Dream cities : seven urban ideas that shape the world A lively unique and accessible cultural history of modern cities from suburbs downtown districts and exurban sprawl to shopping malls and sustainable developments that allows us to view them through the planning design architects and movements that inspired created and shaped them. Dream Cities explores our cities in a new way as expressions of ideas often conflicting about how we should live work play make buy and believe. It tells the stories of the real architects and thinkers whose imagined cities became the blueprints for the world we live in. From the nineteenth century to today what began as visionary concepts sometimes utopian sometimes outlandish always controversial were gradually adopted and constructed on a massive scale in cities around the world from Dubai to Ulan Bator to London to Los Angeles. Wade Graham uses the lives of the pivotal dreamers behind these concepts as well as their acolytes and antagonists to deconstruct our urban landscapes the houses towers civic centers condominiums shopping malls boulevards highways and spaces in between exposing the ideals and ideas embodied in each. From the baroque fantasy villages of Bertram Goodhue to the superblocks of Le Corbusiers Radiant City to the pseudo agrarian dispersal of Frank Lloyd Wrights Broadacre City our upscale leafy suburbs downtown skyscraper districts infotainment driven shopping malls and sustainable eco developments are seen as never before. In this elegantly designed and illustrated book Graham uncovers the original plans of brilliant obsessed and sometimes megalomaniacal designers revealing the foundations of todays varied municipalities. Dream Cities is nothing less than a field guide to our modern urban world. provided from Amazon.com Castles : Bertram Goodhue and the romantic city Monuments : Daniel Burnham and the ordered city Slabs : Le Corbusier Robert Moses and the rational city Homesteads : Frank Lloyd Wright and the anticity Corals : Jane Jacobs Andres Duany and the self organizing city Malls : Victor Gruen Jon Jerde and the shopping city Habitats : Kenzo Tange Norman Foster and the techno ecological city