Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between

by Darran Anderson

For as long as humans have gathered in cities, those cities have had their shining—or shadowy—counterparts. Imaginary cities, potential cities, future cities, perfect cities. It is as if the city itself, its inescapable gritty reality and elbow-to-elbow nature, demands we call into being some alternative, yearned-for better place. This book is about those cities. It’s neither a history of grand plans nor a literary exploration of the utopian impulse, but rather something different, hybrid, idiosyncratic. It’s a magpie’s book, full of characters and incidents and ideas drawn from cities real and imagined around the globe and throughout history. Thomas More’s allegorical island shares space with Soviet mega-planning; Marco Polo links up with James Joyce’s meticulously imagined Dublin; the medieval land of Cockaigne meets the hopeful future of Star Trek. With Darran Anderson as our guide, we find common themes and recurring dreams, tied to the seemingly ineluctable problems of our actual cities, of poverty and exclusion and waste and destruction. And that’s where Imaginary Cities becomes more than a mere—if ecstatically entertaining—intellectual for, as Anderson says, “If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined.” Every architect, philosopher, artist, writer, planner, or citizen who dreams up an imaginary city offers lessons for our real ones; harnessing those flights of hopeful fancy can help us improve the streets where we live. Though it shares DNA with books as disparate as Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities, there’s no other book quite like Imaginary Cities. After reading it, you’ll walk the streets of your city—real or imagined—with fresh eyes. 

Genres: Nonfiction, Architecture, History, Urbanism, Cities, Urban Planning, Reference

576 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 16, 2015

About the author

Darran Anderson is an Irish nonfiction writer who lives in London. He is the author of ‘Inventory’ (Chatto & Windus/Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and 'Imaginary Cities' (Influx Press/University of Chicago Press).

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really liked the concept of this book but, in retrospect, should perhaps have been suspicious of its grand ambitions. The blurb claims that it, 'rethinks ideas of utopia and dystopia' and 'seeks to move beyond the clichés of psychogeography and hauntology'. The fact of the matter is, I got 164 pages in and not a single chapter was longer than five pages. Indeed, most were a mere three pages long. Each chucked a couple of vaguely worded ideas about cities at the reader, supported by several quotes and a single footnote, then flitted onto the next thing. This is not what I want from non-fiction. I could discern no thesis, no structuring idea(s), and no direction in which the author was heading. Yet somehow there were more than five hundred more pages left. Also, it's due back at the library tomorrow.

I always feel guilty about 'abandoning' books, especially if they might potentially have some interest should I persist. However, as my mother said, I should see it more positively as moving on to a more engaging book. I was reminded of the 700 page 100 Selected Stories O Henry collection that I gave up on halfway through because 100 short stories is simply too many. The reader gets lost and bewildered by such a density of disconnected fragments. This strikes me as even more of a problem in a non-fiction book. Adorno got away with it in Minima Moralia because his fragments were succinctly insightful, as well as longer than five pages for the most part. 'Imaginary Cities' has no clear idea of what it is trying to do or say; a forest of literary, historical, and academic references cannot make up for this lack.

[Barkingstars · Rating 3 out of 5]

Imaginary Cities is definitely worth a read but just be aware of what you're getting into.

Do not expect to be taken by the hand and guided through a world view. This is more like a train ride whizzing past sites, trying to get a glimpse as it all flies past.

The author covers a remarkable amount of ground but in doing so sacrifices any real depth. This is not necessarily a bad thing - and I don't think I've ever highlighted so many passages from any book - but this makes it feel a bit unsatisfactory to this reader.

A very interesting book, but one that throws everything at the reader - good or bad.

[Jackie Law · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imaginary Cities, by Darran Anderson, is vast in scope and scale. It looks at cities throughout time, their founding and evolution, the effect their existence has had on man. The cities discussed are not restricted to those which can be visited. They include cities which exist only in history, those of myth and legend, fictional cities, and those which were conceived but never born. The cities are examined from a variety of perspectives but always with a view to their influences and effect. This is a perceptive, challenging and fascinating wander through time and space whilst looking at how history is defined.

We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. We are unreliable narrators even to ourselves. Time is much more complex and relativist than our linear way of thinking permits.

A note on this review. As I read the book I made notes. Much of what follows is taken from the book, ordered and paraphrased by me. Sometimes it is hard to cut back on all that I wish to highlight to a potential reader. This is very much a book that I want to encourage those with an interest in the subject to read, because I will struggle to do it justice.

