Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Imaginary Cities
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://darrananderson.com/
CITY: Scotland
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: Irish
http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-imaginary-cities-darran-anderson-20150716-story.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and public speaker. Has given talks at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Robin Boyd Foundation, and the Venice Biennale.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the Guardian, Wired, Aeon, 3:AM magazine, and the Quietus.
SIDELIGHTS
Darran Anderson grew up in Derry, Northern Ireland and is a writer, poet, and editor who regularly writes about art, literature and music. He has served as the editor of literary journals and is the author of several books, including a book a poetry. Anderson’s book Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between was called an “immersive work of creative nonfiction,” by Chicago Tribune Online contributor Kathleen Rooney. A Kirkus Reviews contributor referred to Imaginary Cities as a “An exuberant tour of cities, real and imaginary, far and wide.”
Focusing on the theme of cities imagined and real over the centuries, Anderson discusses a wide range of imaginary landscapes, from Platos Republic to the dreary, overpopulated, waterlogged city of Los Angels in the film Blade Runner. In the process, the book examines the influences of architects such as the Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret and the architectural group Archigram, an avant-garde group formed in the 1960s that was based in London, England. Anderson, however, is especially interested in the influence of writers, film, and art in the world of both real and imagined architecture.
“It’s accepted that an architect will be inspired by the natural world, but there’s been some reluctance to accept the influence of ‘frivolous’ sources like cinema, comic books and the like,” Anderson noted in an interview with CityMetric website contributor Stephanie Boland, going on to tell Boland: “Architects were all kids once, and civic planners were – even politicians were once children.” As an example, Anderson pointed to the 1960s television cartoon show The Jetsons and the influence it has had on architecture, adding: “We ignore how these things seep into the consciousness.”
Anderson explores the various ways that the city as an idea has been conceived over history, from architectural design and social theory to art and literature. In the process, he provides a wide ranging intellectual ruminations. “Anderson’s extended essay feels like spending time with an entertaining, well-read explorer who has traversed the cities of the imagination and returned with exotic tales that stretch back into pre-history and out into the solar system,” wrote Quarterly Conversation website contributor Joseph Schreiber, who went on to note: “One of the book’s greatest assets—perhaps the key to its success—lies in its author’s thoughtful, engaging tone. His lyrical, aphoristic prose offers a wealth of memorable lines.” Chicago Tribune Online contributor Kathleen Rooney remarked: “Readers can jump in and out, chapter to chapter: Like a dream, it starts where it starts and goes where it goes and readers follow and roam and make sense of what they can.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2017, review of Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between.
Publishers Weekly, January 23, 2017, review of Imaginary Cities, p. 70.
ONLINE
Chicago Tribune, http://www.chicagotribune.com/ (July 16, 2015), Kathleen Rooney,review of Imaginary Cities.
CityMetric, http://www.citymetric.com/ (July 17, 2015), Stephanie Boland, “Interview: Darran Anderson, Author of Imaginary Cities, on Architecture, Power & The Jetsons.”
Darran Anderson website, https://darrananderson.com (October 26, 2017).
Eve White Literary Agency website, http://evewhite.co.uk/ (October 26, 2017), brief author profile.
Forbes Online, https://www.forbes.com/ (April 10, 2016), Kavi Guppta, “Darran Anderson, Writer: Hemingway Was Wrong–Write Sober, Edit Drunk.”
Icon, https://www.iconeye.com/ (January 10, 2015), review of Imaginary Cities.
Quarterly Conversation, http://quarterlyconversation.com/ (March 13, 2017 ), Joseph Schreiber, review of Imaginary Cities.
Quarterly Conversation, http://quarterlyconversation.com/ (March 13, 2017), Joseph Schreiber, review of Imaginary Cities.*
Darran Anderson is a writer from Derry. He is co-editor of the literary journal The Honest Ulsterman and former contributing editor to 3:AM Magazine and Dogmatika. He has written the 33 1/3 study of Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson (Bloomsbury, 2013) as well as the forthcoming Jack Kerouac - Critical Lives (Reaktion Books, 2014) and A Hubristic Flea (3:AM Press, 2014). He has also written several collections of poetry including Tesla's Ghost (Blackheath Books, 2009). He regularly writes on art, literature and music for the likes of Studio International, 3:AM and The Quietus.
Darran Anderson is the author of Imaginary Cities (Influx Press/University of Chicago Press) and the forthcoming Tidewrack (Chatto & Windus/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux). He has written on cities for the likes of The Guardian, Wired and Aeon, and has given talks at the V&A, the LSE, the Robin Boyd Foundation and the Venice Biennale.
July 17, 2015
Interview: Darran Anderson, author of Imaginary Cities, on architecture, power & The Jetsons
By Stephanie Boland
Can we blame all this on The Jetsons? Image: Getty.
I’m five minutes into a Skype interview with Darran Anderson, and we’ve already discussed comic books, the Situationists, Iain Sinclair – and a river that flows backwards after heavy rain.
“Every city is more fantastical than fantasy,” Anderson is telling me. “Barcelona, Berlin, Tokyo, London – they’re more bizarre than we think.”
It’s the premise that’s at the centre of his new book, Imaginary Cities, a vast collage which teases out the links between fictional urban environments – the “imaginary” cities of its title – and real, inhabited places.
