Metis: Urban Cartographies (2002 Black Dog Publishing Limited, London) by Mark Dorrian and Adrian Hawker is less a conventional architecture book than an experimental exploration of how cities can be understood through mapping, narrative, drawing, and speculation. Rather than presenting fixed master plans, it treats the city as a dynamic field of stories, representations, and possibilities.

The book functions simultaneously as an architectural guidebook and a visual storybook. Readers are led through a series of “urban cartographies” — imaginative mappings that recode familiar urban elements into new relationships. Through projects and drawings based on cities such as Ottawa and Venice, Dorrian and Hawker investigate themes of chance, memory, representation, and what they call the urban imaginary: the ways cities are mentally and culturally constructed as much as physically built.

A central argument is that maps are not neutral tools for recording cities; they actively shape how urban space is perceived and imagined. By combining architectural drawings, diagrams, texts, and speculative proposals, the book demonstrates how alternative mappings can reveal hidden patterns and generate new possibilities for urban design.

In one sentence:
Urban Cartographies is an experimental architectural atlas that uses imaginative mapping and narrative techniques to rethink how cities are represented, understood, and projected into the future.