Future Cities: Architecture and the ImaginationThough reaching ever further toward the skies, today’s cities are overshadowed by multiple threats: 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 predictions: 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. |
Contents
7 | |
Unmoored Cities | 21 |
Vertical Cities | 105 |
Unmade Cities | 167 |
References | 225 |
256 | |
Acknowledgements | 259 |
Photo Acknowledgements | 261 |
263 | |
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airships already Anthropocene architects architectural artist Ballard’s balloon become Blade Runner built environment bunker Burj Khalifa centre century China Miéville city’s climate change climate change fictions Cloud Cities connections construction conventional countercultural courtesy created Crobuzon cultural cyberpunk demonstrate destruction Dobraszczyk domes dominated dream Drop City Dubai eVolo example experience fantastical film floating cities flying city future cities global Global Undergrounds ground high-rise housing human Ibid iconic images Imagining Urban Futures inhabitants J. G. Ballard Kowloon Walled City Lebbeus Woods living London materials Miéville Miéville’s nature Neverwhere novel Perdido Street Station political produced proposals radical recent rising sea levels ruins salvage Science Fiction Seafort Seasteading Seasteading Institute sense Shard skyscrapers social submerged tall buildings Tomás Saraceno Torre David towers transformed underground spaces urban environment urban explorers urban world Utopia vast vertical city vision visual vulnerability waste Waterpod Woods’s York