Machine generated contents note: pt. 1 State Projects of Legibility and Simplification -- ch. 1 Nature and Space -- ch. 2 Cities, People, and Language -- pt. 2 Transforming Visions -- ch. 3 Authoritarian High Modernism -- ch. 4 The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique -- ch. 5 The Revolutionary Party: A Plan and a Diagnosis -- pt. 3 The Social Engineering of Rural Settlement and Production -- ch. 6 Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams -- ch. 7 Compulsory Villagization in Tanzania: Aesthetics and Miniaturization -- ch. 8 Taming Nature: An Agriculture of Legibility and Simplicity -- pt. 4 The Missing Link -- ch. 9 Thin Simplifications and Practical Knowledge: Metis -- ch. 10 Conclusion.

"Hailed as 'a magisterial critique of top-down social planning' by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail--sometimes catastrophically--in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters." -- Provided by publisher.