Daniel Brook

UPDATE
I finished the book and it went more or less as I anticipated: tons of new information on Shanghai and Mumbai, then torture with St. Petersburg. Thank God later Dubai joined it as a whipping boy. All in all impression left by the book: St. Petersburg and Dubai is hubris, two others are shining examples of daring human spirit.

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Just started. Intro was inspiring. Along came Chapter 1 on my native Russia and the city I lived 2 years in and a monarch about whom Robert K. Massie wrote a stunning masterpiece (Peter the Great: His Life and World). Nearly every paragraph makes me cringe: patronizing tone here, dubious shortcut there, sensation making oversimplification here, weird (an never heard by me) quote there. Oh, my what shall I do? I want to love the book, I want to believe it. But if I see how freely (and arbitrarily) he juggles the story of St. Petersburg to shoehorn it into his slick narrative, should I take his word for the places I know little about: Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai? Or he massages their stories in a similar fashion?… (más)

An intriguing case study of four attempts to plant Western cities in the global East: St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Bombay and Dubai. The first and last were created by local autocrats, the middle two by foreign imperialists, but all four saw a polyglot population, an architectural mashup and cultural collision.

All four also saw significant limits to the rights and freedoms normally granted in the Western cities they emulate, intense poverty alongside opulent riches and simmering tensions between locals and outsiders.

Author Daniel Brook highlights these contradictions, mentioning but not dwelling on both sides of the Future Cities' stories. His case studies are offered up as lessons for other developing cities hoping to borrow from the West without losing what made them unique before.

Brook's historical analysis takes a middle ground between the nationalists who want to keep foreign influence out and the copycats who want to erase the local. Both are necessary, he argues. In a closing metaphor, he points to an exhibit in St. Petersburg's Hermitage art gallery, in which Roman copies of Greek statues are displayed. "That the Romans copied does not mean that history is nothing but copying," Brook writes. "But it does mean that copying is an integral part of history."… (más)