The City of Today is a Dying Thing

In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow

Des Fitzgerald

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English

Faber & Faber
13 May 2025

Environmentally-friendly architecture & design; City & town planning - architectural aspects; Conservation of the environment

Cities are bad for us: polluted, noisy and fundamentally unnatural. We need green space, not concrete. Trees, not tower blocks.

So goes the argument. But is it true? What would the city of the future look like if we tried to build a better life from the ground up? And would anyone want to live there?

Here, Des Fitzgerald takes us on an urgent, unforgettable journey into the future of urban life, from shimmering edifices in the Arizona desert to forest-bathing in deepest Wales, and from rats in mazes to neuroscientific studies of the effects of our surroundings.

Along the way, he reveals the deep-lying and often controversial roots of today's green city movement, and offers an argument for celebrating our cities as they are - in all their raucous, constructed and artificial glory.

By: Des Fitzgerald
Imprint: Faber & Faber
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Edition: Main
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 129mm,
ISBN: 9780571362226
ISBN 10: 0571362222
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 13 May 2025
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Des Fitzgerald is professor of medical humanities and social sciences at University College Cork. He was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for sociology in 2017, and named a 'New Generation Thinker' by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He lives in Cork.

Reviews for The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow

'A social scientist offers a witty and sceptical view of our obsession with greenery in urban spaces . . . Counterintuitive, funny and provocative . . . We could all use a little more of Fitzgerald's scepticism', Edwin Heath-cote, Financial Times 'An amusing, sceptical and refreshing journey through the past and fu-ture of urban life. Fitzgerald has an eye for the incongruous, and a talent for teasing out grander themes from unlikely or lacklustre settings . . . [his] en-gagements with his surroundings are compelling . . . [and] he has an entertaining cattiness throughout . . . [The City of Today is a Dying Thing is] a compassionate and lively venture, a robust defence of the messiness of cities, and a noble corrective against those who insist on a managerial view of nature, urban spaces and human beings', Daily Telegraph