Future Cities: A Visual Guide

by Nick Dunn, Paul Cureton

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.

381 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 10, 2020

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lushly illustrated book of architecture but especially urbanist visions of the future that compelling argues that imagining how cities will evolve is a prime (and perhaps inescapable) site for futures imaginaries in general — in other words, that almost every elaborated vision of the future whether dystopian or utopian, fictional or policy-focused, has entailed a detailed vision specifically about the evolution of the urban.

After this general discussion of the relationship between urbanism and futurism, it then unpacks a wide range of examples of urban figuring exercises, categorized into three buckets: technological futures, which consist of visions that are driven by optimism about technology, and which conceive of the city as a series of systems, networks and processes; social futures, which place greater emphasis on the human scale of the city and emphasize the lived experience of people and their relationships; and global futures, in which urbanists have specifically articulated how future cities will have to respond to the impacts of climate change and other planetary challenges.

It all adds up to a great compendium of urbanism over the last 150 years or so.