Overview

Hailed as an ""original and fascinating book"" (Times Literary Supplement), A History of Future Cities is Daniel Brook's captivating investigation of four ""instant cities""-St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai-that sought to catapult themselves into the future by emulating the West.

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Reviews

Daniel Brook tells a fast moving story, filling in much of the political history of each city along the way. History Today ...there is much to enjoy in this timely and accessible contribution to our debates on the future of the city. RIBAJ A History of Future Citiesremains a delicious read... Time Out Mumbai ...he [Brook] marshals well-known facts with great facility into exciting narratives that steer us from each city's origin, through cycles of boom and bust, to its present state. Caravan an interesting addition to the debate about the importance of cities, the contradictions they embody and the creative potential of human beings. Socialist Review [A History of Future Cities] offers a rich panorama of the mechanisms at work in cities which may one day displace London, Paris and New York as the torchbearers of progress. As such, it deserves our full attention. Literary Review

[An] inspired tour of the postmodern city... Invigorating. -- Harper's Persuasive and lushly detailed. -- New York Times Uncommonly interesting and intelligent. -- Washington Post The pleasure in Mr. Brook's unusual history is in his descriptions of the creation of these cities. The deeper message, though, is about the tensions such cities create. -- Wall Street Journal An interesting thesis about the city's role in fomenting political change in the modern era. -- The New Yorker 'Instant cities' like Shenzhen, China, may seem like twenty-first-century twins of 'disposable cities' like rust-belt Camden, New Jersey. But in this probing new book that is at once both charming and reflective, Daniel Brook tells the story of urban hybrids conceived to fuse Western cosmopolitanism and local culture. His close but never pedantic reading of these metropolises puts the city back at the center of our vision, reminding us that in new and old towns alike, the urban amalgam of creativity, diversity, and mobility offers a key that not only unlocks the past but also opens the door to our future. -- Benjamin R. Barber, author of Jihad vs. McWorld An intimate, canny comparative study ... Accessible, entertaining... Enormously elucidating and relevant. -- Kirkus Reviews

Author Information

Daniel Brook is a journalist whose writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Nation, and New York Times Magazine, and he is the author of several books, including A History of Future Cities and The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction. A New York native and a Yale graduate, Brook lives in New Orleans. He researched The Einstein of Sex in Berlin on a Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship.

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