Introduction

This book recovers a lost history of interdisciplinary thought, politics, and literary philosophy in the 1960s devoted to the possibilities of urban reform. Drawing on Italo Calvino’s letters, essays, book reviews, and fiction, as well as a wide range of works—primarily architectural and urban planning and design theory—circulating among his primary interlocutors, this study uses Calvino’s dialogue with architectural theorists and urbanists as a case study that has much to teach us today about the possibilities for both urban life and exchanges across the arts and sciences in an increasingly globalized (and, some would say, homogenized) world.