Future Cities: A Visual Guide

by Nick Dunn

What might our cities look like in ten, twenty or fifty years? How may future cities face global challenges? Imagining the city of the future has long been an inspiration for many architects, artists and designers. This book examines how cities of the future have been visualised, what these projects sought to communicate and what the implications may be for us now. It provides a visual history of the future and explores the relationships between different visualisation techniques and ideologies for cities.

Thinking about what futures are, who they are for, why they are desirable, and how and when they are to be brought into being is central to this book. Through visualisation we are able to experiment in ways that would be impractical and potentially hazardous in the real world, and this book, therefore, aims to contribute toward a better understanding of the power and agency of visualisations for future cities.

In this lavishly illustrated text, the authors apply several critical lenses to consider the subject in different technological futures, social futures, and global futures, providing a comprehensive survey and analysis of visions for future cities, and engaging creatively with how we perceive tomorrow's world and future studies more widely.

224 pages, Hardcover

Published February 25, 2021

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

In addition to responding to the practical issues of how we might all live together on the planet including the many significant global challenges that face us, future cities require us to explore improbabilities, paradoxes and risks against which we can question the consensual and rationalistic narratives that dominate current debates. Different ways of thinking about cities, their futures, and our relationships and experiences within them are vital. Understood in this way we can view visions of future cities as having transformative power to avoid path dependency. The need to articulate radically alternative futures so that we may better conceive different trajectories and understand their implications finds itself increasingly urgent given our collective responsibility in mitigating planetary consequences and providing a safe and sustainable world for future generations.