figure in urban planning history is as either racist or fascist (no sources provided of course), therefore their ideas should be entirely disregarded.
2. Urban parks are bad because they were invented during the Industrial Revolution to make factory workers just healthy enough to keep producing profit for factory owners.
3. Basically every scientist with decades of research in their specialised field is wrong—simply because the author feels like they are. No evidence, no reasoning, just vibes.

Like… what?? Was really excited to get a fresh perspective on the future of town planning, but instead got a dude with a surface level understanding of urbanism throwing out sweeping criticisms of everything, all with zero data, minimal logic, and not a single credible counterargument in sight.

It got so absurd I ended up reading it all the way through, half expecting some kind of twist—maybe he’d turn around and reflect on the ridiculousness of his own points, or at least try to tie it all together in a coherent conclusion. But the fact that there wasn’t even an actual conclusion chapter indicates this isn’t a constructive review of urban planning but rather an incoherent rant.

Honestly, one of the book’s main points—that adding forests and biodiversity to cities is unnecessary and disrupts the idea of cities as “unnatural” spaces—isn’t just wrong, it’s reckless. In the middle of a climate crisis, pushing that kind of narrative feels as dangerously out of touch as anti-vax rhetoric during the pandemic.

[Martin Castle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have wanted to read this book for a while and it didn’t disappoint. Looking at all the contrasting ideas theory’s and schools of architecture and the city it pulls them all together to see how far we have moved away from nature in our building and city planning. Throughout the book the author writes with humour and passion linking people’s emotions to the challenge of the urban environment. Rest assured you will not look at an urban tree in the same way a great book.

[Will Dawson · Rating 2 out of 5]

He says he wasn’t writing a book about ‘why trees are bad’, but it’s hard to know what this book is. Some interesting commentary on things he disagrees with - anything which can lazily be dismissed as conservative, capitalist or colonialist - but a near total failure to present an argument or point of view with which he does agree.

[Patrick J-O'B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought-provoking in a genuine way, and compellingly snobbish and funny.

ah, nice try, but I have already depicted your perspective as symptomic of psycho-sexual anxieties!

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

An odd book. There's a germ of an idea at the core, about his wariness of urban planners/architects/public policy people wanting to push "more trees" as a solution to all of the ills of society as being, at best, naive, and at worst, an active attempt to divert from the actual work of helping people and tackling structural inequality and poverty, but it gets very blurred. He makes some not entirely convincing links between some of the proto-fascist and eugenicist thinking of the early advocates for garden cities and other types of planned urban spaces and contemporary efforts to "re-wild" cities where really it just seems like he finds the latter a bit silly and wanted the chance to rant at the hippies who creep him out. I don't think this is any clearer than when he frequently simply describes things, people and ideas as "weird" without any real reflection; it's a collection of impressions and suspicions, which fine, but I don't think there's any grand thesis here worth that much of anyone's time or really worth dedicating a whole book toward.

If I had to draw any real conclusion it seems to be that those involved in city management should stop attaching grand ideological narratives aimed at shaping the "character"/"moral fibre" of their residents or "returning" city dwellers to some anachronistic idea of "nature", when making plans for their cities and instead focus on making interventions which tangibly improve people's lives in simple, practical, ways, but he doesn't even spell this out, that's just my inference based on the extending grumbling throughout the book.

[F · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fitzgerald amusingly punctures the pieties of the ‘back to nature’ crowd, in a study that synthesises a wealth of scholarly work on the history of urban planning, aesthetics, environmental psychology and public health. There are lots of fascinating case studies here — the Garden City movement, Lord Lever’s Port Sunlight, Poundbury. The over-arching aim is to reveal the ideologies that underpin contemporary fantasies of ordered, healthy, regulated space. Like many studies in this vein, it is better at deflating the scientistic certainties of others than in offering its own positive thesis about the future of the city — so those hoping for a simple manifesto will be disappointed. An enjoyably caustic read nonetheless.

[Loren · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5. Some engaging commentary and interesting opinions in here and overall I enjoyed reading a sociological piece for the first time in a long time.

