Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World

by Wade Graham Narrated by Paul Bellantoni

Overview

Landscape designer and historian Wade Graham follows the acclaimed American Eden with a lively, accessible cultural history of modern cities-from suburbs, downtown districts, and exurban sprawl, to shopping malls and “sustainable” developments-seen through the lens of planning, design, and the architects and movements behind them.

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. In this book, Graham uncovers the original plans of brilliant, obsessed, and sometimes megalomaniacal designers, revealing the foundations of today's varied municipalities. Dream Cities is nothing less than a field guide to our modern urban world.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

11/02/2015
This survey of prominent architectural trends through the 19th and 20th centuries serves as a concise historical primer of mainly American urban development, though it fails to live up to some of the promises Graham makes early on (American Eden); he is a versatile writer whose enthusiasm can’t quite tie the book together. When Graham writes that “architectures are expressions of the desires of their designers and builders: these forms intend to shape people and thus shape the world,” he sets up a goal that may be too lofty to meet through the history of different styles and their leading architectural proponents. Graham’s precise encapsulations of architects’ biographies and philosophies hit the relevant highlights with a lively, accessible style; he deftly captures Bertram Goodhue, a prominent borrower of neoclassical styles whose ideas informed the Art Deco movement, and the rural utopianism of Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision. The author is less convincing when he argues for the lasting impact of the New Urbanism approach or the Japanese-influenced Metabolism movement, among other innovations, in brief sections that fail to go beyond mentions of the most representative buildings. An exception is his examination of the influence of the shopping mall and how Victor Gruen’s take on shopping centers was first adapted cheaply, then transformed by James Rouse to create highly successful “festival marketplaces” such as San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square and Boston’s Faneuil Hall. His assertion that a place has “the ability to trigger aesthetic emotion” and “can reinvigorate cities” reaches beyond biography and addresses the wider effects of architectural change. 59 b&w photos. (Jan.)

From the Publisher

An excellent and novel exploration of key ideas behind city spaces and the behaviors they engender. . . . Mr. Graham is as masterly as a novelist when it comes to character development and narrative.” — Wall Street Journal

“An intriguing architectural history and an effective antidote to the excesses of urban renewal and city planning.” — Kirkus

“Dream Cities offers a fascinating look at seven trends in urban planning that shaped the modern world.” — Shelf Awareness

Praise for American Eden: “An ambitious study of the forms and ideas of the contemporary city.... Graham wants us to see these urban and architectural forms afresh, not as the drab commonplaces they have become but as the work of visionaries ‘whose dreamed-of cities became the blueprint for the world we actually live in.’” — New York Times Book Review

Shelf Awareness

Dream Cities offers a fascinating look at seven trends in urban planning that shaped the modern world.

Wall Street Journal

An excellent and novel exploration of key ideas behind city spaces and the behaviors they engender. . . . Mr. Graham is as masterly as a novelist when it comes to character development and narrative.

New York Times Book Review

Praise for American Eden: “An ambitious study of the forms and ideas of the contemporary city.... Graham wants us to see these urban and architectural forms afresh, not as the drab commonplaces they have become but as the work of visionaries ‘whose dreamed-of cities became the blueprint for the world we actually live in.’

Wall Street Journal

An excellent and novel exploration of key ideas behind city spaces and the behaviors they engender. . . . Mr. Graham is as masterly as a novelist when it comes to character development and narrative.

Washington Post on American Eden

Enjoyable reading. It is well researched, posing an interesting historic tie from the past to the present.

Los Angeles Magazine on American Eden

We are what we plant, L.A.-based writer Wade Graham posits in his history of gardens. When he isn’t explaining the economic and cultural influences, he crafts fascinating profiles…. An engaging look at our own pieces of paradise.

Wall Street Journal on American Eden

Mr. Graham recounts his tale with considerable verve and a vast erudition in the history of gardening and the arts generally…. Among much else, Mr. Graham shows us that the history of how our nation grew can be found in what it has grown.

Kirkus Reviews

2015-10-06
Garden designer and historian Graham (American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park to our Backyards: What Our Gardens Tell Us About Who We Are, 2011, etc.) explores how modern cities were built on foundations made of the fantasies and utopian dreams of individual architects. The author examines a variety of conceptions of architecture. He shows how building design and city planning have combined to destroy our sense of community, which is the life of any city. In this field guide to architectural styles, Graham provides examples of each style mentioned, represented by particular buildings, neighborhoods, and properties. Photographs and illustrations accompany each section. His heroine is Jane Jacobs, who organized the resistance to Robert Moses' destructive plans in New York in the 20th century. She helped save the community-based neighborhoods of lower Manhattan, including Washington Square, from his proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway. Moses' bulldozers had forced the large-scale relocation of people on behalf of building and city designs promoted by the architects Graham discusses. Among them is the Swiss utopian Le Corbusier, whose skyscraper slabs and open spaces were intended to impose a sense of "order" as seen in New York City's Stuyvesant Town, which opened in 1947. Frank Lloyd Wright's individualized agrarian homestead communities provided a dream of advancement embodied in the uniformity of American suburbs. He sought to "do away entirely with the notion of an urban or even town center, scattering the center's traditional functions around the landscape." These and other styles put structure ahead of community, and Graham outlines their common underpinnings, which are often fantastic dreams about recovering lost golden ages or overcoming present chaos with some abstract future order. The author's spirited defense of Jacobs' successful struggle against Moses points to an alternative in which people and community again became primary. Graham delivers an intriguing architectural history and an effective antidote to the excesses of urban renewal and city planning.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940160480961
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/18/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

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