True Cities

True Cities is a photographic publication, a summary of ten years of Charlie Koolhaas' research on global cities, to create a collage from a vast collection of images and words that have been collected from around the world. Her work concentrates on cities, their architecture and the way it is used. True Cities weaves a dense photographic patchwork of images of the historical financial centers London, Guangzhou, and Houston and of the emerging centers of commerce Dubai and Lagos, creating a multi-layered picture of an intricately connected world. Koolhaas aims to give a representation of these cities as global centers of cross-cultural life and exchange across different fields, beliefs and cultures. The book shows similarities and contradictions, structures and surfaces and relates to the people living there. The book is a snapshot of Koolhaas' own sociologically guided perception of what is a true representation of today's global cities, cultures, architecture and their inhabitants. Multi- faceted and complexly layered, these insights and images have been gathered whilst spending significant periods of her time living and working within these different ideologies, markets and economies. True Cities will be part street photography, part raw documentary and energised observation, part deliberate mess, and deliberately non-judgemental. This will be Charlie Koolhaas's first major publication documenting not only her visual exploration but accompanying literary dialogue and discussions. The book will demonstrate the way in which urban life forces us to conform to an endless array of cliches and mundane routines, whilst making us believe that we are living out our fantasies.