When discussing urban planning, it's easy to forget the intricacies that go into creating the systems and structures that affect billions of people on a daily basis. From how streets are built to zoning laws that keep ethnic minorities ghettoized, every piece of the modern city comes from decisions made by architects, public servants and entrepreneurs who wanted to make their mark on humanity. Wade Graham's Dream Cities follows those men and women, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Jane Jacobs and Daniel Burnham, as they dreamt new ways for us to live, and battled to turn those dreams into reality.
Dream Cities highlights seven major theories or styles of urban planning, like Wright's focus on single-family homes that ultimately lead to cookie-cutter suburbia, and Le Corbusier's brutalist slabs that provided the main inspiration for high-rise apartment complexes. Teasing out the history of thinkers and the ultimate impact of their work, Graham (American Eden) creates an interesting mix of biographies: that of his human subjects, and the cities and countries whose shape they altered. While the book doesn't have much of a thematic structure (there's no summation or look to the future, for instance), attentive readers can easily see how the buildings and streets around them relate to the various threads Graham establishes. It's no small feat for a book to change how someone conceptualizes her world, and Dream Cities does just that. --Noah Cruickshank, marketing manager, Open Books, Chicago, Ill.