When I ask Anderson where the idea for such a mammoth undertaking came from, he first cites an evening in Phnom Penh – the city with that backwards-flowing river – before backtracking. “I keep thinking of growing up, reading 2000AD comics and applying those city spaces to my world as a child.”
Anderson grew up in a terraced house in inner city Derry which overlooked a “pastiche of a Russian Orthodox roof spire” on top of St Patrick's Church in Pennyburn. “Reading Arabian Nights as a kid”, he tells me, “I continuously made the connection. It was this link to the outside world, but fantastical.”
"Would the garden bridge have been a good idea if Tony Benn proposed it?"
It’s this attention to popular culture which makes Imaginary Cities so rewarding. The book traces the influence of Le Corbusier, Gericault and radical architecture group Archigram, but also Dr Caligari and Judge Dread.
“It’s accepted that an architect will be inspired by the natural world,” Anderson explains, “but there’s been some reluctance to accept the influence of ‘frivolous’ sources like cinema, comic books and the like”. This is a particularly self-defeating form of elitism, he thinks: “Architects were all kids once, and civic planners were – even politicians were once children”.
Childhood influences get into architects’ heads just as much as seashells and forests. “You see, in the 1960s, the influence of something like The Jetsons. The architects of tomorrow are more than likely playing Minecraft at the moment. We ignore how these things seep into the consciousness”.
I ask him if the Jetsons are therefore actually to blame for The Shard. Unsurprisingly, the building is something he has a lot of thoughts about. “There’s a tendency to let on that you’re going purely on aesthetic judgement, when actually it’s a political stance,” he argues. “I may disagree with a lot of what The Shard stands for, or The Garden Bridge, or various other vanity projects, high towers to Mammon and all the rest. But I think it’s important to look honestly at their aesthetics”.
If The Shard had been designed by The Constructivists, an early 20th century group who argued that art should come with a purpose, Anderson suggests, people would admire it. “It’s the same with a lot of North Korean architecture. A lot of it’s absurd, and oppressive. But if you took those towers and you translated them to Dubai, certain critics’ opinion would change.”
What about London? “London and Britain generally are getting decimated by the Tories, and there’s a tendency to shoot down any vanity project. Would the garden bridge have been a good idea if Tony Benn proposed it? I have a feeling people would have warmed to it.”
The fraught relationship between architecture’s politics and its aesthetics is a recurring point of tension in Imaginary Cities. From writing elegantly on the ransacked houses of Krisstalnacht and other sites now predominantly associated with historical atrocity– there is a particularly affecting anecdote which describes how the composer Shostakovich used to sleep in the corridor, bags packed, so that when the Black Marias came to take him his family would not be disturbed – Imaginary Cities gestures to how things could have been different.
“We do not like to think it, facing the obscenity of the football stadiums of Pinochet, the churches of Rwanada... that for a few sadists these were utopias.”
You can tell what the predominant ideology is by what the tallest towers are
This interest in the link between buildings and the distribution of power also stems from Anderson’s childhood. “Growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, it was very obvious where the zones of inclusion and zones of exclusion were. Now any time I go to a city, I always apply that [logic].”
He cites Paris as an obvious example: a romantic and beautiful city, whose wide boulevards were designed with the purpose of preventing revolt. The use of kettling as a police tactic is similar: “It’s a form of constricting architecture.”
In Anderson’s mind, buildings are always a clue as to where power resides. “In every city, you can tell what the predominant ideology is by what the tallest towers are. In medieval times, it would have been the churches. In Northern Ireland, it was the military watchtowers. Now it’s the banks.”
We’re back to The Shard again. “The glass and chrome... it’s intangible. It’s all shiny glass and you can’t see in”. We discuss the idea of Marc Auge’s “non-places”, the heavily mediated spaces like airports and tube stations where people’s movement is defined by commerce and transport. I suggest The Shard might be like that, too. “Yes. People have said about The Shard that it’s a kind of arch villain, like a lair... I wish it was that interesting!”
At a recent event at the V&A Anderson was described as pessimistic, but he insists there is hope. Imaginary Cities makes reference to Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect and theorist previously ranked in Time magazine’s list of “100 most influential people” who has recently emphasised the importance of situating buildings in place.
“The push towards regionalism and more democratic forms of architecture is a very welcome one,” Anderson says. “It does mitigate the mediocrity on the horizon. Ultimately, these are our spaces. These are where we live and breathe, where we interact with each other.”
“It shows a profound lack of imagination that every tower that goes up is a tower to commerce,” he adds. “It could be towers to music, and culture... there’s no reason we can’t dare to dream again. Where are the towers for everything else? It’s just a matter of nerve.”
Imaginary Cities is out now from Influx Press.
Darran Anderson is on Twitter as @oniropolis, where he posts an ongoing stream of imaginary cities.
Apr 10, 2016 @ 03:32 AM 2,233
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Darran Anderson, Writer: Hemingway Was Wrong -- Write Sober, Edit Drunk
Kavi Guppta , Contributor
I write about technology and how it impacts workforce transformation.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
How I’m Informed is a look into the reading and learning habits of people from all walks of life.
Darran Anderson is author of Imaginary Cities, a sprawling and rich study of our relationship with place and space. Anderson tweets about past, present and future urban landscapes as @Oniropolis.
What is your daily reading habit?
