Inventing Future Cities (The MIT Press)

Despite beginning with the query--how can we invent cities--the author never follows through on discussions that matter, particularly on the making of cities. He never offers vocabularies or ways of thinking about the future city's ontology. There is a fantastic literature on complexity in the development of urban markets, centripetal and centrifugal logics of urban growth, and infrastructure, but this is never extended by this book. The author is a symbol analyst simply pushing metaphors around without in-depth exploration. Please stop contrasting ideal city plans with a bottoms-up approach as it is a strawman discussion avoiding the meaningful inquiries we need to make.

This book’s main point is simple. Cities are emergent at a large scale, and planned to some extent at a smaller scale, and so there is a limited extent to which we can know how cities will turn out over time. And the unknown-unknowns that fate periodically slings at us constrain our knowledge still further.Inventing Future Cities is dedicated to explaining why that should still be so, given the intellectual efforts that have been made over the past century-and-a-half to understand how cities work. It adopts a historical perspective. It has to really given the range of material covered. Some of it, the early theories on city-regions, ideal cities and the like, will be familiar to any urban historian. Other material may be less familiar: Kondratieff’s work; some of the computer modelling material; the work based on “big data;” or the discussion of smart cities.It seems that we know a lot about how cities work, but it turns out that we only think we do. Yet many urban planners do understand that no matter how much we plan, we may not be able to predict how our cities will be in ten or twenty years. But this problem is understood intuitively, and so is hard to pin down in any precise way. And that makes it difficult to deal with. That’s where this book comes in, because it will help them understand the problem better. And in so doing, it will help them do their jobs better. In short, an interesting, useful and inspiring book. Heartily recommended.

More, much more, was expected from the author. Hardly anything new and almost nothing inspiring between the covers of this book. The image on the cover is fantastic though !

Apresenta uma visão inventiva das cidades, integrando urbanismo, economia, geografia, planejamento e outras áreas. Por utilizar tantas referências, pode parecer incompleto - mas assim deve ser tendo em vista a complexidade do objeto em questão. Acompanha ao longo de todo o texto, que constitui apenas 220 páginas, 72 figuras que ilustram as ideias apresentadas. Recomendo o livro aos interessados no passado, presente e futuro das cidades.