Where Cities Go To Die: Review of Tony Fry’s Disappearing Cities

Lillian Liao Under Review:Tony Fry. Disappearing Cities. Anthem Press, 2025. What does it mean for a city to vanish from the face of the earth? And just where do cities go to die? These questions are explored in British cultural and design theorist Tony Fry’s Disappearing Cities, a collection of over 50 short stories portraying how cities and their doomed inhabitants manage climate catastrophes. While Fry’s title directly invokes the idea of disappearance, his stories illustrate how cities don’t just “vanish” as if they were swept away to Oz or through a magical looking glass. Rather, they become uninhabitable, leaving behind a trail of destruction that is at once physical, social, emotional, and psychological. In other words, even when its tangible structures still exist, the collective understanding of that place as a “city” has been destroyed. It is this experience that concerns Fry’s narratives: when a city dies, what gets buried with it? Through fictional anecdotes written in a…