Dream Cities, Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World

If you’ve ever wondered how cities have come to be as they are then the book Dream Cities by Wade Graham is a great place to start to find answers.

The book, published in 2016, chronicles 7 movements in city planning all of which have been hugely influential in shaping the world we live in. It is striking how many of them come into being in conjunction with world fairs.

The movements are castles, monuments, slabs, homesteads, corals, malls and habitats. Each is intrinsically linked to great architects and urban thinkers, giants such as Daniel Burnham, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Jane Jacobs.

A nice pictorial guide is appended to each chapter to help the reader identify when a certain city or area is under the influence of a given movement. 

What I loved especially about this book is the understanding that architecture isn’t created in a vacuum.

It is an interaction between ideas, often Utopian and real life which has to realize that vision. It’s also acknowledged that the people behind these ideas are all too human and not as perfect as their ideas were supposed to be.

The book also deals with the built environment at the city level without getting too fixated on individual buildings although buildings are mentioned, especially when they have introduced new methods or materials. 

The birth of the car as the engine of our modern city is also explained through these 7 movements. Having been seen as the solution to the problem of dirty and crowded cities the car was embraced as a mean to escaping to the much “healthier” countryside.

Romantic notions of an idyllic past or the desire to solve the world’s challenges through design and planning shines through these ideas.

Dream Cities will help you appreciate the concrete of your city and understand the ideas that put it there.

 Ingi Finnsson is passionate about data, economics and cities. He loves complex data but he loves complex data made simple more. He spends his days making real estate valuation models.