No one had even lived there or even visited.

People gather at a high plateau to view Irene‘s skyline, imagining how life there could be.

In one vignette, he tells about a city named Irene only seen from a distance, but never from inside. In Calvino‘s book, Marco Polo reports to China’s emperor Kublai Khan on the different cities he has visited. In all, 43 cities have populations of one-million-plus today, with a projected 221 by 2025, a mass migration of millions from the impoverished Chinese countryside, leading to significant urban social and environmental problems.Ī recent essay in Foreign Policy ponders the issue in light of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The rapid industrialization of China includes proliferation of megacities, including Tianjin, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Chengdu and Wuhan. This essay poses the what-if notion of imaginative urban design that could have overcome some of the problems of crowded, polluted urban mega-cities of 10 million residents or more.Ĭalvino’s Invisible Cities envisioned in a Nora Sturges painting: how do the latest Chinese megacities measure up? Chinese Urban Utopian Overdose Could Have Learned from Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities.” The imaginative utopian vision of Italo Calvino in “Invisible Cities” should have inspired the urban planning of China’s cities undergoing rapid industrialization.

Marco polo invisible cities