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.