Cities Made Differently

Description

Full of playful graphics, provocative questions, and curious facts, this book asks what makes a city and how we might make them differently.
What makes a city a city?
Who says?
Drafted over decades out of a dialogue between artist and author Nika Dubrovsky, the late anthropologist David Graeber, and Nika's then four-year-old son, this delightful and provocative book Cities Made Differently opens a space for invention and collaboration. Fusing anthropology, literature, play, and drawing, the book is essentially a visual essay that asks us to reconsider our ideas about cities and the people who inhabit them.

Drawing us into a world of history and myth, science and imagination, Graeber and Dubrovsky invite us to rethink the worlds we inhabit — because we can, and nothing is too strange or too wonderful to be true. With inspired pictures and prompts, Cities Made Differently asks what a city is, or could be, or once was. Sleeping at the bottom of the ocean? Buried in lava? What were those cities of long ago, and what will the cities of the future be? They might be virtual, ruled by AI, or islands of beautiful architecture afloat in seas of greenery. They might be utopian places of refuge or refugee camps as far as the eye can see.
On land, underground or aloft, excavated or imagined, cities, this book tells us in provocative and funny ways, can be anything we want them to be-and what we want them to be can tell us something about who we are, what it is to be human, and what's possible when we make way for wonder.

Cities Made Differently exists in two versions, one for reading and thinking, the other, downloadable at a4kids.org, for drawing and dreaming.

Reviews

 "An entertaining introduction to the conceptual common in contemporary architecture training. It encourages everyone, including children, to ask intelligent questions about where they live and how power is structured."
-The Spectator

Contents: 1 Flying ity
2 The City that always sleeps
3 City in the clouds
4 A city of fighters: Citizens who are ever ready to attack and defend.
5 City of freedom
6 The City of Play
7 City of greed
8 City as a Family
9 City in the desert
12 Surveillance City
13 Transparent City
14 City of Masks
15 Invisible City
16 Priceless solitude
18 Ghost town
19 A city of runners
20 Underground city
21 City in the Ocean
22 City of Punishment
23 Trash city
24 Noah's ark
25 Model city
26 City Under Siege
27 Sun City
28 School City
29 City of Care

 

Author Biography: David Graeber (1961-2020) was an anthropologist, activist, and author of several bestselling books, including Debt- The First 5,000 Years, Bullshit Jobs, and The Dawn of Everything. He was involved in the Global Justice Movement and Occupy Wall Street. His latest book was Pirate Enlightenment. Nika Dubrovsky is an artist and writer who works in the style of the visual essays featured in the series of books "Made differently" and others. She is the founder of the David Graeber Institute and the editor of Graeber books.