Future Cities: Architecture and the Imagination

by Paul Dobraszczyk

Though reaching ever further toward the skies, today’s cities are overshadowed by multiple climate change, overpopulation, social division, and urban warfare all endanger our metropolitan way of life. The fundamental tool we use to make sense of these uncertain city futures is the imagination. Architects, artists, filmmakers, and fiction writers have long been inspired to imagine cities of the future, but their speculative visions tend to be seen very differently from scientific flights of fancy on the one hand versus practical reasoning on the other. In a digital age when the real and the fantastic coexist as near equals, it is especially important to know how these two forces are entangled, and how together they may help us best conceive of cities yet to come.

Exploring a breathtaking range of imagined cities—submerged, floating, flying, vertical, underground, ruined, and salvaged— Future Cities teases out the links between speculation and reality, arguing that there is no clear separation between the two. In the Netherlands, prototype floating cities are already being built; Dubai’s recent skyscrapers resemble those of science-fiction cities of the past; while makeshift settlements built by the urban poor in the developing world are already like the dystopian cities of cyberpunk. Bringing together architecture, fiction, film, and visual art, Paul Dobraszczyk reconnects the imaginary city with the real, proposing a future for humanity that is firmly grounded in the present and in the diverse creative practices already at our fingertips.

Genres: Nonfiction, Architecture, Art

272 pages, Hardcover

Published March 11, 2019

Reviews

[Nightkid · Rating 3 out of 5]

對未日小說或電影感興趣的讀者，應該會喜愛此書的內容——作者將大災難過後，關於城市的形態劃分為海面、地底和廢墟三種進行論述，介紹了各種小說、影視作品或畫作，然後再輔以不同建築師或科學家提出的應對方案，內容略嫌有點大雜燴。

[Keen Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 Stars!

This book is made up of three sections. In the first part the author seems to talk about and hover around many ideas, but at no time did I feel like we actually got into any of them in any great or satisfying detail. There was a vagueness an aimlessness about this structure that didn’t quite fit right.

We get lengthy descriptions, detailed backgrounds and many quotes from the plots of dubious disaster movies and dystopic/futuristic novels, with particular repeated emphasis on J.G. Ballard, William Gibson and “Blade Runner”. Some of these descriptions are interesting, but after a while this almost exhaustive list really does start to read like a student’s dissertation on the futuristic ecological disaster genre.

To be honest I am not really sure what the author was trying to do with this book and I am pretty certain that he wasn’t too sure himself. It isn’t awful and he can write, but the structure is all over the place and someone really should have marshalled it better.

It definitely picks up a little come the second section. The Shard being described as “autistic architecture” by one commentator did make me laugh. I was also intrigued by the concepts of “green washing” which consists of companies making a big song and dance about some minor concessions towards the environment, but it is really still just another standard blight on the environment. And the idea of “Salvagepunk” where the ruins of the past are being refashioned into the (often overpriced) treasures of the future was also compelling.

Overall this was a peculiar beast, I enjoyed many elements of it but too often I found it too vague, rambling and speculative to get to whatever point he was trying to get across.

[Sean]

Planners need to be able to anticipate the future. Doing so is the difference between creating the world we want to live in, and simply allowing the forces of chance (or, just as often, the market) to decide for us. In the nearer term our anticipations are more familiar: macroeconomic fluctuations, energy shifts, even autonomous vehicle systems. But in the long run our potentialities get more fantastical- flying cities, sunken cities, cities under the earth. But in the long story of civilization, everything more advanced than two sticks to bang together was fantastical at one point, so we might as well get planning before fantasy overtakes us. A sober analysis of how such potentialities might actually grow and develop is in order, and as such, it’s great to see a book that at least appears to take such matters seriously.

In a book of this sort, there are three major subjects to cover: the speculative types of city-building that currently can only appear as fiction, the fledgling versions of these available to us in the present at our current level of technology, and a projection of what the full maturation of these plans may reasonably look like in the future. This book covers the first adequately enough, but focuses far too much on the second to the detriment of the third. Obviously whatever we’ve managed to build so far is a necessary clue towards our potential course of development into the future, but since that future is so distant, so much of what we have at present are essentially art projects (once more, with feeling: Architecture Is Not Art!), and not particularly relevant to the actual future of human settlement. This book is dragged down by what’s effectively a catalog of gimmicks, and it’d be better served by more of a focus on how our distant speculations may actually appear and function, conjectural though it may necessarily be.

And actually, now that I think about it, if you really do require some sort of contemporary analogue to firm up the conjecture on the long road towards realizing the fictional, this book might have benefitted from spending a little more time engaging with vernacular architecture. Something like the {treehouses}, while not actively or intentionally anticipating Laputa, are at least actual architecture, unlike Tomas Saraceno’s silly little art projects, which, again, are not.

The main issue throughout the book is the consistent tone of art criticism (and the attendant socio-political-philosophical posturing). Rather than taking art (fiction) as a jumping-off point for a discussion of unrealized structures,

In the end (and the beginning, and the middle), this book isn’t about architecture at all, really—much less about planning. At every juncture, it’s really about Art. Which is fine if you’re into that sort of thing, I guess, but it’s not what it says on the tin.

Anyway, I DNF’d it halfway through cause at some point I realized the only thing I was getting out of it was a few book recs, and the last thing I need is more fucking books to read

[Cilvia Danks · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was an interesting expose of architectural cisions of the future and their bases. It wouldve done well to massively reduce the number of words dedicated to discussing the motivations of fictional characters, and focus on the details of the obstacles between these visions and reality. i particularly enjoyed the ending focusing on how architectures future is a negotiation of form that eclipses the traditional top-down development cycle