Visions of the City

David Pinder is based at the Department of Geography, Queen Mary College.

• Preface; 1. INTRODUCTION; An urban adventure; Underground visions; Utopian spaces past and present; In the wake of utopia?; Utopia, desire and the city; Outline of the chapters; 2. RESTORATIVE UTOPIAS; Utopian awakenings; The vision of Ebenezer Howard; Smokeless, slumless cities; The 'master key' to socio-spatial reform; Biologically sound cities and bodies; Securing space; 3. MODERNIST CALLS TO ORDER; Time and space died yesterday; Le Corbusier and the spirit of construction; Spatial purification; Water-tight formulae; Urban surgery; Political authority and the plan; 4. DREAMS OF CITIES AND MONSTERS; Between two journeys; White cathedrals: confronting New York; Of monsters and organic life; Utopian regulation and authoritarianism; Counter-spaces of the surrealists; Destabilising dreams of order; 5. SITUATIONIST ADVENTURES; To build the haçienda; The critique of human geography; Environments of abstraction; Bringing fuel to the fire; Never work; Unchaining the city; In quest of new spaces; 6.THE GREAT GAME TO COME; A science fiction of architecture; Unitary urbanism and the construction of situations; Passionate environments; Living art of the Imaginist Bauhaus; Games with machines; A camp for nomads; 7. LIFE WILL RESIDE IN POETRY; Welcome to New Babylon; Play structures; Paradise on earth; Not yet: utopianism and games to come; For another city and another life; A lived utopianism; Reappropriating cities: urban critique; 8. PARTISANS OF POSSIBILITIES; Dark skies; For utopianism; Re-dreaming modernist urbanism; Spaces and times of the avant-garde; Challenges of utopia; Future paths; Notes; Selected bibliography; Illustration credits; Index.

Visions of the City takes its readers on a fascinating and richly inllustrated tour through some of the most powerful and inlfluential visions at the heart of estern European urban theory, policy and practice.