À paraître bientôt

We live in an age when humanity spends 90% of its time indoors, yet the nature around us—especially in America’s cities—has never been more vital. This distancing from nature has sparked crises in mental health, longevity, and hope for the next generation, while also heightening the risks we face from historic floods, heatwaves, and wildfires. Indeed, embracing nature holds untapped potential to strengthen and fortify our cities, suburbs, and towns, providing solutions spanning flood preparation, wildfire management, and promoting longevity.

Betsky shows us contemporary imaginative reuse throughout the world: the Mexican housing authority transforming concrete slums into well-serviced apartments; the MassMOCA museum, built out of old textile mills; the squatted city of Christiana in Copenhagen, fashioned from an old army base; Project Heidelberg in Detroit. All point towards a new circular economy of reuse, built from the ashes of the capitalist economy of consumption.

The legend of the foundation of Rome by Romulus in 753BC accords very well with the earliest defensive walls on the Palatine Hill, made of clay and timber and showing evidence of animal sacrifices. To trace the continual efforts to fortify Rome is to trace the rise and fall of the Roman Empire - through the taking of the city by the Gauls in 390/387, the wars with the Italian states, the threat of Hannibal, the establishment of the Republic, attacks by the northern tribes and eventual division and collapse.

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.

The world’s skyscrapers have brought us awe and wonder, and yet they remain controversial—for their high costs, shadows, and overt grandiosity. But, decade by decade, they keep getting higher and higher. What is driving this global building spree of epic proportions? In Cities in the Sky, author Jason Barr explains all: why they appeal to cities and nations, how they get financed, why they succeed economically, and how they change a city’s skyline and enable the world’s greatest metropolises to thrive in the 21st century.