Cities are conceived as utopias yet it is worth recognising that all dystopias are utopias for some inhabitants at least. To create an ideal city is it necessary to dispose of non ideal inhabitants? From ancient walled cities to modern, gated communities the barriers were erected to keep the Other out. Those who benefit from the status quo fear change even though it is the polyphony of a city that is its beating heart.

Might we see the Fellowship of the Ring as sabateurs of necessary progress, a ragged luddite band of aristocrats, peasent revolutionaries and priests preventing necessary industrialisation of Mordor?

The future will be built from the reconstructed wreckage of the past and the present. There is little in the behaviour of mankind to suggest we will abolish degradation, poverty and ruin given our inability to extricate from greed, power and sadism. With improvements in cleanliness and thereby health we exist, perhaps without realising, in what would once have been sought after as a utopia.

With cities as with people the condition of the bowels is all important. Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Power is the control of space: in prison, factory or stately home; in kettling, erecting walls such as currently exist in Belfast or Gaza; in backstage passes, first class travel, or the ability to live in freedom within our own homes.

Every vast Emerald city requires vast emerald mines yet the powerful demand that everyone be happy by whatever means necessary: behavioural conditioning, drugs, lobotomisation.

Many accept the premise that the more you own the more you are and the more deserving of it you have been.

The edifices of the powerful have always dominated the city skyline, from the spires of churches to the glass towers of finance.

This is but a tiny taster of the subjects explored by the author. The book is long but every word is worth reading. It is a challenge to consider the world we inhabit, how it came to be and what will replace it. This is an exploration of psychogeography, architecture and philosophy; what is real and what reality even means; man’s inability to escape his influences, including fiction and the fiction that is accepted in our present and as history.

These tales of alchemy, devils and gold, theft and ambition and death, we give the insufficient title, history.

I do not review a great deal of non fiction but am so glad to have been sent such an astounding and readable tome. The depth, breadth and quality of writing is phenomenal. This is seminal stuff.

My copy of this book was provided gratis by the publisher, Influx Press.

[Knibbs · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting ideas but no cohesive structure to be found. Could have benefited a lot from some serious editing, culling and redrafting.

[Neil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Real cities, mythical cities, fantasy cities, lost cities, submerged cities, cities in the sky or on the surface of the sea, cities in space, cities on the move, vertical cities, buried cities. Cities, cities and more cities.

The birth, evolution and death of cities.

Architecture and more architecture.

Utopia and dystopia.

Real cities that inspired fictional cities. Fictional cities that inspired real cities.

This is one of those books that takes an age to read. Partly because it is nearly 600 dense pages long. But also partly because the 884 (yes, 884!) footnotes have a tendency to send you off into cyberspace chasing an obscure but fascinating reference to a book or a movie or a piece of music or a painting or...you get the idea.

I don’t think it is possible to properly review this book. It is so broad in its scope that any attempt to summarise will necessarily leave out many of the important bits. But it is also true that the structure defies reviewing. The reader is bombarded with facts, with references, with connections between seemingly disconnected ideas, with ideas. And they never stop. It is actually a fairly exhausting book to read because of the continual flow of information that leaves you repeatedly saying “I didn’t know that” or “I hadn’t thought of that”. It seems that the author has read every other book ever written and is determined to make reference to all of them and build links between them. I have to acknowledge there were many times when I reached the end of a section and could not remember where it started because we had visited so many other places since the start that my brain was fairly fried. And what’s amazing about that is the most of the sections are only 4-5 pages long (often less). Imagine that: nearly 600 pages with nearly 900 footnotes of rapid fire sections that machine gun facts at you.

I want to admire this book. It covers the whole scope of human history and more. It finishes by thinking about the end of the universe. It is not constrained by reality but frequently heads off into the world of imagination and fantasy. It jumps around finding connections from one topic to another that can mean a single sentence takes you from a real city to a building to book to a movie to a politician to a philosopher to a scientist to another book to an imaginary city to another piece of writing…. But the honest truth is that I was overwhelmed by the book. I simply could not take it in. If it was half its size with some more narrative thread to it, I either wouldn’t need to re-read it or I would feel able to re-read it. As it is, I feel that I missed out on a lot of it but the thought of going back in is, frankly, a bit too scary.

