Recognizing that our civic responsibilities towards our environments have drastically increased, Visionary Cities ambitiously sets the agenda for the city of the future. Amid crippling bureaucracies and economic crises, present-day thinking on city design remains woefully inadequate, and this first publication in NAi´s Future Cities Series announces 12 civic issues that are in need of transformation through the researches of The Why Factory, a global urban-studies thinktank operated in part by the Delft University of Technology. These issues include: "The Solitary (Our Dreams are Undermining the City)"; "The Iconic (Our Idols Have Been Compromised)"; "The Fun (We Are Having Too Much Fun)"; "The Cautious (Being Careful Is Killing Us)"; "The Poor (Slums Are Growing Bigger Than The Cities They Are Part Of"; and "The Future (Our Future Is Being Imagined Without Us)." A howl against civic impotence and the apathy of citizens in the face of incompetence and decay, Visionary Cities makes a manifesto of these and other topics to loudly demand large-scale change on a collective rather than individual level. In an afterword, Winy Maas, of the innovative Dutch architecture firm MVRDV, argues that architecture possesses a visionary dimension waiting to be applied to the cities of the future.