Following the success of the bestselling The Travel Book comes The Cities Book, a new pictorial coffee-table book that ventures into the top 200 cities in the world, as voted by Lonely Planet travellers, authors and staff.A gorgeous gift for travellers and dreamers alike, The Cities Book evokes the soul of each city in a lavish double-page spread filled with stunning images and captivating information. Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City are the Canadian entries.Included are vital statistics, such as population and the age of the city, as well as more intimate details, such as the city's origins, its local name and urban myths. Recommendations of the best things to see, do, eat and drink are also included, in case The Cities Book inspires readers to pack their bags and pay a visit.Additional sections of The Cities Book cover the evolution of the city, ancient cities, lost cities and cities of the future.

New life underground -- Modern necropolis -- Charon's bark -- Urban apocalypse.

Lonely Planet's bestselling The Cities Book is back. Fully revised and updated, it's a celebration of 200 of the world's most exciting urban destinations, beautifully photographed and packed with trip advice and recommendations from our experts - making it the perfect companion for any traveller deciding where to visit next. - Highlights and itineraries help travellers plan their perfect trip - Urban tales reveal unexpected bites of history and local culture - Discover each city's strengths, best experiences and most famous exports - Includes the top ten cities for beaches, nightlife, food and more - Lonely Planet co-founder Tony Wheeler shares his all-time favourite cities - Fully revised and updated with the best cities to visit right now About Lonely Planet: Lonely Planet is a leading travel media company and the world's number one travel guidebook brand, providing both inspiring and trustworthy information for every kind of traveller since 1973. Over the past four decades, we've printed over 145 million guidebooks and grown a dedicated, passionate global community of travellers. You'll also find our content online, on mobile, video and in 14 languages, 12 international magazines, armchair and lifestyle books, ebooks, and more. TripAdvisor Travelers' Choice Awards 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 winner in Favorite Travel Guide category 'Lonely Planet guides are, quite simply, like no other.' - New York Times 'Lonely Planet. It's on everyone's bookshelves; it's in every traveller's hands. It's on mobile phones. It's on the Internet. It's everywhere, and it's telling entire generations of people how to travel the world.' - Fairfax Media (Australia) Important Notice: The digital edition of this book may not contain all of the images found in the physical edition.

How can we understand the infinite variety of cities? Darran Anderson seems to exhaust all possibilities in this work of creative nonfiction. Drawing inspiration from Marco Polo and Italo Calvino, Anderson shows that we have much to learn about ourselves by looking not only at the cities we have built, but also at the cities we have imagined. Anderson draws on literature (Gustav Meyrink, Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, and James Joyce), but he also looks at architectural writings and works by the likes of Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, Medieval travel memoirs from the Middle East, mid-twentieth-century comic books, Star Trek, mythical lands such as Cockaigne, and the works of Claude Debussy. Anderson sees the visionary architecture dreamed up by architects, artists, philosophers, writers, and citizens as wedded to the egalitarian sense that cities are for everyone. He proves that we must not be locked into the structures that exclude ordinary citizens--that cities evolve and that we can have input. As he says: "If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined as well.”

In often dreamlike peregrinations around his home towns of Liverpool, London and New York Andy Merrifield reflects on what cities mean to us and how they shape the way we think. As he wanders, Merrifield’s reveries circle questions: Can we talk about cities in the absolute, discovering their essence beneath the particulars? Is it possible truly to love or hate a city, to experience it carnally or viscerally? Might we find true love in the city? Merrifield does find love in the city: with his future wife, whom he takes on a date to see his hero Spalding Gray’s “It’s a Slippery Slope” at London’s South Bank and soon after moves in with, to a tiny place in Bloomsbury where they celebrate the brilliance of new romance by painting the walls turquoise and gold. And for the fellow urbanist Marshall Berman, another working class boy who went up to Oxford. Berman takes Merrifield under his wing and shows him the thrills available in Dostoevsky and Marx over cups of coffee in ordinary cafes on New York City’s Upper West Side. The mood music to these love affairs is provided by a rich repertoire of intellects, from Jane Jacobs to Mike Davis, from Louis Malle to Walter Benjamin. John Lennon, a pupil, like Merrifield, at Quarry Bank school in Liverpool, enters the story; so too the novelist and critic John Berger. And providing tonality throughout is the stripped down, razor honed talk about love in the stories of Raymond Carver. Andy Merrifield is the author of ten books including works on urbanism and social theory such as The New Urban Question and Magical Marxism, biographies of Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord and John Berger, a popular travelogue, The Wisdom of Donkeys, and a manifesto for liberated living, The Amateur. His journalism has appeared in the Nation, Harper’s, Adbusters, New Left Review, Dissent, the Brooklyn Rail, and Radical Philosophy.

Why Old Places Matter is the only book that explores the reasons that old places matter to people. Although people often feel very deeply about the old places of their lives, they don’t have the words to express why. This book brings these ideas together in evocative language and with illustrative images for a broad audience. The book reveals the fundamentally important yet under-recognized role old places play in our lives. While many people feel a deep-seated connection to old places -- from those who love old houses, to the millions of tourists who are drawn to historic cities, to the pilgrims who flock to ancient sites throughout the world -- few can articulate why. The book explores these deep attachments people have with old places –the feelings of belonging, continuity, stability, identity and memory, as well as the more traditional reasons that old places have been deemed by society to be important, such as history, national identity, and architecture. This book will be appealing to anyone who has ever loved an old place. But more importantly, it will be an useful resource to articulate why old places are meaningful to people and their communities. This book will help people understand that the feeling many have for old places is supported by a wide variety of fields, and that the continued existence of these old places is good. It will give people the words and phrases to understand and express why old places matter.