Living Cities

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BACKGROUND Living Cities is an artist's book which is a collaboration between an Excavator, working in the basement of a family home in the Melbourne suburb of Burwood, where he unearths images of cities from magazine photographs in erased layers of printer's ink; and a Professor, who, in his book-lined study above Melbourne's civic spine, overlooking the State Library, classifies and curates a set of 25 columns. The columns trace a non-specific city's archaic emergence, its formation in grids of rational order, the thickening of the city's core over time, expansion around the city's edges, the return to central urbanity, the leap from one city to another, and finally, the quest for companionship that explains why cities begin. CONTRIBUTION In this book Leon van Schaik has written a creative work, in collaboration with the artworks of Peter Lyssiotis, which describes an emergent cityscape. The written narrative and the Lyssiotis images inform one another to reveal the character of the cityover time and the reasons why cities change and grow to accommodate human need. SIGNIFICANCE Printed by Bernie Rackham of Redwood Limited prints, this Limited edition of 10 copies with two artists' proofs (signed by author and artist) has been hand bound by Wayne Stock in red leather. Copies are held by The National Library in Canberra, Queensland State Library, NSW State Library, Victorian State Library and the University of Melbourne Library.