I read in the time I can steal back from work, so mainly when I should be sleeping or when I’m travelling. There’s something about a moving landscape, a view over a nocturnal city or a pub window by the sea that chimes when contemplating the interior worlds within books. I used to gravitate, somewhat masochistically, towards huge sprawling texts (Peter Conrad’s Modern Times, Modern Places remains a favourite) but that’s changed in recent years. The reason was a physical one; I’ve a recurring problem with my sight, which has necessitated reading in short bursts. So I found myself drawn to Borges’ ficciones, novellas from Candide to Camus, short stories from Clarice Lispector to Kevin Barry, essays by the likes of Rebecca Solnit and Simon Critchley, as well as journals like Gorse, Elsewhere and The Stinging Fly. I read, almost entirely, fragments now and, almost always, subjects outside my knowledge. The American Civil War is a present fascination. It was the Boxer Rebellion before that. No discernible purpose in either case.
One side effect of being periodically half-blind is that it’s changed the way I regard literature. At times, I’ve had to consider individual poems rather than racing through collections as I used to, which has made me realise poetry is a way of slowing down time until the world appears as strange, hideous or wondrous as it really is. Discovering Montaigne’s essays on everything from thumbs to cannibals made me aware, not only that you can wring insight from practically anything but also, that the best literature tells us colossal things through small details, those moments that Joyce called epiphanies or Burroughs termed the “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork”. In terms of reading, I’m always searching for those epiphanies, especially in non-fiction. Very often they’re hidden in footnotes or asides, like Seneca complaining in a letter about the sound of the city outside (the drink pedlars, narcissistic musclemen and ‘cocky bastards’) or the gloriously-obscene graffiti of Pompeii, which seem to resonate far more than dry archaeology in terms of recreating lost cities. Some day in the far-flung future, readers might chance upon us the same way, when our digital files are as archaic as papyrus and we’ll tell them things about our lives from beyond the grave.
When researching for your book, how did you decide what to keep and what to throw?
I write in a very fragmentary way and spontaneously; on the backs of envelopes, napkins, notepads. Ideas fall out of the sky and end up as reams of paper stuffed in drawers, sometimes for years. Some of these will be triggered by books I’ve read but mostly they are the result of conversations or thoughts I’ve had whilst walking around. When enough notes have accumulated on a certain theme, I start trying to whittle it down into something resembling a book. I don’t know if it’s writing in a traditional sense so much as some kind of assemblage or sculpture, building from scrap even. It means I’m always working on several books at one time but there’s little danger of writer’s block.
Inevitably, with space constraints, you have to get rid of writing you’d grown attached to. Imaginary Cities is around 500 pages long but the first draft was something like 1700 pages. I carried it around in a briefcase, like Benjamin’s Arcades Project (which is where the similarities end). Entire chapters had to go, which requires a Spartan discipline that I don’t possess. You read a horrendous amount of terrible writing advice online and amongst the absolute worst is Hemingway’s “Write drunk; edit sober.” I’ve found the precise opposite is true. Write sober; edit drunk for Christ’s sake. The attachment diminishes. Drink brings out beautifully the merciless in us all.
Other people help. There’s a tendency you get in writing that you also get in painting; where you stare so long at something so long that you no longer quite see it. So a fresh pair of eyes helps; someone to come in, look horrified and ask, “What the hell is that?” The publishers at Influx Press have been great in that regard and my wife Christiana Spens is a writer, whose writing I love and fear, so she tries to prevent me drifting off into drivel. It’s important though to acknowledge that discarded writing can have an afterlife, in terms of ideas for articles or talks. Ted Hughes said of Sylvia Plath that “her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn’t get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy.” I have a lot of time for Plath and I get that.
One of the interesting things about creating a book out of piles of notes is that you end up quite aware of all the other possible books the end result could’ve been. When people come up after events and say (mostly) kind things about Imaginary Cities, I think to myself, “Damn, you should’ve read one of the other versions that could’ve been published; the ones that are locked in the attic.”
How will the fight for equality reshape our cities?
Well, the first thing to do is recognise it’s already happening. Architecture is the sculpting of space and space is one way that power is articulated and maintained. Fortunately, resistance can also be wielded through space. I saw this growing up during the Troubles in Derry and I see it, to varying degrees, in every single city I’ve visited since.
Aside from the sheer strength and enormity of what they’re facing, there are two flaws progressives, for want of a better word, have within their cause, if we might be so reductive. The first is a tendency to be absorbed in tokenistic battles, very often around symbols or semantics. These matter of course but those benefiting from inequality (and it’s important to remember that they wholeheartedly exist) focus much more on structural victories and real-world dominance, which remains financial. In terms of cities, what I see a lot are battles over renaming signposts in the midst of vast sections of public space being privatised, or campaigns to build cycle lanes through slums. These may seem like victories but, in the wider scheme of things, they’re defeat with tassels.
The second problem is a tendency to fight battles solely on the opposition’s terms. This happens continually in Britain where the fight for public hospitals, schools, libraries, housing and so on is always fought in retreat, when attack is the best form of defence. This will rely on shaking off the pessimism that we’ve been paralysed by for decades. There’s a reason FDR said we’ve nothing to fear but fear itself. It’s wholly absurd and dissonant that we have a huge surge in technological progress and optimism at the precise time that society is being rewound and unwound. We can imagine conceivably transcending humanity through virtual technologies but not a world where everyone has access to health or education. We can draw up cities where buildings twist, float or move but we never ask where people will actually live in these heady plans. We log on to the 21st century and log off increasingly into the 18th.