[Nicolas Schneider · Rating 2 out of 5]

I almost gave it up several times, but there were enough interesting passages scattered throughout the book to keep me reading. 'Imaginary Cities' is sprawling, and reflects in that way the immense knowledge of its author. However, as other users have already pointed out, its structure is flawed: asymmetric chapters, repetitions, non-sequiturs and a very problematic lack of clarity often made it difficult to see what the point was. What bothered me too was the author's apparent inability to express a point of view and ideas of his own, except in the form of dubious truisms which he never takes the time to justify (see for example the passage on how vice is what makes cities exciting - I probably agree with that, but it should be explained why). In other words, do not be fooled by the grand ambitions announced on the back cover, 'Imaginary Cities' is in fact little more than a tedious yet extremely comprehensive introduction to a number of often fascinating and little known fictional cities and unbuilt monuments - which is not that bad in itself.

[Maria Longley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Imaginary cities is a rich exploration of the city in myth, fiction and history. The breadth of topics mentioned and the knowledge of Darran Anderson is breath-taking, but there is so much going on and it's so wide ranging that it's a little bit difficult for it all to be memorable. I enjoyed reading it all at the time, but looking back it's quite tricky to remember all that was covered in the book as there's practically something new being discussed on each of the 570 pages... It was fun encountering people and books I already knew and I did look up a whole bunch of new things as I went along too. And I've really enjoyed his twitter feed (@oniropolis) with lots of really interesting pictures.

[Alex Sarll]

Imaginary Cities intentionally suggests Calvino's Invisible Cities, of which it proclaims itself a diminished non-fiction reflection, but while it's topped and tailed with Marco Polo, in between are a dizzying array of other reference points. Anderson knows that to even begin to talk about the topic he needs to address le Corbusier (on whom he's a lot more nuanced than you often see), Wren, Speer – but to get anywhere worth reading he'll want Robert Jencks, Blobism, Fritz Lang. And to really impress? That needs James Blish and Clark Ashton Smith, Babar and Judge Dredd. Inevitably, with such a breadth of material, there's the odd fumble; Imaginary Cities is a very different book to the only other Anderson I've read (and it wasn't a connection I realised when I picked this up), the Melody Nelson 33 1/3, but both made me think that if anyone had been assigned to edit them, they possibly just threw their hands up and went to the pub. Sentences not infrequently change direction halfway through, leaving a mess of fragments which I suppose could be considered method writing when applied to ruined cities and broken dreams of impossible structures; Siegel and Shuster must have crossed timelines with Lee and Kirby to have become New York Jews, and reading this when I did, the reference to the Cistine Chapel was particularly glaring. There's also an occasional threat of turning doctrinaire, sometimes nonsensically so: the suggestion that Prester John was an imaginary forerunner to the West's later installation of client dictators is bullshit on multiple levels, not least that if the West had been anything like hegemonic at the time, they wouldn't have been needing to fantasise about Prester John. The book would also have benefitted hugely from illustrations, though I appreciate they would have bumped up both the price and the bulk of an already fairly hefty volume; in 2013, Anderson is among the first writers aware that most readers will be accompanied at all times by devices on which they can find themselves illustrations of Metabolist and Suprematist designs, unbuilt Frank Lloyd Wright masterpieces – but doing so does break the flow. And whatever its flaws, it is a book that flows, surprisingly so given its switchbacks and hecatombs. It's not quite on the same level, it's certainly from a less glorious era of English prose, but I really can't think of a better comparison for the omnivorousness and paradoxical insights here than the mesmerising, melancholy miscellanies of Burton and Browne.

[Adriana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whew. I have approximately 8,000 things to look up now. I'm surprised he failed to mention Zaha Hadid's work, and the book is (he admits occasionally) very western focused. But fascinating, all the threads he pulls together.

[James Corson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Imaginary Cities has an intriguing premise: it looks at how imaginary cities - whether described in literature, depicted in film, explored by philosophers, or envisioned by architects - both influence and are influenced by real cities. Darran Anderson explores many interesting concepts throughout the book, and he keeps hitting on a few key themes that really resonated with me. For example, he makes the (often expressed) point that utopias are often dystopias, but he adds the caveat that utopias are in fact utopia for some people. After all, Airstrip One is probably a pretty great place for Big Brother. I appreciated his defense of diversity and how it leads to more vibrant, interesting cities - whether real or imaginary. All in all, there's a lot to like in this book.

