Description:
Disappearing Cities is a collection of short stories of invented cities, set in the not too distant future, destroyed by climate change impacts. The projected fictions are created from projected current climate facts. Inspired by Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities, the work aims to be a salient contemporary companion text.
Review Quotes:
'Disappearing Cities by Tony Fry is an essential read. It timely reveals how urban centres are vanishing due to natural forces, climate change and human conflict. This book underscores escalating global risks, urging us to mobilise imagination for urgent, life-affirming action.' -- David Palazón, Climate Change Content Producer, UNICEF Pakistan
'Disappearing Cities is compelling reading that encourages deep reflection. Through a diverse range of short stories, Tony Fry takes the reader to entirely imaginable places, experiencing potentially avoidable devastation. These tales paint a bleak picture of our world's future, but in doing so hope to inspire societal action now.' -- Jeremy Mather, ACT 2318 NSW 9349, RAIA, RIBA, Director, Mather Architecture
'What is the opposite of fantasy? What is fiction that helps you face pressing situations - not personal ones, but collective ones, the experiences some of us have already lived through, the unsettling we are all going to have to deal with? Disappearing Cities is this kind of reading .' -- Cameron Tonkinwise, Professor of Design Studies, the University of Technology Sydney
'Disappearing Cities presents urban endings and their causes, interweaving their roles in modernity's inequities and demise. Eschewing modernity's tendency to reproduce itself through solutionism, this seems less a work of fiction than vignettes of plausible future pasts, reminding us that modernity's benefactors may not fare so well under its demise.' --Professor Louise Crabtree-Hayes, Professorial Research Fellow, Institute for Culture and Society
'Contrary to Calvino`s or Pavic`s hyper-textual games, Fry's imagined cities disappear for quite real reasons, threatening life on the planet as such. Using all the power of creative writing as a tool for cultivating political imagination, Fry places the readers in the epicentre of catastrophe and induces them to start acting now.' --Madina Tlostanova, Professor of Postcolonial Feminisms, Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University, Sweden
Tony Fry's Disappearing Cities is a catalogue of loss and deprivation, a litany of the many ways in which the contemporary city might meet its end.... The book is an invitation to critical engagement with the legacy of Western modernist urbanism. --Diseña