How we begin to combat this is by resurrecting a currently unfashionable strain of utopianism and I say that as an abject cynic but it is absolutely essential. This won’t be nostalgic retrofuture jetpack bullshit or snake-oil speculation but rather an approach that takes the ideas of inclusive architecture we see architecture studios proposing, an approach that demands, ‘Why not now, why not here and why not for everyone?’ To resurrect the egalitarian spirit of the early Bauhaus or the Russian Constructivists and apply it to contemporary developments, to expand and innovate public space and opportunities. To oppose plans that simply omit the populace, building citadels rather than cities, and propose and support plans that recognise that the citizen is more than just a consumer to be fleeced by spivs, spied on by our technology or moved along by some private security goon. Cities are husks of steel and glass without citizens.
The old adage that all utopias end up as dystopias is misleading. It’s true all utopias are dystopias for some, what is Dubai, or indeed Ancient Rome, for a slave but a glittering obscenity? Yet it is equally the case that all dystopias are utopias for a privileged self-appointed few. The real choice we have, which we’ve always had, is not between utopia and dystopia but between competing attempts at utopia. If we don’t try for ours, and there’s no shortage of ideas on what that might be, we’re guaranteed to end up living in someone else’s.
Does urban development today follow much of our past context? Or is this uncharted territory?
It’s new to us perhaps but it’s not uncharted. Once you get beneath the surface of all our startling new inventions and discoveries, you find the same age-old issues. Two of the most enlightening commentators you could have for the implications of virtual and augmented realities are Descartes and Plato. Similarly, our cities look new but they follow patterns and tendencies that you see throughout history. The Expressionist Bruno Taut realised that role of the castle and the church had fatally diminished as the Vitruvian focuses of the city and he tried, sadly unsuccessfully, to replace it with a kind of palace to humanity with his Die Stadtkrone. Nowadays it’s almost always the financial or bureaucratic districts that command a metropolis sadly. In the future, this too will change. It inevitably alters but there are recurring patterns. You learn about the future by finding where it is hidden in the past and present.
I’m genuinely excited by the developments that are coming and I enjoy talking to those working on such technologies. There’ll be nanotechnology that will mimic and boost the properties of any building material meaning the now-impossible will become possible. I’d take this further and suggest that nanobots will enable us to have buildings which will change style and function on command. This isn’t a question of plucking a fanciful idea out of the ether; it’s a question of looking at what is useful and desirable (rooms which are as fluid as our lives, needs and tastes are), where the inefficiencies lie that block those, and then following the paths that technology may open up.
At the same time, I should add a distinct note of caution. Even ignoring colossal issues like the effect of rising seas when most of our great cities are on the coast, the side-effects of future developments have real potential to be monstrous. These will come in two ways. The more obvious one is the active threat. We’ve been warned about this for a hundred years in dystopian literature; what the deranged blueprints of the mad scientist will do to us all. It’s so ubiquitous that I find myself having to regularly defend Le Corbusier, a flawed genius but a genius nonetheless, from the now accepted fallacy that he was a beast who intended tower blocks for us all.
My suspicion is the danger lies beyond grand technocratic plans. The real threat of future, and indeed present, urban development will be much more passive. I talk to planners and engineers and a lot of their focus is on removing inefficiencies. The problem is inefficiencies are very much where we live our lives and where our freedom lies. The dystopian is unlikely to manifest as ‘evil’. Rather it’ll come bundled up in things we want, in a sort of toxic financial package model. I think both Huxley and Orwell were right in Brave New World and 1984 respectively, and I’ve seen this in action travelling in the developed and developing world; the rich nations will get the former, poorer nations will receive the later. Our poison will be sweetened to the point we crave it. It will be intrinsically tied in with our vanity, our security and our fragile self-worth. It will move from performing surveillance on ourselves through social media to more esoteric fare. One of my favourite examples of what is to come is the much-touted internet of things. You climb into a nice bath and it silently performs a full-body diagnostic on you, determining if you have early symptoms of a condition or a disease. It seems unquestionably beneficial. Except, what does it do with the information it collects? Who does it potentially share it with? Your spouse? Your employer? Your insurance company? If your home can monitor such details, what else can it monitor, who can it inform and for what purpose? Again, it’s not a new development but our panopticons will be much more comfortable and desirable than those of the past.
It’s likely that which oppresses will not even be aware that they are oppressive. The casual misery will come in their blind spots, their omissions, their good intentions. We can see this in the spread of liminal space, what Rem Koolhaas called ‘junkspace’, once restricted to airports but which has gradually filtered in towards the cities and into our lives. There’s a particular form of contemporary purgatory and it resembles an Apple Store. I’ve seen this directly in places I’ve worked, where everything is slick, clean and characterless, where your computer times your piss-breaks and inspirational mottoes adorn the walls, where they throw in a glorified playpen for adults to prevent it going Ballard, where the window blinds never quite open and you go outside at lunch for a walk and find yourself on the side of a motorway or in an industrial estate. I used to think this was a particularly modern phenomena but have gradually realised it’s simply a feature of imposed hegemony. “If you had gone into the square of any Mediterranean town in the first century” Kenneth Clark notes in Civilisation, “you would hardly have known where you were, any more than you would in an airport today.” This is what victory looks like, even today, and it sucks.
