A Typology of Fantastical Cities and Architecture: Categorizing the Urban Imaginary

Abstract

Throughout time, imagining fantastic and future cities has played a key role in developing Urban Design as a discipline and a practice. Images of fictional cities strongly influence the way we perceive the urban world today and open the dialogue for negotiating our future urban reality. Following both deductive and inductive reasoning approaches, this paper proposes a typological system for organizing and analyzing fictional cityscapes and their built environment and facilitates the conceptualization of much-needed new urban visions that address contemporary urban issues, concerns, and transformations. The proposed typology is presented in the form of a "fictional city sheet", an analytical tool that can be applied across media to various representations of urban imaginaries. This work aims to promote stronger connections between the imaginary and the coming real, serving as a first step in planning the possible by exploring the impossible.