Wed Jan 28, 02026, 12:00AM UTC
Diane E. Davis and Bruno Carvalho
The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World
A kaleidoscopic and original new history of urbanization—from Lisbon to New York, Paris to Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires to Lagos.
For the past three centuries, urban dwellers and planners have imagined future cities that would be radically different from those of the past. Planners pursued progress, whether focused on flying vehicles above, sewage systems below, or daily life in between. Yet, as Bruno Carvalho shows in this original and wide-ranging history, which features some sixty illustrations, modern cities continuously defied predictions. Visionary designs and technological innovations created dramatic, unforeseen outcomes, and the ongoing urban boom is a story of continuity as well as rupture. A compelling history of imagined futures and the transformation of urban life, The Invention of the Future also suggests what we might learn from the stories of our cities as we shape them for the twenty-first century.
Diane E. Davis is the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism and former Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). She also is the director of the Mexican Cities Initiative at the GSD, and faculty chair of the committee on Mexico at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. Davis’s research interests include the relations between urbanization and national development, urban governance, urban social movements, and informality, with a special emphasis on Mexico. Her books include Transforming Urban Transport (Oxford: 2018), among other titles.
Diane E. Davis
Bruno Carvalho's interdisciplinary approaches tend to bridge history, literary analysis, urban design, landscape architecture, and the social sciences concerned with cities. His award-winning Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro was published in Brazil in a revised and expanded edition. He co-organized a critical edition in Portuguese of United States constitutional documents, which circulated across the Atlantic and played a role in independence movements. Carvalho is also editor of Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies: The Eighteenth Century, and co-editor of Occupy All Streets: Olympic Urbanism and Contested Futures in Rio de Janeiro (2016).
Bruno Carvalho