Unfortunately, there's even more to dislike. My biggest complaint is that the book is so scattered and unorganized. I had been prepared for relatively thin treatments of each subject; after all, the back cover states that this is "a magpie's book," and many Goodreads reviewers have made similar observations. But I had underestimated how scattered this book would be. It could have benefited greatly with an introduction or mission statement. Instead, it jumps right into discussions of cave paintings, which segues into Plato's allegory of the cave, which then jumps to Marco Polo, and so on. In that respect, it reminded me of Ovid's Metamorphoses (which also contains many intriguing stories and ideas but suffers from its whirlwind nature, in my opinion). Themes pop up here and there, but this book is more stream-of-consciousness than coherent essay.

Second, I was frustrated by the constant name-dropping of various books, movies, and architects. Many of these works were rather obscure, such that it would be necessary to look something up every page to understand the reference. I'm not opposed to looking stuff up as I'm reading. The problem here is the sheer volume of references. And it's a shame, because the book worked well when Anderson was covering territory with which I had passing familiarity. In general, I understood many of his references to novels, less of his references to movies, and very little of his references to architecture. Needless to say, the parts of the book that were heavy on architecture were a slog.

Lastly, this book is downright sloppy. It has far more errors than any book I have ever read. There are the mundane spelling errors, which are annoying but not necessarily a big deal. However, I also noticed some mixed up references. Notably, Anderson mixes up his references to Bleak House and Great Expectations by Dickens. I'm sure there were other mix-ups that I didn't catch because I wasn't familiar with the references.

The way works are cited is also maddeningly inconsistent. Sometimes Anderson will include detailed information in the footnote, other times he just includes a page number without being clear about what book he's referring to, and often he has long quotes that he doesn't footnote with a specific reference. Even if I was inclined to look up more of the references, it would have been a challenge due to this sloppiness.

Most unforgivably, there is just way too much lazy writing, including trite sentences like, "To qualify as a pilgrim, there has to be a pilgrimage," or "The real becomes unreal and the unreal becomes real," or "The spectacle wins at its most spectacular." This sounds like something a "deep" freshman philosophy student would say to sound intelligent. And Anderson relies heavily on these banal statements to carry his message.

All in all, this is a book with an interesting premise and interesting themes that is seriously undermined by its lack of organization, its poor editing, and its frequently lazy prose. I'm glad I read it - I learned a lot in the process - but it was a frustrating experience at times.

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book much more than I actually I did. Anderson writes prose like a poet, which is fine, and his exploration of the concept of City - in imagination and in reality; in the past, present, and future; in high, low, and pop culture - is intriguing. But ultimately, I found the book to be a real slog, with no continuous thread or logical progression that I could discern. The sources and quotations are footnoted, but not in any coherent manner, and it can be difficult to tell which architect, writer, philosopher, or comic book provided any given quote.

And for a University of Chicago Press book, it is woefully in need of a copy editor. Typos, mispunctuation, and missing words abound making it very hard to read in parts.

I think there may be some really fascinating ideas in this book, but it’s not coherent enough to tie them together.

[Babak Fakhamzadeh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like a very, very long essay, but one that lacks focus and draws no overarching conclusions. Interesting for its many associations, all loosely related to 'the city', there are plenty deductions the author implies as obvious that I have an issue with, leaving me with the impression that, at best, the book is a showcase for how much Darren Anderson has read.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 4 out of 5]

A vast and sprawling journey through the city as it has existed in the imagination, the ideal, and as echoed in reality—past, present and probable future.
Working on review for publication/Spring 2017. My review for The Quarterly Conversation can be found here: http://quarterlyconversation.com/imag...

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Take your time. This isn't a normal read.

Sit with a second screen and search Google for the endless names and references and phenomenal work by thousands of artists. It was a wonderful learning experience for me.

Really, this is an internet pop-up book for adults.

A student could do a great extra credit assignment making a web page with the thousands of references in this book.

[Valters Bruns · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptionally well-written kaleidoscope of dreams of space around us.
Although packed with information to the level I had to use a pen as my bookmark, it still leaves the impression of being poetry in disguise.
Thank you for the trip. 10/10

[Jamie Delano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, erudite, informative and compendious. Recommended.

[Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to this book as a fan of the author's twitter feed, one of the best curated and consistently fascinating on that hellsite. This book is impressive for many of the same reasons, and operates in a way that will maybe appeal most to those used to hyperlinked blogs. The only regret is that it does feel limited by the printed page, as so many images are referenced that I would have been better off reading slowly with a web browser open the entire time instead of on the train. It certainly made me imagine a more utopian future where a 900 page special edition with full-color illustrations exists.

