#imaginary cities

Imaginary Cities: A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere In Between

by Darran Anderson

I keep seeing people on tumblr talking about the idea of academic research as a kind of play. This book very much felt like that. There's a delight and joy present in the writing of this that you don't typically see associated with nonfiction, and the number of specialties this book covers, flitting from topic to topic but always weaving them back into a constellation circling the idea of the city as a work of fiction, gives the impression of an extremely curious person with a lot of different but overlapping interests.

Because of the multitude of things this book explores I am having a hard time summarizing the thesis or just the most salient points. There's a lot going on here and almost of all of it is very interesting to me. I suppose the central theme around which this book is built is: the identity of a city is a work of collective fiction between the people who build it and the people who inhabit it, and as it becomes something that exists in the public consciousness, the people who visit it and create art about it. Every city is influenced by the architectural styles and artistic movements architects are working within, which in turn are influenced by both pragmatic and political aims. The idea of 'a city' (generic) in the public consciousness is influenced by ideas about cities from ancient history all the way down to the present day, and this public consciousness idea of a city exists in a superposition of utopia and dystopia.

The reassuring dichotomy of the tale gained particular currency during the Cold War with the American Christian Right and its supposed antithesis the godless Evil Empire of the Soviets. In dozens of posters, publications and sermons, it was asserted again and again that the Atomic bomb was not just God's gift to America, it was 'the spirit of God'. Few but the incurably credulous actually believed this but it proved valuable to televisual preachers up to and including President Reagan, who restored America's faith in itself, having been shaken by the hard cold realities of Viet Nam, JFK and Watergate, by telling the nation pleasant Manichean bedtime stories. They are Babylon so we are the just City. They are the damned, we are the chosen. For the first time it was conceivable for humanity to bring about the apocalypse through technology. Despite not a single mention of an atom in Revelation, it seemed certain the Rapture predicted there was coming.

Embarrassingly, it failed, as it has done for each generation, to arrive but it will not be long before the Just and Damned Cities require rebuilding again. The end of the world will come eventually, and until then the end of the world prophecy industry will remain a busy one. Every generation, once safely out of its youth, sees the end of days beginning in younger generations: "Whence shall come the new barbarians? Go through the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, even now, their gathering hordes. How shall learning perish? Men will cease to read, and books will kindle fires and be turned into cartridges! It is startling to think how slight the traces that would be left of our civilisation did it pass through the throes that have accompanied the decline of every previous civilisation. Paper Will not last like parchment, nor are our most massive buildings and monuments to be compared in solidity with the rock-hewn temples and titanic edifices of old civilisations.” (Henry George, 1897)

Here's some of my more weird mixed media art. I created an entire country called Tirahvaallta as an art project that never really finished. There are several cities with specific flavors, color schemes and inhabitants.

Above is pictured the Great Sphinx in the desert of Oubliette. He watches over the desert as it serves as a sort of lost and found, where discarded dreams and parts of oneself must be excavated. When the Sphinx is particularly happy, he starts getting purple and pink stripes (an allusion to the Cheshire cat) He enjoys having tea with Robin GoodFellow and "The Beetles".

Underworld remind us that moments and places that are disposable or debauched or transitory can be worthy of attention, or even be considered art, that these too are life, and in noticing them, you are honouring something deeper. This may sound worthy but the incidences themselves are not – the frantic dash for the last train, the drunken confessional moment staring at graffiti above a urinal, the glimpse of an illuminated room from a passing taxi, a shredded barely-legible poster or a neon sign above a backstreet door, a lucid moment in a ket-bumping pisshead’s lost night, a chant in a Romford street or a Manhattan canyon, a billboard on the A13 or Times Square, a whispered sentence from someone you will never see again.

-Darran Anderson on Dubnobasswithmyheadman at 30.

Planet City.

Directed by Liam Young, 2020.

Ane Crabtree (Costume Director)

Alexey Marfin (Visual Effects Supervisor)

Matthew Barnes/Forest Swords (Original Score)

Case Miller (Lead Researcher)

Case Miller, Aman Sheth, Vivian Komati (Visual Effects)

Courtney Mitchell (Main Costume Assistant)

Ela Erdogan (Costume Assistant)

We used to live in one of those neighbourhoods that burnt down. You know the kind, where there used to be specialty stores that sold bizarre nicknacks, little wind-up chattering teeth and google-eyed monster dolls. Shelves full of smelly paperback books and floorboards caked with decades of street grime. 

It was great.

I miss it. I miss it ever day. I miss it still.

After it burned down they planted new buildings which grew up think and strong in what seemed like no time at all. Great gargantuan skyscrapers with strange names like SHE WHO STANDS BEFORE ALL AND BRANDISHES AN AX, and CHARLIE, THE ONE WHO IS ALWAYS WATCHING. You can live in them, if you want, but the rent’s are obscene; it’s all fucking and shitting and the views aren’t really that great.

Wouldn’t you like to live somewhere nice, where you could see all the poor people you’d beaten? Or do you prefer to turn your back on them, and stare out to sea?

They’ll be out there too someday. Don’t worry. It’s happening right now.