A stroll through a strangely suspended landscape, past heart-shaped rooftops half-shrouded in pastel yellow and orange clouds, and a candy-coloured masterplan compose the cover of Dreams + Disillusions, lending only the first glimpse of the mild, fantastic delirium that follows. Inside the book, readers are led not through neatly stacked chapters, but through cities re-seen as riddles, myths, ruins and rituals. Fiction and fact braid into one another like the speculative skylines of Hong Kong dotting several pop-cultural canons, the vanished geometries of Tenochtitlán or the ghostly facades of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles, where dystopia wears the promise of architecture.

In a way, reading the book feels not unlike watching a dystopian setting, à la the reiteratively constructed but crumbling cityscapes of Inception or the neon-drenched ones in Ghost in the Shell, only annotated in exquisite, colourful ink. A capsule of visions, projections and what-could-have-beens; built environments not imagined to be particularly realised, but as particular tales of caution. Not a single plan or section appears; buildability is not the book’s concern, but possibilities sure are.

“Whether by bold gestures of power and wealth or by subtle attrition and guerrilla activities, cities are built on the dreams of princes and political leaders as well as the abstracted interpretations of countless planners, architects, authors and citizens,” reads the book’s preface. “For the keen observer, cities themselves can be read as encyclopaedias of ideas and ideologies.” This quote serves as a north star for the journey ahead, one in which the city is not a machine for living, but a kaleidoscope of impulses: personal, political, historical and also wildly hypothetical.

“Myth and belief. Tradition and logic. Revolution and marginalisation. Ignorance and hubris. Sins and excess. Seasons and climate. Continuously interacting, shifting to enlighten and to enrage, these themes combine critical thinking with deep-rooted influences and new agencies that are a true sign of the times. The 18 illustrated speculations provide an abundance of curious imaginings, diverse provocations and satirical criticism. While there are distinctions between dreams and disillusions, could virtues be made of sins, or sensitivity be borne from hubris? Could progress advocate tradition, or should we re-attempt revolutions formerly experienced as disillusionments? …cities are continually re-written crucibles for the human condition. In this book, we develop a better understanding of the discourse of cities tailored to the determining factors of climate, resources and humanity’s idiosyncrasies to address a world in crisis,” the book’s description relays, commenting on the many questions and provocations it affronts.

The authors, academic and professor CJ Lim and his collaborator Luke Angers, structure the book around six dichotomies: Myth + Belief, Tradition + Logic, Revolution + Marginalisation, Ignorance + Hubris, Sins + Excess and Seasons + Climate, as elucidated in the book's key dichotomous provocations. Each chapter pairs an essay with a drawing, each drawing with a counterpoint, each case study with a kind of cinematic choreography. “The six chapters reveal dreams that were fundamental to the origin of great cities, underpinning the stories of the many lives within; and how, through circumstance or manipulation, fortunate coincidence or planned perfection, desires are sometimes left defeated and disillusioned,” the description further notes.

The book comprises over 150 images in total: a welcome flood of diagrammatic satire, abstract montages and graphic provocations that make reading the book feel like entering an architectural storyboard, one that throws up fresh speculations and notes each time you find yourself revisiting it. In Dreams + Disillusions, speculative drawing becomes architecture’s most human and humane gesture.

Take Myth + Belief, the book’s opening act, for instance. Here, architecture is shown not as a neutral container of governance but as a theatrical apparatus. From New Delhi to Ankara, cities are laid bare as systems and empires of performance; as tools of power, persuasion and projection. The authors examine how mythologies, both ancient and corporate, continue to script the ways we inhabit the world. “Architecture never exists apart from a value system”, writes Lim, “whether subconscious or stated outright…A city founded on the disillusions of utopia will inevitably become saturated in contradictions and inconsistencies…Architecture can’t do anything that the culture doesn’t.”

The chapter Tradition + Logic teases out the false binaries of the old and new. Here, Martin Scorsese’s New York and Corbusier’s rational grids across the pond bump against the fluid architectures of the digital realm, made manifest. Cities begin to pixelate. The notion of the ‘real’ blurs, destabilised by the simultaneity of history and hyperreality. At one point, Lim quotes French professor Antoine Picon, noting how digital space now constitutes its own architectural dimension, one just as potent as brick and mortar. “The elaborate delusions of architectural logic can doubtless realise much value from an injection of tradition, whose understanding is likewise invigorated by the application of a logical approach. A healthy dose of both can mediate the delicate balance of multiplicities essential to the experience of the urban fabric,” Lim notes in the chapter.

Revolution + Marginalisation reframes cities as theatres of resistance, where squats, diasporas and forgotten communities script their own spatial narratives. In one of the book’s more poignant images, Lim sketches a young girl doing her homework on a weather-worn rooftop, a visual ode to unseen labour, migration and maternal sacrifice, something he discusses at length with STIR. “We never acknowledge the contribution and the sacrifices made by mothers, grandmothers, daughters,” Lim conveys. “Even the most menial tasks could be seen as a big contribution to how cities function on a daily basis… the reconceptualisation of cities must start from first principles, from a gender-based perspective or space and time, and the recognition that cities are more equitable when more female voices are heard, especially in policy making.”

The book’s satire cuts deepest in Ignorance + Hubris. A section that eviscerates top-down visions of ‘smart cities’, it includes a particularly damning proposal: Walt Disney’s megalomaniacal EPCOT masterplan is revisited here as a cautionary tale – a city of surveillance dressed up as utopia. “Architecture becomes dangerous when it forgets to serve humans,” Lim says. “Cities are no use if they do not facilitate humanity. I feel that we have lost a lot of that kind of humanity and emotions that should really be celebrated through architecture. So I always see architecture, the building or the fabric of it, as secondary to the needs and the desires, the aspirations, the qualitative intangibilities that we feel as humans; they should come first, and as architects, we should take that as a priority rather than what is the form of the building, of the city,” he tells STIR.

By the time one reaches and reviews Sins + Excess and Seasons + Climate, the speculative becomes meteorological. We’re asked to reimagine cities shaped not by steel or stone, but by wind, cloud, light and shadow. Vegas’ ‘visually recognisable example of sinful architecture’ is spoken about, while one proposal turns the cloud cover of an English summer into a masterplan, each patch of grey sky casting a shifting urban shadow. “The masterplan is never the same twice,” Lim smiles as he discusses this. “It depends on the wind, which shifts. I love that intangibility.” There’s poetry here, as well as didactic practicability.

For all its visual bravado, Dreams + Disillusions is ultimately a book about empathy; about imagination as an architectural tool and questioning the default. “Architecture, or cities, are no use if they do not engage and serve and facilitate humanity,” Lim enunciates. “The book is really about that: facilitating human beings from multiple perspectives, from different points of view, from the different ideologies that exist.”

“We want readers to find common ground between dichotomies,” he continues. “To see that cities are not about perfection – they are about possibility... we can produce architecture which is intelligent and sustainable and also poetic at the same time.” And so, the drawings, like Zaha Hadid’s unbuilt, unrealised sketches, or the shadows of a mango tree in Lim’s Malaysian hometown, are not merely there; they are the architecture. They are the city.

And if, as Italo Calvino is quoted in the book’s introduction, “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears,” (Invisible Cities, 1974), then Dreams + Disillusions is a reminder that our blueprints must begin with both.