[Cozy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Given this book titles itself with the word "imaginary" I was hoping that I wouldn't need a functional understanding of real life architecture and architects to be able to enjoy this, I was wrong. This is a very densely packed book with a lot of interesting points, but the presentation left much to be desired as it meandered from point to point with many detours.
As for production, I noticed far more typos than I have in other published works which seemed to get worse towards the end of the book. The book itself (the paperback at least) has a very tight binding and it's a heavy book which made it uncomfortable to read. Not to say that this book is all bad, when I was able to understand what was being said I did find it interesting, I just wish I could have gotten more out of it.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the associations and ideas in this, but reading it was something of a chore. It's hundreds of pages of micro-chapters, with very little cohesion or structure. I give this book credit for adding to my TBR, but overall, it was too scattered and superficial for my taste.

[Graham · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really, really wish I didn't have to write this - I wanted so much to like it and everything about it should be something I like - but despite an absolutely fascinating premise, this book falls flat in its attempt to...well, I'm not sure. The semblances of topic sentences are absent from everywhere. The book follows a vague progression of meandering subjects, perhaps illuminating connections but more often than not merely appearing one after the other in a grouping of quasi-similar areas.

Darren Anderson curates a very interesting Twitter feed called Oniropolis, each tweet (or thread) of which usually features a collection of images from a given source or artist or city. It's simple, thought-provoking, and very well-spotted. Unfortunately, this book exists almost as a prose version of the same. Anderson flits from one book to a trio of films to the art of a noir painter without describing the works in any meaningful way. But the limitations of print mean that, despite such a visual analysis of the built environment, of art and architecture, it is the words that must suffice in lieu of pictures. But while Anderson's allusions are dense and heavy, they are also fleeting, with a captivating reference to something immediately moved on from, leaving the reader with little grasp of what that reference is or how to learn more about it.

Coming from Anderson's fertile mind, the sheer abundances of sources and references that go unexplained also means that much can escape the reader. For instance:

There are other stories which show us what is to be gained from seeing the city in cross-section; Chris Ware's Building Stories and Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual. Yet this is by no means an intrinsically good thing as the prying protagonist of Barbusse's Hell finds out.

What is the plot in these? The subject? What do they share save a "cross-section" view of the city? Do they even come from a common period? With this book, you're left wanting for detail, the cumulus clouds of the word tags floating far overhead, casting only a shadow. This isn't to say that the book isn't interesting; indeed, these frustrations are so precisely because one would like to know more about the referred-to material. But in the absence of that detail - or, as I'll address, an easy means of finding it - Imaginary Cities confounds as often as it provokes.

I've saved the most pedantic for last, but the citation structure in Imaginary Cities is lamentable. It's astonishing that the University of Chicago Press, inventors of the ur-standard for citation formatting, seems to have skipped editing this volume entirely. Footnotes follow no given standard; whether or not they even end with a period is a crapshoot. Sometimes the author is included, sometimes the title, never the date. On occasion, without sufficient reference in the text itself, the footnote won't include anything more than a page number (edition? Publication date? Absent entirely). Half of the most interesting allusions in the text aren't even cited! Quotes from separate volumes will follow each other and yet only one given a partial citation. (And to be even more pedantic, sometimes the citation superscript is properly placed outside of punctuation; more often though, it inexplicable comes before even the period.) In short, as much as this book might prompt broader explorations of the material within, its inadequate references and citations make it difficult to further examine the source material.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say? Undoubtedly one of the best books I've ever read. I found it in London, it traveled with me to the other side of the world, it lived with me in Seoul, it has been lost, found, lost again, re-bought, brought back to Amsterdam, and finally finished after almost 3 years. Most of that time I spent dipping into it and googling virtually every reference. I've learned so much. Imaginary Cities is really an absolute treasure trove of hidden gems, quotable prose, and labyrinthine knowledge on the whole idea of cities. But it's also much more than that. It's truly something original and something that I have no doubt I'll be coming back to again and again. 10*.

[Edward Giordano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Darran's book is very ambitious, covering fictional, real and planned architecture all in the same criss-crossing chapters. I came to this book for world-building ideas and I left with a million book recommendations and buildings I had to constantly google image search to see what they looked like. I loved the way Darran interrogated the concept of city from almost every conceivable angle. I came for inspiration, but left with an appreciation for buildings like songs frozen in time, their shapes influenced by what has come before and representative of contemporaneous thoughts.

