A History of Future Cities - Rilegato

Brook, Daniel

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0393078124 ISBN 13: 9780393078121

Casa editrice: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2013

Riassunto

Every month, five million people move from the past to the future. Pouring into developing-world “instant cities” like Dubai and Shenzhen, these urban newcomers confront a modern world cobbled together from fragments of a West they have never seen. Do these fantastical boomtowns, where blueprints spring to life overnight on virgin land, represent the dawning of a brave new world? Or is their vaunted newness a mirage?In a captivating blend of history and reportage, Daniel Brook travels to a series of major metropolitan hubs that were once themselves instant cities— St. Petersburg, Shanghai, and Mumbai—to watch their “dress rehearsals for the twenty-first century.” Understanding today’s emerging global order, he argues, requires comprehending the West’s profound and conflicted influence on developing-world cities over the centuries.In 1703, Tsar Peter the Great personally oversaw the construction of a new Russian capital, a “window on the West” carefully modeled on Amsterdam, that he believed would wrench Russia into the modern world. In the nineteenth century, Shanghai became the fastest-growing city on earth as it mushroomed into an English-speaking, Western-looking metropolis that just happened to be in the Far East. Meanwhile, Bombay, the cosmopolitan hub of the British Raj, morphed into a tropical London at the hands of its pith-helmeted imperialists.Juxtaposing the stories of the architects and authoritarians, the artists and revolutionaries who seized the reins to transform each of these precociously modern places into avatars of the global future, Brook demonstrates that the drive for modernization was initially conflated with wholesale Westernization. He shows, too, the ambiguous legacy of that emulation—the birth (and rebirth) of Chinese capitalism in Shanghai, the origins of Bollywood in Bombay’s American-style movie palaces, the combustible mix of revolutionary culture and politics that rocked the Russian capital—and how it may be transcended today.A fascinating, vivid look from the past out toward the horizon, A History of Future Cities is both a crucial reminder of globalization’s long march and an inspiring look into the possibilities of our Asian Century.

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Recensione:

In these deft portraits of St. Petersburg, Russia; Bombay, India; Shanghai, China; and Dubai, UAE; journalist Brook (The Trap) artfully condenses and illustrates three centuries of revolutionary urban development and globalizing impulses. --Publisher's Weekly

(...) a fast moving story, filling in much of the political history of each city along the way. --History Today

a mouth-watering, architecturally tinged work of urban history [...] Brook's entertaining book is less a thesis than a rich description of the social and architectural fabric of four cities. --Literary Review

Daniel Brook has written an original and fascinating book, undergirded by prodigious research. A History of Future Cities bristles with questions, both answered and unanswerable, that provoke the reader to want even more. --Times Literary Supplement

L'autore:

Daniel Brook is the author of The Trap and a journalist whose work has appeared in publications including Harper's, The Nation and Slate.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0393078124
• ISBN 13: 9780393078121
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 457