Download or read book Imaginary Cities written by Darran Anderson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-04-06 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we understand the infinite variety of cities? Darran Anderson seems to exhaust all possibilities in this work of creative nonfiction. Drawing inspiration from Marco Polo and Italo Calvino, Anderson shows that we have much to learn about ourselves by looking not only at the cities we have built, but also at the cities we have imagined. Anderson draws on literature (Gustav Meyrink, Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, and James Joyce), but he also looks at architectural writings and works by the likes of Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, Medieval travel memoirs from the Middle East, mid-twentieth-century comic books, Star Trek, mythical lands such as Cockaigne, and the works of Claude Debussy. Anderson sees the visionary architecture dreamed up by architects, artists, philosophers, writers, and citizens as wedded to the egalitarian sense that cities are for everyone. He proves that we must not be locked into the structures that exclude ordinary citizens--that cities evolve and that we can have input. As he says: "If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined as well.”
Download or read book The Dictionary of Imaginary Places written by Alberto Manguel and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000 with total page 780 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes and visualizes over 1,200 magical lands found in literature and film, discussing such exotic realms as Atlantis, Tolkien's Middle Earth, and Oz.
Download or read book Imaginary Cities written by Darran Anderson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-04-06 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 exercise: 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.
Download or read book Invisible Cities written by Italo Calvino and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2013-08-12 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.
Download or read book Imaginary Cities of Gold written by Peter O. Koch and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2009-04-22 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanish conquistadors attempted to conquer the New World nearly a century before the English colonists established a permanent settlement at Jamestown. This book examines the unsuccessful elements of Spain's attempt at expanding its empire in the Americas, focusing particularly on the misadventures of three conquistadors. Part One tells the story of Cabeza de Vaca who, along with three other survivors of the ill-fated Panfilo de Narvaez expedition to Florida, spent nearly eight years among the various tribes that wandered across Texas, New Mexico, and northern Mexico before finding his way back to civilization. Their tales of lands rich with earthly delights served as inspiration for two epic but failed expeditions that make up the second and third parts of the book: Francisco de Coronado's quest to find the golden cities of Cibola and Hernando de Soto's efforts to find the rich kingdoms of Florida.
Download or read book Virtual Cities written by Konstantinos Dimopoulos and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virtual cities are places of often-fractured geographies, impossible physics, outrageous assumptions and almost untamed imaginations given digital structure. This book, the first atlas of its kind, aims to explore, map, study and celebrate them. To imagine what they would be like in reality. To paint a lasting picture of their domes, arches and walls. From metropolitan sci-fi open worlds and medieval fantasy towns to contemporary cities and glimpses of gothic horror, author and urban planner Konstantinos Dimopoulos and visual artist Maria Kallikaki have brought to life over forty game cities. Together, they document the deep and exhilarating history of iconic gaming landscapes through richly illustrated commentary and analysis. Virtual Cities transports us into these imaginary worlds, through cities that span over four decades of digital history across literary and gaming genres. Travel to fantasy cities like World of Warcraft’s Orgrimmar and Grim Fandango’s Rubacava; envision what could be in the familiar cities of Assassin’s Creed’s London and Gabriel Knight’s New Orleans; and steal a glimpse of cities of the future, in Final Fantasy VII’s Midgar and Half-Life 2’s City 17. Within, there are many more worlds to discover – each formed in the deepest corners of the imagination, their immense beauty and complexity astounding for artists, game designers, world builders and, above all, anyone who plays and cares about video games.
Download or read book Atlas of Imagined Places written by Matt Brown and published by Batsford Books. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER, Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2022: Illustrated Travel Book of the Year. HIGHLY COMMENDED, British Cartographic Society Awards 2022. From Stephen King's Salem's Lot to the superhero land of Wakanda, from Lilliput of Gulliver's Travels to Springfield in The Simpsons, this is a wondrous atlas of imagined places around the world. Locations from film, tv, literature, myths, comics and video games are plotted in a series of beautiful vintage-looking maps. The maps feature fictional buildings, towns, cities and countries plus mountains and rivers, oceans and seas. Ever wondered where the Bates Motel was based? Or Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life? The authors have taken years to research the likely geography of thousands of popular culture locations that have become almost real to us. Sometimes these are easy to work out, but other times a bit of detective work is needed and the authors have been those detectives. By looking at the maps, you'll find that the revolution at Animal Farm happened next to Winnie the Pooh's home. Each location has an an extended index entry plus coordinates so you can find it on the maps. Illuminating essays accompanying the maps give a great insight into the stories behind the imaginary places, from Harry Potter's wizardry to Stone Age Bedrock in the Flintstones. A stunning map collection of invented geography and topography drawn from the world's imagination. Fascinating and beautiful, this is an essential book for any popular culture fan and map enthusiast.
