At the Pacific Design Center Gallery in Los Angeles, artists have created an imaginary enormo-conurbation into which humanity’s billions have been herded, surrendering what’s left of the planet to wilderness. Views of Planet City, the resulting temporary exhibition, is all Blade Runner-esque, purple-neon cityscapes in miniature, VR games and costumes melding world cultures into one. The show riffs on Edward O. Wilson’s Half Earth hypothesis, the biologist’s 2016 proposal to remove humanity from half the planet to allow ecosystems to recover. It is an entertaining, clever and provocative exhibition, but it is fiction: it does not offer a set of instructions.
David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky’s Cities Made Differently is a related exercise, billing itself as ‘a visual essay that asks us to reconsider our ideas about cities and the people who inhabit them’. It presents 29 ideas for cities rather than one, and is printed to suggest a blueprint, in cobalt, black and white.
Graeber, who died in 2020, was an American anthropologist, left-wing academic and the author of a 2018 hit book, Bullshit Jobs, which articulated with erudition many millennials’ sense of malaise about working life. Dubrovsky is an artist and Graeber’s widow. For this book, the pair are credited as co-authors. The accompanying release says thatitwas ‘drafted over decades out of a dialogue’ between the two. But it’s likely that Dubrovsky has done most of the work here.
The format is somewhere between a comic and a textbook, perhaps anticipating young-adult readers short on attention, or readers of all ages. There are cut-out images, white spaces, cartoon faces, squiggly drawings, diagrammatic lines, a bewildering array of fonts and lots of exclamation marks.
Each city prototype, real or imagined, gets a bitesize summary – from Georgy Krutikov’s flying cities visualised in early Soviet-era Russia, to Christiania, the 1970s-built ‘freetown’ area of Copen-hagen, to the Pritzker-prize-winning architect Alejandro Aravena’s contemporary social housing projects in Chile.
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