There is a hope however and it lies in architecture. It exists in the vernacular, the unusual and the inclusive. It exists in anything that celebrates the plurality of the city, and the citizen, and champions the personal mythologies we attach to space. It asks a great deal of us. It requires us to be individual Jane Jacobs, Guy Debords and Friedensreich Hundertwassers. It requires us to defend the places that we can call our own and, in their absence, build such places. In this, I am profoundly hopeful, simply because we’ve no other options.
Anything else you'd like to add?
Societies stagnate when they lose the ability to adapt and adapting means questioning. As the present sprawls face-first into the future, we need to ensure social, economic and political progress keeps pace with technological progress (at the minute all of the former are being reversed). This means demanding a lot of questions are answered, alongside every great leap. Who benefits and at whose expense? What are the side effects? Who is excluded, why and where to? And, when shiny futures are being proposed, what is being sold?
I spend a lot of time considering strange and wonderful futurist plans. The problem is that so much of it deals with surface concerns. Architects are not politicians and shouldn’t be expected to act in their conspicuous absence but my thoughts always come back to what does this mean for the individual facing all of this, with essentially no power at his or her disposal? Taken as a whole these seem like insurmountable issues but there are weak-spots.
One is in the point where reality meets myth. A surprising amount of our exceptionally-cynical modern civilisation exists within mythology. Virtually every film tells us of the victory of the underdog when they are crushed in reality. Pronouncements on poverty are made from religious institutions so opulent that Liberace would have puked in their midst. We are lectured on the value of hard work, independence and self-sufficiency by establishments craven to inheritance, monopolies, outright theft and cronyism. We are continually presented with a world that is starkly binary (for us or against us, good or evil, male or female, left or right, black or white, cowboys or Indians etc) that bears no resemblance to how life actually is. We are bound up in disingenuous myths. The result is a catastrophic waste. In my youth, I hoped for the dispelling of myths but now I think the radical thing is to insist on these phantasms becoming reality. Let’s have the American dream and the Golden Rule. Let’s insist on them coming about. Imagine the creativity and innovations unleashed, if we got rid of anachronisms like the class system or the death-grip that old money has, and establish a genuine meritocracy. Perhaps the most radical thing to do is simply to insist that reality matches the fictions we’ve been presented with for a hundred years, to insist on the dream becoming real.
Know someone interesting to feature on How I’m Informed? Nominate them to me here: @kaviguppta.
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Anderson, Darran: IMAGINARY CITIES
(Feb. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Anderson, Darran IMAGINARY CITIES Univ. of Chicago (Adult Nonfiction) $22.50 4, 10 ISBN: 978-0-226-47030-6
An exuberant tour of cities, real and imaginary, far and wide.An epigraph from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities--"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears...everything conceals something else"--sets the stage for Scotland-based Irish writer Anderson's (Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson, 2013, etc.) "diminished non-fiction mirror" of Calvino's book. Though Anderson lacks the Italian master's poetic style, he makes up for it with energy and learning. He notes that a history of "ever-changing cities, whether real or unreal, must also be a history of the imagination." Anderson's approach owes much to the psychogeography school of thought and the seminal works of Borges and W.G. Sebald and recent writers like Iain Sinclair and Will Self. Rather than walk his cities, Anderson draws upon a postmodernist mashup of history, literature, film, art, philosophy, architecture, video games, and pop culture to weave in and out of them. A distant cousin to Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Anderson's idiosyncratic and loosely organized compendium is filled to the brim with quotes and references. He opens with Marco Polo and his tales of the many cities he visited, real and fanciful. Then it's off to Coleridge and his laudanum-infused city of Xanadu. Anderson then quickly infuses his commentary with Homer, engraver Theorodor de Brys, and poet Comte de Lautreamont by way of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Then comes Goya, De Quincey, and Dore, all in the space of three pages. Written in an aphoristic, epigrammatic style, Anderson's cascade of language and sources borders on the rambling. His discussions about cities and how they have been created and explored in history and myth become hard to follow. There's much to admire here, but the sheer mass of information--and hundreds of footnotes, many quite fascinating ("the subliminal sense of unease towards pleasure parks is evident in the ease with which it is turned into dystopia--Westworld, The Prisoner, Eurobosch, Tommy's Holiday Camp")--often overwhelms. Anderson provides plenty of fodder for academic audiences.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Anderson, Darran: IMAGINARY CITIES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234419&it=r&asid=79783e665c0660cf67c3ae539c0125fd. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479234419
Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between
264.4 (Jan. 23, 2017): p70.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between
Darran Anderson. Univ. of Chicago, $22.50 (576p) ISBN 978-0-226-47030-6
Anderson, an Irish poet and urbanist, muses on all manner of nonexistent landscapes, including Plato's Republic, Blade Runner's dank Los Angeles, science fiction cities in space or underwater, Batman's Gotham City, and Superman and Fritz Lang's Metropolises. He investigates this curio shop of cities in essays that explore themes of community and identity, mythical past and speculative future, and utopia and dystopia. Anderson overwhelms with his mix of obscure lore and erudition: "The feeling of lost greatness or lost futures is a curious one, combining the sense of the transitory in the Japanese term mono no aware and the feeling of yearning Portuguese sailors call saudade." A thesis never gels beyond pensees that range from banal ("There must be barbarians for us to convince ourselves that we are civilized") to bizarre (he styles King Kong as a symbol of Ayn Rand's philosophy, a "hulking gorilla emigre... rising above the bureaucrats and the liberals to command the city"). These meditations make for a diverting browse, but the book frequently strands readers in baffling alleyways without a map. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between." Publishers Weekly, 23 Jan. 2017, p. 70+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479714214&it=r&asid=35112989ea7d50773426b0bc0d46efdb. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479714214
Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson
Review
01.10.15
Darran Anderson’s ambitious tour of the city in myth, fiction and history veers down some unexpected paths, but Will Wiles is more than happy to tag along
Some years ago, in this magazine, I made the observation that a book about lost buildings by a noted commentator on architecture had the odour of the desk drawer about it. Perhaps I should have said the glow of the bookmarks folder, just to be up to date, but the principle is the same. It was a rag-bag of oddities of the kind that architecture buffs accumulate over time – the disappeared Singer building in New York, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Hitler’s unrealised plans for Berlin – yoked together in picture-book format and stuffed with padding. Interesting in places, but never sustaining that interest. Just sweeping up these odds and ends and putting them between hard covers is about as satisfying as a listless scroll through Tumblr.