Download or read book Future Cities written by Paul Dobraszczyk and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2025-03-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brings together architecture, fiction, film, and visual art to reconnect the imaginary city with the real, proposing a future for humanity that is firmly grounded in the present and the diverse creative practices already at our fingertips. Though 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.
Download or read book Automatic Cities written by Robin Lee Clark and published by Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. This book was released on 2009 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Automatic Cities explores the psychological and metaphorical influence of architecture on contemporary visual art. The title of the exhibition refers to the Surrealist practices of automatic writing and automatic drawing, which sought to access individual creativity by tapping into the unconscious. The exhibition explores notions of architecture in the broadest sense, comprising images of sites and cities both built and unbuilt, rising from collective experience and imagination." "Automatic Cities includes works by 13 artists and one artists' collective hailing from 11 countries around the globe including Michael Borremans (Belgium); Matthew Buckingham (New York); Los Carpinteros (Cuba); Catharina van Eetvelde (Paris, born Belgium); Jakob Kolding (Berlin, born Copenhagen); Ann Lislegaard (Copenhagen, born in Norway); Julie Mehretu (New York, born Ethiopia); Paul Noble (London); Sarah Oppenheimer (New York); Matthew Ritchie (New York, born London); Hiraki Sawa (London, born Japan); Katrin Sigurdardottir (U.S., born Iceland); Rachel Whiteread (London); and Saskia Olde Wolbers (London, born Netherlands)." --Book Jacket.
Download or read book Beyond Architecture written by Robert Klanten and published by Gestalten. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Architecture is the first publication of its kind to document the creative exploration of architecture and urban propositions in the contemporary arts. The projects collected in this book demonstrate how not only architects and designers but also artists are taking architecture as a starting point for experimentation. They range from performance, installation art and crafted sculptures to architectural models, alternative ideas for living spaces and furniture, as well as illustration, painting, collage and photography. Through stunning photography, visuals and complementary texts, these visionary concepts reveal the hidden creative potential for architecture and urban environments in inventive ways.
Download or read book Story Cities written by Rosamund Davies and published by . This book was released on 2019-06-13 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Story Cities explore ways in which stories respond to, reflect and re-imagine the city. Explore new short fictions in multiple genres, guide book to the fictional city, all cities, any city: its markets, squares, parks, stations & ports; the streets, alleys, dead ends & the crossroads. Never identified, the city has a voice of its own.
Download or read book Cities and Creativity from the Renaissance to the Present written by Ilja Van Damme and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume critically challenges the current creative city debate from a historical perspective. In the last two decades, urban studies has been engulfed by a creative city narrative in which concepts like the creative economy, the creative class or creative industries proclaim the status of the city as the primary site of human creativity and innovation. So far, however, nobody has challenged the core premise underlying this narrative, asking why we automatically have to look at cities as being the agents of change and innovation. What processes have been at work historically before the predominance of cities in nurturing creativity and innovation was established? In order to tackle this question, the editors of this volume have collected case studies ranging from Renaissance Firenze and sixteenth-century Antwerp to early modern Naples, Amsterdam, Bologna, Paris, to industrializing Sheffield and nineteenth-and twentieth century cities covering Scandinavian port towns, Venice, and London, up to the French techno-industrial city Grenoble. Jointly, these case studies show that a creative city is not an objective or ontological reality, but rather a complex and heterogenic "assemblage," in which material, infrastructural and spatial elements become historically entangled with power-laden discourses, narratives and imaginaries about the city and urban actor groups.
Download or read book Real Cities written by Steve Pile and published by SAGE Publications Limited. This book was released on 2005-05-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is real about city life? Real Cities shows why it is necessary to take seriously the more imaginary, fantastic and emotional aspects of city life. Drawing inspiration from the work of Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud and Georg Simmel, Pile explores the dream-like and ghost-like experiences of the city. Such experiences are, he argues, best described as phantasmagorias. The phantasmagorias of city life, though commonplace, are far from self-evident and little understood. This book is a path-breaking exploration of urban phantasmagorias, grounded empirically in a series of unusual and exciting case studies. In this study, four substantial phantasmagorias are identified: dreams, magic, vampires and ghosts. The investigation of each phantasmagoria is developed using a wide variety of clear examples. Thus, voodoo in New York and New Orleans shows how ideas about magic are forged within cities. Meanwhile vampires reveal how specific fears about sex and death are expressed within, and circulate between, cities such as London and Singapore. Taken together, such examples build a unique picture of the diverse roles of the imaginary, fantastic and the emotional in modern city life. What is "real" about the city has radical consequences for how we think about improving city life, for all too often these are over-looked in utopian schemes for the city. Real Cities forcefully argues that an appreciation of urban phantasmagorias must be central to what is considered real about city life.
