Cities are bad for us: polluted, noisy and fundamentally unnatural. We need green space, not concrete. Trees, not tower blocks.

So goes the argument. But is it true? What would the city of the future look like if we tried to build a better life from the ground up? And would anyone want to live there?

Here, Des Fitzgerald takes us on an urgent, unforgettable journey into the future of urban life, from shimmering edifices in the Arizona desert to forest-bathing in deepest Wales, and from rats in mazes to neuroscientific studies of the effects of our surroundings.

Along the way, he reveals the deep-lying and often controversial roots of today’s green city movement, and offers an argument for celebrating our cities as they are – in all their raucous, constructed and artificial glory.