Darran Anderson’s Imaginary Cities contains many of the same fragments of architectural history, but is an altogether different beast. There are no pictures, for one thing. One or two might have been welcome, but it’s admirable that the publisher resisted the urge. This is a proper book. Anderson has taken a colossal theme – the idea of the city over the course of human civilisation – and, if anything, expanded its boundaries in an extraordinary feat of sustained argument and imagination.
It defies handy summation. Imaginary Cities roams freely, and with easy authority, from the first scratchings on a cave wall to last month’s architecture magazines. To give a sense of Anderson’s casual ambition, a chapter on “The Tower” (no small subject) finds time to throw in a potted history of nuclear obliteration and Godzilla movies. He moves with easy grace from Herodotus to Hugo Gernsback, a range of reference that enriches already enjoyable prose with inventive imagery. Take this discussion of the scenery found in medieval sacred art:
The Annunciation gave rise to a variety of cloistered walled gardens (“Hortus Conclusus”) where Mary was kept from the corruption of the world; part prison, part sanctuary (an urban Locus amoenus). The archangel Gabriel would descend into her courtyard like a helicopter in a prison break ... In Perugino’s depiction, Christ hands Saint Peter the keys to heaven in a cityscape that extends off into the distance like a marble Tron.
Anderson wears his erudition very lightly, sometimes too lightly. Quote attribution is rough and ready in places, and there are repetitions and slips; in particular he has a capricious way with names. However, this reviewer saw an uncorrected proof and I am told that most, if not all, of these errors have been caught in the final version. Even if some have slipped the net, the reader will surely be moved to decisively overlook them, on the grounds that this is a hugely ambitious book for a small publisher, and Anderson is delightful company as an author.
Coleridge’s vision of Xanadu is here, of course, and in a sense pervades the text. There’s a dreamlike quality to the non-linear, allusive way that Anderson drifts from subject to subject. That, and the immense breadth of material included, means that while Imaginary Cities is always a pleasure to read, it doesn’t always leave that deep an impression on the memory. But that, in a way, is the point. This is not just a study of cities in myth and fiction (although heaven knows that’s a big enough topic) but a study of cities in general; or rather, a study of the human imagination and the way that it interacts with the world. The epigraph comes, aptly, from Italo Calvino, and Imaginary Cities is an enterprise in the Invisible Cities vein – one that shows the city to be a protean, infinite, impossible subject, and that its most important infrastructure lies within the human skull.
Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson
Review by Joseph Schreiber — Published on March 13, 2017
Published in Issue 47
Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson. University of Chicago Press. $22.50, 576 pp.
Imagine a city that you cannot contain, a city that forms and reforms itself around you constantly, a city that continues to change while your memories remain lodged in a reality that moves further into the past every day. That is the city of a man with a ten-second memory. I know such a person. Severely injured in an accident more than thirty years ago, this man, a former client, is unable to lay down new memoires. He lives in the continual present, working from a frame of reference decades out of date. But in the moment he is a highly intelligent, logical thinker—he was a young lawyer at the time of his injury. To see him today, his memory impairment is not immediately apparent. He is meticulous about his appearance, well-spoken, and polite. He tries to cover for his confusion as much as possible.
For many years, this man has spent several hours a week volunteering at a downtown law firm. The purpose is to provide him with social stimulation, stave off boredom. He goes to “work” in a suit, briefcase in hand. A special needs taxi delivers him to and from his placement. One day, a storm slowed all traffic, and his ride was late to pick him up. In the driving snow he began to walk toward the last home he could remember. But he had not lived there in years, and downtown, with its signature landmarks, had shifted in the meantime. The city around him no longer conformed to the one he had known, but on its streets he was invisible, a business man like any other, lost in a truly imaginary city.
As one navigates the sprawling streets and avenues that spread out across the pages of Darran Anderson’s ambitious guidebook to the metropolitan ideal—past, present, and future—there is likely to be more than one occasion of disorientation, an invitation to entertain an entirely new way of understanding the possibilities of the urban reality. In this sense, Imaginary Cities is a map that encourages you to get lost. Subtitled A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between, this journey is an open-ended inquiry into the myriad ways that the idea of the city has been conceived in history, art, literature, social theory, and architectural design—for better or worse.
