Dream Cities : Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World

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.