![]() ![]() He then pondered the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions, such as Enoch, Babylon, Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World. Trouble happens when humans actually build them from their imagination.Įven the great Khan’s atlas contained maps of the imaginary promised lands: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun, Oceana, Tamoé, New Harmony, New Lanark, Icaria. No one had even lived there or even visited. People gather at a high plateau to view Irene‘s skyline, imagining how life there could be. In one vignette, he tells about a city named Irene only seen from a distance, but never from inside. In Calvino‘s book, Marco Polo reports to China’s emperor Kublai Khan on the different cities he has visited. In all, 43 cities have populations of one-million-plus today, with a projected 221 by 2025, a mass migration of millions from the impoverished Chinese countryside, leading to significant urban social and environmental problems.Ī recent essay in Foreign Policy ponders the issue in light of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The rapid industrialization of China includes proliferation of megacities, including Tianjin, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Chengdu and Wuhan. This essay poses the what-if notion of imaginative urban design that could have overcome some of the problems of crowded, polluted urban mega-cities of 10 million residents or more.Ĭalvino’s Invisible Cities envisioned in a Nora Sturges painting: how do the latest Chinese megacities measure up? Chinese Urban Utopian Overdose Could Have Learned from Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities.” In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them.The imaginative utopian vision of Italo Calvino in “Invisible Cities” should have inspired the urban planning of China’s cities undergoing rapid industrialization. Your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its formĪs for Kublai Khan, as for all of us, the narrator tells us, However for those who work to give shape to these desires The city appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost and of which you are a part, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit this desire and be content. However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it.Īnastasia has concentric canals and much in it streets that captures our senses and feeds our desires. Statues and shields depict lions, dolphins, towers, stars: a sign that something-who knows what?-has as its sign a lion or a dolphin or a tower or a star. The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things: pincers point out the tooth-drawer’s house a tankard, the tavern halberds, the barracks scales, the grocer’s. You penetrate it along streets thick with signboards jutting from the walls. It is a city “that moves entirely upward.” According to others, the gods live in the buckets that rise, suspended from a cable, as they appear over the edge of the wells,Īnd live in all the other apparatus and construction that brings the water to the top. The city’s gods, according to some people, live in the depths, in the black lake that feeds the underground streams. Ībove, Isaura, the city of a thousand wells, whose borders are determined by a subterranean lake beneath, its design by all that is needed to extract the water.Ĭonsequently two forms of religion exist in Isaura. Her progress can be found at her site here, and you can learn more about Karina and the project in this interview at Kindle. The drawings capture much from the text, but they also have a magic of their own. Karina Puente, an architect and urbanist based in Lima, Peru, who has worked on plans for the Lima of the future, has also begun illustrating each of Calvino’s 55 cities. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” And for much else our walls cannot contain, what escapes our most rigorous designs, what exists within, beneath, and above the surface of our intentions. And for our experiences, alone and together, within the walls we construct around ourselves, walls being metaphors themselves. The cities in Italo Calvino’s novel are metaphors for cities. Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.
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