Dream Cities

From the 19th century to today, many design ideas, sometimes utopian, sometimes bizarre, but generally controversial, have been gradually adopted and implemented in cities all over the world, from Dubai to Tokyo, London to Los Angeles. Graham analyzes cityscapes, aiming to show where our urban forms come from, how we shape them, and how they shape us, by drawing on the life stories of the visionaries behind these design ideas and their rivals.

While Wade Graham narrates cities in the light of plans, designs, and architectural movements, he also reveals that all of these are in fact an expression of ideas about how we should live, how we should work, how we should shop, and what we should believe. From Bertram Goodhue's baroque fantastic villages to Le Corbusier's Radiant City; he enables us to see luxurious green suburbs, city center skyscrapers, high-rises standing alone in the middle of empty lots, shopping malls promising brand new experiences, eco-sites, squares, narrow streets, and highways with a completely different perspective.

Dream Cities, offering a lively, original, and general-reader-friendly cultural history, is a guidebook for understanding the urbanized world.