Imagining the modern city

Paris, Berlin, London, Singapore, New York, Chicago, Los Angelesthese define ´the city´ in the world´s consciousness. James Donald takes us on a psychic journey to the places that have inspired artists, writers, architects and film-makers for centuries. Artists and social critics - from Dickens to Baudelaire, Fritz Lang, Virginia Woolf, Wim Wenders, Ridley Scott to others - have seen the city as the locus not just of vanity, squalor and injustice, but also of civilised society´s highest aspirations. Considering the cultural and political implications of the ´urban imaginary´, Donald contends that the imagined city remains the best lens for a future of democratic community. Imagining the Modern City also looks at how artists have shaped cities through their creation of public spaces, sculpture and architecture - art forms that help determine our ideas about our place in the urban environment. Planners and architects such as Otto Wagner, Le Corbusier, and Bernard Tschumi present us with real and possible cities, showing a way forward to alternative social futures. Imagining the Modern City is a rich and dazzling exploration of the ways cities stir and shape our consciousness.