However, for the most part, Fitzgerald’s core argument gets lost amongst complaints, irrelevant hot takes and, ultimately, a long tirade about trees with no real conclusion.

I understand that just putting in the work in this field isn’t necessarily going to get you any attention. And I begin to wonder if some of the loftier statements in this book are the result of a perceived need to bring divisive opinions to the table, in order for your voice to be heard.

That said, I do think the conversational and informal writing style is refreshing to see and it kept me reading even when I wasn’t sure where the narrative was going.

[Stefan · Rating 2 out of 5]

An example of why urban designers often struggle to be taken seriously, especially compared to architects who tend to command more influence. Fitzgerald’s book is unfocused—its core concepts are diluted, buried beneath utopian musings and an overreliance on anecdotal evidence. If there is a central thesis, it leans toward a romanticized vision of rewilding and a return to an idealized rural past. However, the absence of even a rudimentary roadmap for achieving such a vision makes the book ultimately unconvincing. A few hours spent with recent urban development podcasts (99% Invisible, Talking Headways, The Urbanist) might offer a more insightful and grounded perspective.

[Lindsay Nier · Rating 3 out of 5]

As an urban design student learning about rewilding and the urban forest, it was an interesting read . I definitely appreciated the humor which is seemingly non-existent in architectural academic spaces. It was great to read a critique of the idea of the urban forest, in school it is inherently seen as good without questioning where the idea came from. Despite the read, I’m still a fan of more nature in cities! I agree that some parts were meandering and a bit far reaching, if not supported at all-but it raised some new questions for me when thinking about the motivations for including nature in design.

[Leisnic · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this am entertaining, albeit not fully elucidating read. Maybe that was just because of my own naivety, thinking (hoping?) that Fitzgerald would provide more conclusiveness to the downsides of planned future green cities and to the reasons for joy about current 'unnatural' ones. Instead, he delivers an admittedly interesting dive into the history of currently prevalent ideas about the green 'cities of tomorrow', always raising good questions, yet never fully answering them. Nevertheless, it was entertainingly written and definitely providing good food for thought.

[Conni Dawson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some very interesting anecdotes and, buried under all the vitriol, some actually interesting ideas. But everything is presented in such weighted, preloaded sentences and the author frequently admits that although there is plenty of evidence for something, he still doesn't believe it, which makes it very hard to take any of it seriously.

[Tay · Rating 2 out of 5]

Readable with some interesting ideas, though I wasn’t fully convinced by his thinking. Still, it’s good to hear someone challenging the usual anti-modernity rhetoric in urban planning, even if a bit flimsy in places.

[Ross Murray · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried with this but it kept making a lot of points which contradicted the thrust of the argument being made.
liking green spaces was liked by some nazis therefore green spaces are bad is not a strong argument in my opinion.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure what percentage of this book was an excuse for the author to publish his feet pics (p.148 if you're curious) but something tells me it wasn't 0%.

Also contains one of the filthiest reads on a monarch you'll ever see so I love it for that

[Phoebe Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 interesting ideas presenting but not in the juiciest ways

[Catriona 🦋 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Des Fitzgerald thoughtfully explores the complex (and more than occasionally fascist) politics of green cities with nuance and scorchingly dry humour. This book was just as likely to make me gasp in horror as it was to make me laugh - or even exclaim, ‘why is it always the Nazis?’ In all seriousness, Des treats the history and future of anti-urbanism with a curious (if cynical) gentleness that leaves the reader themselves more curious, and, simultaneously, more educated. The best quality a non-fiction book can have is to call you deeper down whatever rabbit hole it concerns - which this title most definitely does. Also, shoutout to Catholic architecture.

[Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately, I really struggle to see any alternative ideas being presented in this book and I generally found the tone to be quite bitter which wasn't enjoyable.

Individuals and groups with often innocent ideas of improving the world and cities are depicted as fascists more often than I expected for a 250 page read.

[Aqil Ersa · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a great book as a reminder that cities should heal. Come back to nature. Come back to how the world once was.