In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs writes: "By its nature, the metropolis provides what could otherwise be obtained only by travelling; namely, the unfamiliar." Growing up in a city that experienced change of seismic proportions between the late 1980s and early 2000s—politically, economically and socially—I saw Moscow's elusive strangeness as indicative of the peculiarities of Russian society at that time, so eager to reinvent itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The multi-location project Image Cities is a visual study of the ever-closer integration of the photographic image and the built environment. In our neoliberal age of networked economic markets and networked images, internationalised global centres of money and culture are becoming increasingly aligned and alike. At the same time, however, these cities try to promote their individuality, often repurposing their particular histories. Moscow promotes itself as a global player in a world economy, yet brands itself through a manipulated iconography of its past. New York, a city profoundly uncomfortable with itself, looks towards its triumphant past and imagined future while ignoring its present problems. Meanwhile, all these cities are moving towards a generic urban landscape of anonymous steel-and-glass architecture, in which homes, offices and shopfronts look and feel the same.
 
 
 
This is a new global order in which old ideas of nationality conflict with the twenty-first-century notion of a borderless economy and transnational culture. Yet those older ideas are now deployed as appealing marketing devices, creating the illusion that these cities somehow remain attractive in their uniqueness rooted in the past. Post-industrial metropolises are living out the prediction made in Jacques Tati's iconic 1967 film PlayTime about the new Paris then emerging. Increasingly unaffordable to live in, new residential buildings are designed to accommodate the wealthy, with block after block of costly tinted-glass apartment cubes matching the glass office towers that form a skyline reminiscent of computer-generated images in futuristic video games. Within this urban landscape are glimpses of the city's past, now reduced to marketing devices. The remaining historic architecture is reinvented as heritage sites, commanding an even higher price.