Unlike the standard guidebook, Anderson offers his traveler no pictures, maps, or diagrams. This is intentional. Side trips are encouraged as the fancy strikes, and generous footnotes are provided for those who wish to follow up on quotes and references. (Of course, there is also the ease of stopping into Google for quick access to an image, biography, or further background material.) Anderson’s extended essay feels like spending time with an entertaining, well-read explorer who has traversed the cities of the imagination and returned with exotic tales that stretch back into pre-history and out into the solar system. We are in the presence of a modern-day Marco Polo who understands that “all cities can, and should be read.” His aim is to help us learn to trace these narratives ourselves.
Our guide is an Irish writer living in Scotland. He is neither an academic nor an architect, but his focus of attention lies in the intersection of culture, architecture, and technology. In a recent podcast, Anderson traced the genesis of this project to long-standing fascinations with cities and with the point at which reality and myth meet. As he became increasingly obsessed with architects and started looking through their plans, he found that beyond their iconic structures, each had drafted countless schemes and designs that would remain, for a variety of reasons, unrealized. With a different set of circumstances, then, the skylines and urban landscapes we know now could have been very different—as they once were in the past and will be in the future. The modern city is in flux and can perhaps best be understood only through a shifting kaleidoscope of angles and perspectives.
Dividing his book into seven sections, Anderson manages to pull together a wide range of interrelated ideas—from sources as diverse as myth, archaeology, art, film, urban studies, science fiction, architectural design, and many others—into a thematically structured, meandering discussion, at once densely packed and tangential. Yet the quality that makes this project so impressive also makes it very difficult to adequately capture in a review. It is a slippery beast. The themes explored are neither exhaustive nor exclusive. Amorphous, the content exceeds the boundary of the pages. Each section necessarily offers more, and less, than it promises—echoing so many of the architectural, community, and metropolitan schemes that come in and out of focus along the way. Dreams cannot be contained—in their fulfilment sacrifices must be made.
Nonetheless, it’s inspiring to see just how much Anderson manages to squeeze into his thematic discussions. For example, the section, “The Tower,” with its twenty-seven chapters, starts with the quixotic. We meet Tommaso Campanella, whose proposed “City of the Sun”—with its utopian vision of a center devoted to intellectual engagement and physical pleasures—landed him in a dungeon as a guest of the Church during the Inquisition. But his mind could not be confined and he continued to construct his designs in his imagination. He was not forgotten, and his ideas would continue to the inspire the civic utopias of his contemporary Francis Bacon and, later, Ivan Ilich Léonidiv, who dreamed up urban plans to try to save himself under Stalin. None of these imagined designs were realized, but that did not lessen their influence.
Subsequent chapters introduce Le Corbusier, the ambitious and eccentric pioneer of Modernism; stop by Mega-City One, the vast metropolis of the Judge Dredd comics; spend time contemplating the Ideal City in Renaissance art and philosophy; and spare a few minutes glancing at various attempts to envision a New Jerusalem before turning to the unfortunate, even tragic, communities founded by messianic leaders and madmen. And at this point, the journey is just getting started. From the ziggurat to the skyscraper, “The Tower” will examine the titular subject both on its own and as an integral part of the cityscape. In later sections, many of the projects and personalities met here will reappear in other contexts.
Ever avoiding the temptation to belabour a point with exhaustive detail, Anderson prefers to paint with broad strokes as he explores concepts and themes. But he continually manages to punctuate his narrative with pointed observations that bring us back, from wherever he has wandered, to moments and ideas we instantly recognize, tying his discursions back into the book’s multifaceted main thread. In the chapter, “Cinematic Dystopia of the Everyday,” for instance, he moves from the surreal silent cityscapes of Metropolis and The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari to the futuristic noir of Blade Runner, then to the soullessness of the consumer-driven society depicted by French director Jacques Tati in his ambitious film Playtime, for which he constructed a set to mimic a modern city:
Tati foresaw it all. Everywhere looks sedately impressive and like nowhere in particular. People are inherently lost. Traffic crawls in barbiturate carousels. The shocking thing watching it back now is not how contrived his sledgehammer and slapstick satire is, but how pertinent. The open plan office floors with their individual cubicles are rife now. The large glass facades, echoing the quiet desolation of Edward Hopper’s paintings, are everywhere. This is life as a glistening empty waiting room and it is a life we are increasingly forced to live all over the globe.
Here we are reminded that, as what once was presented as part of a dystopic (or, for that matter utopian) vision arrives, it soon becomes commonplace. It is easy to forget that the future is now, or rather, to quote William Gibson, “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.”
The wide, eclectic sweep of Anderson’s project is fueled by an infectious sense of endless curiosity. One of the book’s greatest assets—perhaps the key to its success—lies in its author’s thoughtful, engaging tone. His lyrical, aphoristic prose offers a wealth of memorable lines. This is where his inner Marco Polo, channeled through Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, serves him well. He is an intelligent, witty, and consummate storyteller, never afraid to speculate, raise questions, and entertain ideas without the pressure to define and prove an overarching theory. But there is a persistent theme that runs through the book. It arises naturally from the earliest formations of human settlements and is so fundamental that it has essentially become part of the psycho-topography of the urban space, reflected in our mythologies, stories, and art. That is the endless tension between utopian aspiration and dystopian despair.
