Imaginary Cities

Product Description

Inspired by the surreal accounts of the explorer & `man of a million lies` Marco Polo, Imaginary Cities charts the metropolis & the imagination, & the symbiosis therein. A work of creative nonfiction, the book roams through space, time & possibility, mapping cities of sound, melancholia & the afterlife, where time runs backwards or which float among the clouds. In doing so, Imaginary Cities seeks to move beyond the cliches of psychogeography & hauntology, to not simply revisit the urban past, or our relationship with it, but to invade & reinvent it. Following in the lineage of Borges, Calvino, Chris Marker & Kenneth White, the book examines the city from global macrocosm to the microcosm of its inhabitants` perspectives. It proceeds through opium dreams, sea voyages, the hallucinations of prisoners, nocturnal decadence, impossible Soviet skyscrapers, marauding golems, subterranean civilisations, apocalyptic prophecies & the work of architectural visionaries such as Antonio Sant` Elia, Archigram & Buckminster Fuller. It rethinks the ideas of utopias & dystopias, urban exploration, alienation & resistance. It claims that the Situationists lacked ambition when they suggested, ” Beneath the paving stones, the beach.” Instead, beneath the paving stones, we may just be able to discern the entire universe. Imaginary Cities demonstrates that each city dreamt up by artists, writers, architects & lunatics has a real-life equivalent & that the great Marco Polo was no liar. Imaginary Cities need not simply exist in fiction or the mind. We already inhabit them.