Future Cities: Architecture and the Imagination by Paul Dobraszczyk dismantles the false divide between speculative vision and built reality, tracing how imagined cities — submerged, flying, ruined, vertical — are already materialising in the world around us.
About This Book
The city of the future has always been a site of projection: utopian, dystopian, provisional. What Dobraszczyk argues, and what makes this book genuinely useful to practitioners and theorists alike, is that these imaginings are not separate from architectural practice — they are continuous with it. Floating cities are under construction in the Netherlands. Dubai's towers mirror the skylines of mid-century science fiction. Informal settlements in the developing world already resemble the dense, layered urbanism of cyberpunk. Drawing across architecture, film, fiction, and art, Future Cities maps the feedback loop between speculative urbanism and the built environment, making a case for imagination as a legitimate design instrument.
Key Features
- 272 pages of cross-disciplinary analysis spanning architecture, film, fiction, and art
- Published by Reaktion Books
What You'll Discover
- How prototype floating cities in the Netherlands are translating speculative urbanism into construction reality
- The visual and conceptual links between Dubai's contemporary skyscrapers and the science-fiction cities that preceded them
- Why informal settlements in the developing world already embody the spatial logic of cyberpunk dystopias
- A sustained argument for reconnecting imaginative and creative practices with architectural and urban design thinking
About the Author
Paul Dobraszczyk is the author of Future Cities: Architecture and the Imagination, published by Reaktion Books. [Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 272
- Dimensions: 15.88 x 2.54 x 20.96 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781789140644
- Publisher: Reaktion Books
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects, urban designers, and theorists interested in speculative urbanism, futurism, and the relationship between imaginative culture and built form; students of architectural theory and urban studies.