niktipolos:

Hello. Thank you for the question, and why not? This is not a comprehensive list by any means (no extensive theory at all or other forms of art, etc). I’m sure there are far better recommendations one could ferret out, but never say no to excellent literature:-

Fiction.

1. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake: a world of gothic grotesque, strange and gloomy and ornate and slumping into decadent decay, choked by ritual and custom. 

2. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino: This book is a marvel, each chapter dedicated to a different city in the form of conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. His cities shimmer and shift and beguile you; they aren’t old-world noirs of vice and squalor, but cities of ideas and questions, dense with meaning, compact in every sentence.

3. Anything by China Miéville, including Un Lun Dun, The Scar, but especially Perdido Street Station: Perdido isn’t his best novel, but the prose crackles and it’s fantastic world-building: a dark, dingy, clanking neo-Victorian London of grimy decadence, occult science, body horror, oppression and corruption.

4. Neuromancer, William Gibson: Messy, energetic & innovative—the cornerstone of 1980s cyberpunk-lit: drugs, hackers, sliding realities, information overload. (Also coined the term “cyberspace”).

5. Hunger, Elise Blackwell: not a different world, exactly, but the past; the starvation of Leningrad—how humans salvage themselves, how a city dies.

6. From Hell, Alan Moore: A graphic novel set in victorian London, From Hell is the city at its darkest and most cruel - a place of shadows, the centre of an empire built on blood and bones, its masters lurking around every corner; a flicker on the periphery of your vision, the chill down your neck.

7. The Matthew Swift Novels, Stray Souls, Kate Griffin: These novels aren’t just about London, they want to be London, so viscerally soaked and stinking with the place that you know how Matthew feels to have it in his bloodstream. Griffin’s playing with some of my favourite tropes: psycho-geography and city as biological organism. 

8. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, The Man in the High Castle, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick. PKD never moves far from the nightmare zone; his filthy, hallucinatory dystopias are full of technological bric-a-brac, hostile AIs, and humans drowning in the system. 

9. Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman: A novel about a London below London, a London between-the-cracks riddled with immortality and myth and magic. Gaiman has a knack for the uncanny, for person-shaped monsters with an insidious aura of wrongness. 

10. The Night Watch, Sergei Lukyanenko: A fascinating post-Soviet novel set in a Moscow that is alive and ravenous; where worlds exist behind worlds; where dark and light watch each other and the twilight is a city space where the lines between the good and not-so-good blur and shift, all encompassed by a landscape that can be deadly. Unnerving.

Others: Of course, writers like Charles Dickens and Daniel Defoe and Edgar Allen Poe and Jules Verne and Thomas de Quincey and Emile Zola and Charles Baudelaire have all explored the cities they inhabited as breathing, living things, bleak and bright and singed with flame. 

Theory, etc.

I’d look at these books as good start - Psychogeography, Merlin Coverley. Restless Cities, Matthew Beaumont. This Urban Design Course on Race & Justice, Metabolic Urbanization, Erik Swyngedouw, The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin. London Orbital, Iain Sinclair. Formulary for a New Urbanism, Ivan ChtCheglov, Imaginary Cities, Darran Anderson

Hope this was helpful. Happy reading.