Dream Cities

<p>From the acclaimed landscape designer historian and author of <em>American Eden</em> a lively unique and accessible cultural history of modern cities--from suburbs downtown districts and exurban sprawl to shopping malls and sustainable developments--that allows us to view them through the planning design architects and movements that inspired created and shaped them.</p><p><em>Dream Cities</em> 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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. In this elegantly designed and illustrated book Graham uncovers the original plans of brilliant obsessed and sometimes megalomaniacal designers revealing the foundations of today's varied municipalities. <em>Dream Cities</em> is nothing less than a field guide to our modern urban world.</p><p>Illustrated with 59 black-and-white photos throughout the text.</p>