Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
March 8, 2021 [3:35 AM — 9:23 PM]
Los Angeles, CA
Recommended by Allen Ortega
Initially, this novel caught my interest because I thought it would be about urban planning, it wasn’t at all. Allen told me that it was more poetry than a novel, I decided to give it a shot and I’m very glad I did. The amount of detail in the imagery put into each city is so well-written and abundant, you can imagine each one of the fictional cities as if you’d be walking through them; they were so well described, I didn’t realize they were fictional until I googled a few of the cities. While some of the descriptions of cities became wild, I assumed this could be a possibility since the explorer lived in the 13th century. The book is a dialogue between Venetian explorer Marco Polo and the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, in which Polo describes 55 cities within Khan’s vast empire that he's visited to the emperor in his garden. The chapters have 11 themes of cities; memory, desire (my favorite), signs, thin, trading, eyes, names, the dead, the sky, continuous (also my favorite), and hidden. Through these themes, you realize it's not about the infrastructure of the cities, but the human experience and the culture.
While it's definitely not an urban planning book, you could extract the descriptive creative writing and translate it into real concepts that urbanists think of all the time; such as the reliance on nature's ultimate power, the timelessness of a city and its urban design, and the visualization as a cultural language. Nature dictates urban design, as the author presents how the cities are built around their nature and how the architectural typology is determined by the natural landscape that predicts the human experience. While timelessness of the city is presented in the themes of the dead and continuation, molding the identity of the city throughout time. Finally, the books beautiful writing demonstrates how we rely on imagery to create an image and understanding, for urban planners & architects, we tend to want to be able to describe a design so meticulously that you'd be provided with a sensory experience where you'd feel like you were already there.