[Sara Shakouri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This could be an interesting book if the author inserted some basic idea of himself, and expanded the book around it. Without this central idea, the books falls into fragmentary pieces, each bringing up an aspect/idea/meditation, listing several examples in art or architecture, and then moving to another piece. For the first 50 pages it is interesting, but turns to a tedious read, despite Anderson's encyclopedic knowledge of the topics.

[Martin Raybould · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sprawling, challenging but, ultimately, highly rewarding study of how art affects architecture and vice versa.

[Ruben Baetens · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book lacks any structure as a guide through the history of imaginary cities and their architecture; leaving the reader faltering from essay to pamphlet.

[Meadhbh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know why it took me so long to get around to reading the final 20 pages of this book. I probably just didn't want it to end.

Everything you read about this book is true: it meanders, it digresses, it is written in a conversational style. It's sort of like the transcript of a dinner party attended by architecture and communication theory grad students. It gets a little deep in some places. But it is only very rarely boring.

I enjoyed this book a great deal.

Maybe because Anderson typed out things I've often thought, but kept to myself. More likely because it gently nudged me into thinking things I had never considered about the relationship of urban planning and the inner life. To understand this text is to accept a mystical link between the interior and exterior worlds.

Structured as a collection of essays, I found it worthwhile to digest each after reading. It's not a race to finish all 570 pages of this tome. I Re-read the bit about Judge Dredd and Concrete Island several times; it's clear to me now the world will end as a Ballardian automobile accident and not as a bang or whimper.

Anderson puts sentences together well; it reads almost as a lyric poem. It's the epic poem of a bookish tribe of Vandals converted to the cause of landscape architecture.

Worth a read.

[Raj · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very difficult book to describe. The back cover calls it a work of "creative non-fiction", which I guess is as good a place as any to start. It's about cities that, by some definition, don't exist. Whether that's cities or buildings imagined by architects but never built; cities thought up by writers and poets; cities as they could or should be; or cities that have died.

The book is split into different sections, with short chapters within each section. To be honest, I found it difficult to pick up themes within the chapters, and even, at times, within the sections. Yes, you might get a section on utopia, and its evil twin dystopia, but then you get a section like 'The Turk' which just seems to flit from subject to subject without any unifying theme (although, of course, this may be more a failure of me than of the book). This makes it an odd read for me. It's something to dip into every so often rather than something to read in large chunks with a unifying narrative running through it but I did find it somewhat unsatisfying. I'm not sure what it's missing, but I do feel it's missing something.

Still, I learned things about architecture and architects that I didn't know. Now let's see if any of it sticks.

[Jonathan Natusch · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me a very long time to read this book. Not because it's a bad book. It's actually very well written, with plenty a quotable line. The reason it took me so long to read is because every few pages I would be sent down some rabbit-hole, where I wanted to know more about a morsel of information that Anderson had dropped into mix. Or it would send me to a completely different book, leaving me to surface weeks later for another chapter of Imaginary Cities.

It's certainly not a book that will be for everyone. There's no overarching journey, and it can often feel like a collection of "once over lightly" essays, where a more in-depth analysis would have been appreciated.

Nonetheless, as a source of inspiration, and a very easy way to add to one's "to be read" pile of books, it's a ripper!

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book in October 2016 and finished it in the spring of 2019. For those two and a half years, it was an ever present feature of my life, always beckoning, always inviting me to go on another strange walk with Mr. Anderson.

Imaginary Cities is so dense with fantasias, historical revelations, and unexpected insights that I have found it best consumed one slim chapter at a time. Even then, I was forced to turn to the internet as reference on so many occasions that I had to go back and reread a chapter to understand the elucidated connections.

I feel that I have been made a better person by reading this book, which I also very much enjoyed. For people interested in history, ideas, society, and of course cities, I recommend it. Best eaten in small doses. Five stars, for sure.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one was worth the wait. I'd been following Darran Anderson on Twitter for some time and was anxiously awaiting a U.S. publication of this one, it lives up my highest expectations. A thorough, amazingly well researched and cited trip through the evolution of imaginary (and more real than you'd expect) cities and landscapes throughout history. Even with every single page jam-packed with references and notes (seriously, I'm going to need to re-read this just to compile all of the many, many topics Anderson encourages me to explore further), it's is endlessly readable. A minor quibble to be had with the frequent typos, way more than I'd expect in this type of book, but that's hardly Anderson's fault. I cannot recommend this highly enough.