The City of Today is a Dying Thing

Download or read book The City of Today is a Dying Thing written by Des Fitzgerald and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2024-01-16 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Lively, irreverent and insightful.' Lauren Elkin 'Like Jon Ronson on town planners ... E ndlessly funny, s eriously smart.' John Grindrod Cities are bad for us: polluted, noisy and fundamentally unnatural. We need green space, not concrete. Trees, not tower blocks. So goes the argument. But is it true? What would the city of the future look like if we tried to build a better life from the ground up? And would anyone want to live there? Here, Des Fitzgerald takes us on an urgent, unforgettable journey into the future of urban life, from shimmering edifices in the Arizona desert to forest-bathing in deepest Wales, and from rats in mazes to neuroscientific studies of the effects of our surroundings. Along the way, he reveals the deep-lying and often controversial roots of today's green city movement, and offers an argument for celebrating our cities as they are - in all their raucous, constructed and artificial glory.