Interview with Wade Graham, author of Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World
Wade Graham, author of Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World, recommends a great range of books! Before jumping into the interview, please check out Wade's book:
Review from Book Depository:
From the acclaimed landscape designer, historian and author of American Eden, 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.
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Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World
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 Corbusier's Radiant City to the pseudo-agrarian dispersal of Frank Lloyd Wright's 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 today's varied municipalities. Dream Cities is nothing less than a field guide to our modern urban world.
Illustrated with 59 black-and-white photos throughout the text.
Buy On:
Book Depository €18.06
Waterstones £14.99
Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
Not easy to pick a single book in this category. I’ll say Steps to an Ecology of Mind, by Gregory Bateson.
Review From Book Depository:
Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. With a new foreword by his daughter Mary Katherine Bateson, this classic anthology of his major work will continue to delight and inform generations of readers.
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Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology
Buy On:
Book Depository €22.52
Waterstones £16.50
Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
I’ve just been reading Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, edited by Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker, and I rate it a 10 for context and for pleasure.
Review From Book Depository:
Like the bestselling Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, this book is a brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, one that provides a vivid, complex look at the multi-faceted nature of New Orleans, a city replete with contradictions. More than twenty essays assemble a chorus of vibrant voices, including geographers, scholars of sugar and bananas, the city's remarkable musicians, prison activists, environmentalists, Arab and Native voices, and local experts, as well as the coauthors' compelling contributions. Featuring 22 full-color two-page-spread maps, Unfathomable City plumbs the depths of this major tourist destination, pivotal scene of American history and culture and, most recently, site of monumental disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill.
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Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas
The innovative maps' precision and specificity shift our notions of the Mississippi, the Caribbean, Mardi Gras, jazz, soils and trees, generational roots, and many other subjects, and expand our ideas of how any city is imagined and experienced.
Together with the inspired texts, they show New Orleans as both an imperiled city - by erosion, crime, corruption, and sea level rise - and an ageless city that lives in music as a form of cultural resistance. Compact, lively, and completely original, Unfathomable City takes readers on a tour that will forever change the way they think about place.
Buy On:
Book Depository €26.65
Waterstones £25.00
Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
Jonathon Livingston Seagull.
Review From Book Depository:
Experience Jonathan Livingston Seagull's timeless and inspirational message like never before in the new complete edition of this philosophical classic, perfect for readers of all ages--now with a fourth part of Jonathan's journey, as well as last words from author Richard Bach. This is the story for people who follow their hearts and make their own rules...people who get special pleasure out of doing something well, even if only for themselves...people who know there's more to this living than meets the eye: they'll be right there with Jonathan, flying higher and faster than they ever dreamed. A pioneering work that wed graphics with words, Jonathan Livingston Seagull now enjoys a whole new life.
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Jonathan Livingston Seagull: A Story
Buy On:
Book Depository €16.02
Waterstones £8.99
Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
Paper! My roof is held up by bookshelves.
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
Stories in Echo Park, Los Angeles, a tiny, vibrant, politically-committed community bookshop of the old school, with a cafe and a patio on the alley where you can sip a can of rosé—on the curb during the pandemic.
Many thanks to Wade for recommending a great range of books! Please don't forget to check out his book Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World.
Daryl
Image Copyrights: Amberley Publishing (Dream Cities), The University of Chicago Press (Steps to an Ecology of Mind), University of California Press (Unfathomable City), HarperCollins Publishers (Jonathan Livingston Seagull).
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