Overview

"Every month, five million people move from the past to the future. Pouring into developing-world ""instant cities"" like Dubai and Shenzhen, these urban newcomers confront a modern world cobbled together from fragments of a West they have never seen. Do these fantastical boomtowns, where blueprints spring to life overnight on virgin land, represent the dawning of a brave new world? Or is their vaunted newness a mirage? In a captivating blend of history and reportage, Daniel Brook travels to a series of major metropolitan hubs that were once themselves instant cities— St. Petersburg, Shanghai, and Mumbai—to watch their ""dress rehearsals for the twenty-first century."" Understanding today's emerging global order, he argues, requires comprehending the West's profound and conflicted influence on developing-world cities over the centuries. In 1703, Tsar Peter the Great personally oversaw the construction of a new Russian capital, a ""window on the West"" carefully modeled on Amsterdam, that he believed would wrench Russia into the modern world. In the nineteenth century, Shanghai became the fastest-growing city on earth as it mushroomed into an English-speaking, Western-looking metropolis that just happened to be in the Far East. Meanwhile, Bombay, the cosmopolitan hub of the British Raj, morphed into a tropical London at the hands of its pith-helmeted imperialists. Juxtaposing the stories of the architects and authoritarians, the artists and revolutionaries who seized the reins to transform each of these precociously modern places into avatars of the global future, Brook demonstrates that the drive for modernization was initially conflated with wholesale Westernization. He shows, too, the ambiguous legacy of that emulation—the birth (and rebirth) of Chinese capitalism in Shanghai, the origins of Bollywood in Bombay's American-style movie palaces, the combustible mix of revolutionary culture and politics that rocked the Russian capital—and how it may be transcended today. A fascinating, vivid look from the past out toward the horizon, A History of Future Cities is both a crucial reminder of globalization's long march and an inspiring look into the possibilities of our Asian Century."

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Reviews

Daniel Brook tells a fast moving story, filling in much of the political history of each city along the way. History Today ...there is much to enjoy in this timely and accessible contribution to our debates on the future of the city. RIBAJ A History of Future Citiesremains a delicious read... Time Out Mumbai ...he [Brook] marshals well-known facts with great facility into exciting narratives that steer us from each city's origin, through cycles of boom and bust, to its present state. Caravan an interesting addition to the debate about the importance of cities, the contradictions they embody and the creative potential of human beings. Socialist Review [A History of Future Cities] offers a rich panorama of the mechanisms at work in cities which may one day displace London, Paris and New York as the torchbearers of progress. As such, it deserves our full attention. Literary Review

[An] inspired tour of the postmodern city... Invigorating. -- Harper's Persuasive and lushly detailed. -- New York Times Uncommonly interesting and intelligent. -- Washington Post The pleasure in Mr. Brook's unusual history is in his descriptions of the creation of these cities. The deeper message, though, is about the tensions such cities create. -- Wall Street Journal An interesting thesis about the city's role in fomenting political change in the modern era. -- The New Yorker 'Instant cities' like Shenzhen, China, may seem like twenty-first-century twins of 'disposable cities' like rust-belt Camden, New Jersey. But in this probing new book that is at once both charming and reflective, Daniel Brook tells the story of urban hybrids conceived to fuse Western cosmopolitanism and local culture. His close but never pedantic reading of these metropolises puts the city back at the center of our vision, reminding us that in new and old towns alike, the urban amalgam of creativity, diversity, and mobility offers a key that not only unlocks the past but also opens the door to our future. -- Benjamin R. Barber, author of Jihad vs. McWorld An intimate, canny comparative study ... Accessible, entertaining... Enormously elucidating and relevant. -- Kirkus Reviews

Author Information

Daniel Brook is a journalist whose writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the Nation, and the New York Times Magazine and the author of several books, including A History of Future Cities. A New York native and a Yale graduate, Brook lives in New Orleans. He researched The Einstein of Sex in Berlin on a Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship.

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