Download or read book In Divisible Cities written by Dominic Pettman and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Divisible Cities takes Italo Calvino's classic re-imagining of Venice, viewed in the mind's eye from many different metaphysical angles, and projects it on to the world at large. Where the Italian saw his favorite city as an impossible metropolis of many moods, shades, and ways of being, this unauthorized sequel unpacks the Escheresque streets in unexpected directions. In Divisible Cities is thus an exercise in cartographic origami: the reflective and poetic result of the narrator's desire to map hidden cities, secret cities, imaginary cities, impossible cities, and overlapping cities, existing beneath the familiar Atlas of everyday perception. Stitching these different places and spaces together is a "double helix" or "Siamese seduction" between the traveler and his romantic shadow, revealing -- step by step -- a clandestine itinerary of hidden affinities, nestled within the habitual rhythm of things. Matter matters. That's what the drone of the city tells us. And yet we dream of something beyond these invisible walls. Were I an architect-deity, I would create an Escheresque subway system, linking all the cities in the world. The tunnels themselves, and the people decanted from one place to the other, would eventually create an Ecumenopolis: a single and continuous city, enlaced and endless. Were this the case I could get on the F train at Delancey Street, Manhattan, and -- after a couple of changes mid-town -- emerge in the night-markets of Taipei, or near the Roman baths of Budapest. Or perhaps even downtown Urville.
Download or read book The Book of Legendary Lands written by Umberto Eco and published by . This book was released on 2015-09-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of his books On Beauty and On Ugliness and The Infinity of Lists, Umberto Eco presents an enthralling illustrated tour of the fabled places that have awed and eluded us through the ages. "Eco is one of the most influential thinkers of our time" Los Angeles Times From the epic poems of Homer to contemporary science fiction, from the Holy Scriptures to modern mythology and fairy tale, literature and art are full of illusory places we have at some time believed are real, and onto which we have projected our dreams, ideals and fears. Umberto Eco leads us on an illuminating journey through these legendary lands - Atlantis, Thule and Hyperborea, the Earth's interior and the Land of Cockaigne - and explores utopias and dystopias where our imagination can confront concepts that are too incredible, or too challenging, for our limited real world. In The Book of Legendary Lands the author's text is accompanied by several hundred carefully assembled works of art and literature; the result is a beautifully illustrated volume with broad and enduring appeal. Translated from Italian by Alastair McEwen
Download or read book American Cities in Post Apocalyptic Science Fiction written by Robert Yeates and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visions of the American city in post-apocalyptic ruin permeate literary and popular fiction, across print, visual, audio and digital media. American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction explores the prevalence of these representations in American culture, drawing from a wide range of primary and critical works from the early-twentieth century to today. Beginning with science fiction in literary magazines, before taking in radio dramas, film, video games and expansive transmedia franchises, Robert Yeates argues that post-apocalyptic representations of the American city are uniquely suited for explorations of contemporary urban issues. Examining how the post-apocalyptic American city has been repeatedly adapted and repurposed to new and developing media over the last century, this book reveals that the content and form of such texts work together to create vivid and immersive fictional spaces in ways that would otherwise not be possible. Chapters present media-specific analyses of these texts, situating them within their historical contexts and the broader history of representations of urban ruins in American fiction. Original in its scope and cross-media approach, American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction both illuminates little-studied texts and provides provocative new readings of familiar works such as Blade Runner and The Walking Dead, placing them within the larger historical context of imaginings of the American city in ruins.
Download or read book Imaginary Peaks written by Katie Ives and published by Mountaineers Books. This book was released on 2021-10-01 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author is a renowned writer in international climbing community Fascinating story of hoax that inspired a quest for a North American Shangri-La Vivid recounting of fabled mountains from across the world Using an infamous deception about a fake mountain range in British Columbia as her jumping-off point, Katie Ives, the well-known editor of Alpinist, explores the lure of blank spaces on the map and the value of the imagination. In Imaginary Peaks she details the cartographical mystery of the Riesenstein Hoax within the larger context of climbing history and the seemingly endless quest for newly discovered peaks and claims of first ascents. Imaginary Peaks is an evocative, thought-provoking tale, immersed in the literature of exploration, study of maps, and basic human desire.
