Ebook: Imaginary cities: a tour of dream cities, nightmare cities, and everywhere in between

The men of a million lies, or how we imagine the world. Plato's cinema ; The deceptions of memory ; Cartography and the canvas of blank spaces ; Faust the imperial architect ; The dialectics of inspiration ; In morphia veritas ; Here be cities ; Dentata ; Robirtsonade ; Where the wild things are ; No north, no south, no east, no west -- The tower. The sun king ; Proteus ; Perfecting the shipwreck ; The sublime, twinned with the abyss ; Apocalypse then ; The urbacides ; Houses of vice and virtue ; New Jerusalem, or Nevertown ; Kurtzville ; The ancient modernists ; The map is the real ; Blueprinting eternity ; Babel ; The living ruins ; The return of Mammon ; City of angels ; Disovering the diagonal ; The lightning rod ; Skyscraper mania ; Elevators through the stratosphere ; The golem ; Vertical suburbs ; Sanctifying the secular ; Lift off ; It came from the depths ; The evaporating cities ; A glowing future -- The alchemical cities. Cities made without hands ; Foundations ; The wrath of God ; The drowned world ; Seasteading ; The seven invisible cities of gold -- The abiding desire for no place. The thirteenth hour ; Cockaigne ; The biological city ; Possessed ; The jungle ; The glass delusion ; The house of constructions ; Books versus stone -- Remembering the future. The mechanical heart ; Further sleepwalking ; Of steam and clockwork ; Micropolis ; Tomorrow will continue forever ; Accelerator ; Pow ; Sealess ships, grounded spacecraft and the curse of the genie ; Home is where the harm is ; The cinematic dystopia of the everyday ; In love with velocity ; On the road ; The crystal palaces ; Plotting the stars ; Flux us ; The megalomania of cells ; Revolution! revolution! revolution! ; Releasing the golem -- The turk. The pit and the pendulum ; The gothic Trojan horse ; Neo-Neanderthals ; The all-seeing I ; In defence of Caliban ; The gaze ; The blind watchmakers ; Guest list ; The magic kingdom ; The last laugh ; Waste ; No man's city ; Conquest ; Of wealth and taste ; Pandemonium ; Nothing ever happens -- Flotsam and jetsam. The fall ; The wounds of possibility ; Terraforms.;How can we understand the infinite variety of cities? Darran Anderson seems to exhaust all possibilities in this work of creative nonfiction. Drawing inspiration from Marco Polo and Italo Calvino, Anderson shows that we have much to learn about ourselves by looking not only at the cities we have built, but also at the cities we have imagined. Anderson draws on literature (Gustav Meyrink, Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, and James Joyce), but he also looks at architectural writings and works by the likes of Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, Medieval travel memoirs from the Middle East, mid-twentieth-century comic books, Star Trek, mythical lands such as Cockaigne, and the works of Claude Debussy.