One might imagine that these are two opposite ends of the spectrum, but Anderson suggests that utopias and dystopias each imply the quality of the other, that is, every utopia contains its own dystopia and vice versa. Cities are fundamentally heterogeneous places. From their earliest incarnations, such as Uruk in Mesopotamia, they were marked by the production of an agricultural surplus and the development of social classes. Utopian visions with their idealistic, often philosophical or Puritanical agendas—the dream of a world without difference or inequity—tend to deny the very qualities that make city life possible, let alone vibrant and interesting. As a sort of heaven on earth, a utopia is rarely imagined for all, just as hell might be said to exist for those who want to imagine other people burning in it. And it is no question which scenario tends to capture the popular imagination. More visitors follow Dante and Virgil down into the depths of the Inferno than sign on for the subsequent treks through Purgatorio and Paradiso.
In the end, Imaginary Cities, is much more than a book. It is an ongoing project that invites participation. It opens conversations, challenges assumptions, exposes contradictions, and invites readers to lose themselves in the cities they live in, visit, and encounter in their dreams. And the discussion does not end when the final page is turned. Darran Anderson’s Twitter feed, @Oniropolis is a wonderful source of fascinating of images, links, and retweets guaranteed to keep the magic flowing.
Joseph Schreiber is a writer and photographer living in Calgary. He maintains a book blog called Roughghosts. He is a contributor at Numéro Cinq and an editor at The Scofield. His writing has also been published at 3:AM, Minor Literature[s] and appears in the 2016-17 Seagull Books Catalog.
Review: 'Imaginary Cities' by Darran Anderson
Darran Anderson's massive work "Imaginary Cities" delves idiosyncratically into the idea of place. (Christiana Spens photo, Influx Press)
Kathleen Rooney
Darran Anderson's "Imaginary Cities" is a travelogue of the mind.
Before talking directly about Darran Anderson's grand and immersive work of creative nonfiction, "Imaginary Cities," it is worth saying a few words about his publisher, Influx Press. UK-based and independent, they focus on writing about place, and their mission is to publish "challenging, controversial, and alternative work written in order to dissect and analyze our immediate surroundings," all of which means they are a fitting home for a book that resembles a drifting walk through a city, strolling across space, time and the imagination, forging unexpected connections and paths.
Like Robert Burton in "The Anatomy of Melancholy," Anderson takes a loose organizing principle and tries to squeeze in every relevant piece of knowledge, resulting in a similarly sui generis literary work, one that is poetic, aphoristic and comprising a seeming infinity of quotable lines. This review has been assigned a 700-word limit, which amounts to a little more than one word per each of the book's 512 almost absurdly rich pages. In other words, it's a hard book to encompass as it is itself so all-encompassing and endlessly etceterative.
Scarcely has Anderson finished writing, for instance, about Christopher Priest's "Inverted World," in which "the city itself flees on a self-laying railway track to try and keep ahead of temporal and gravitational distortions," than he's off on another track of his own, about Leonardo da Vinci asserting that "'(w)e ought not to desire the impossible' at the same time as drawing flying machines, submarines and robotic knights." This is followed closely by a discussion of Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels."
The structure of the text — seven large, titled chapters consisting of numerous smaller, titled subsections — is not unlike a commonplace book, full of its brainy owner's jottings, and it reads like a document made first and foremost to please its creator. This is a risky approach and could result in a text that feels like it is talking only to itself, but luckily, Anderson pulls it off through the sheer allure of his information and the clarity of his tone, showing over and over that "(e)ven the assumption that cities are simply settings falls short when considering architecture as narrative."
Early on, he writes of how "(a)t its most attractive, this desire to explore and to chart evolved into the fashion for wunderkammer or 'cabinets of curiosities'; deliberately eclectic assemblage of curios, from embalmed extinct birds to the tusks of narwhals." "Imaginary Cities" is something of a wonder cabinet: You don't have to look at everything in it to be delighted; you don't have to read it straight through, though you'll probably want to because it's so enjoyable.
Marco Polo, whose nickname we learn was "the man of a million lies," is here, as is René Magritte, as is Narnia, as are the foggy London streets of Jekyll and Hyde, and here is Marlowe's Faustus to illustrate that "(i)f there was a Faustian moment, it was when these advances (of knowledge) were applied to the conquering of land and peoples." Readers can jump in and out, chapter to chapter: Like a dream, it starts where it starts and goes where it goes and readers follow and roam and make sense of what they can, behaving as the "pattern-seeking mammals" Anderson points out that we are. The book's idiosyncratic organization argues in favor of one of its own ideas, that the mind "can walk through walls or be imprisoned by the sky."
Anderson has a Twitter account (worth following: @Oniropolis) through which he shares material that pertains to the research and content of the book. Recently, when someone asked, in reply to his tweet about "Imaginary Cities," "It's a picture book, yeah?" he wrote, "no, it's not a picture book. it's a pop-up book. to scale. you can live inside it." This description is not true, literally, but is kind of true metaphorically, for "Imaginary Cities" is the sort of labyrinthine tome into which a reader can disappear, illustrating, quite convincingly, Anderson's point that "all cities can, and should, be read."
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and the author of the novel "O, Democracy!"
"Imaginary Cities"
By Darran Anderson, Influx, 512 pages , $13.04 Amazon