Imaginary Cities

‘Imaginary cities’ authored by Darran Anderson explores the nuanced symbiotic relationship between a metropolis and imagination. It’s a work of creative non-fiction that journeys through various time, space and possibility, mapping cities of sound, melancholia and the afterlife, where time runs backwards or tends to float among the clouds. It attempts to understand past city, present city, future city within an interesting time warp. It’s actually like a magpie’s book, full of characters and incidents and ideas drawn from cities real and imagined around the globe and throughout history. Thus Thomas More’s allegorical island shares space with Soviet mega-planning; Marco Polo’s imaginings of cities is paired with James Joyce’s meticulously imagined Dublin; the medieval land of Cockaigne meets the hopeful future of Star Trek– so on and so forth. What run common in these imaginings are certain recurring themes and dreams tied to the seemingly non-disposable problems of actual cities like poverty, exclusion, waste and destruction. Anderson writes that “if a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined” thus arguing that the dreams of an imaginary city of every architect, philosopher, artist, writer, planner, or citizen actually offers lessons for our real ones as it is only by acting upon those dreams that the present streets and lanes and locales can be improved.