Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World

Wade Graham

jan. 2016 · HarperCollins

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“An excellent and novel exploration of key ideas behind city spaces and the behaviors they engender.” —Wall Street Journal

From the acclaimed landscape designer, historian and author of American Eden, a lively, unique, and accessible cultural history of modern cities.

Dream Cities explores our cities in a new way—as expressions of ideas, often conflicting, about how we should live, work, play, make, buy, and believe. It tells the stories of the real architects and thinkers whose imagined cities became the blueprints for the world we live in.

From the nineteenth century to today, what began as visionary concepts—sometimes utopian, sometimes outlandish, always controversial—were gradually adopted and constructed on a massive scale in cities around the world, from Dubai to Ulan Bator to London to Los Angeles. Wade Graham uses the lives of the pivotal dreamers behind these concepts, as well as their acolytes and antagonists, to deconstruct our urban landscapes—the houses, towers, civic centers, condominiums, shopping malls, boulevards, highways, and spaces in between—exposing the ideals and ideas embodied in each.

From the baroque fantasy villages of Bertram Goodhue to the superblocks of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City to the pseudo-agrarian dispersal of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, our upscale leafy suburbs, downtown skyscraper districts, infotainment-driven shopping malls, and “sustainable” eco-developments are seen as never before. Elegantly designed and illustrated, Dream Cities is a field guide to our modern urban world.

“An intriguing architectural history.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Enjoyable . . . well researched, posing an interesting historic tie from the past to the present.” —Washington Post

“Absolutely engrossing.” —Ross King, author of Brunelleschi’s Dome

Om författaren

Wade Graham is a Los Angeles–based garden designer, historian, and writer whose work on the environment, landscape, urbanism, and the arts has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, Outside, and other publications. An adjunct professor of public policy at Pepperdine University, he is the author of American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park to Our Backyards: What Our Gardens Tell Us About Who We Are.