Desired Landscapes

We all have an idea, when we travel there, of what a particular city is really like, or at least what it should be like: we picture Venice without all the tourists, Paris without the graffiti, London without the painfully-expensive ticket prices on the Tube. But those things are part of the truth of the place, aren’t they? And to deny them is to deny the reality of our lived experience of the world.

Which is where Desired Landscapes comes in.

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At first glance, you might think Desired Landscapes is a travel magazine – a pocket-sized, beautifully-designed one – but this first impression doesn’t do this little reader justice. Desired Landscapes does not concern itself so much with travel as lifestyle, or travel as holiday, but with travel as the human experience of place: observing, capturing and demystifying the intangible effects of a particular place on the human soul and putting them down in essays, stories, pictures and poems.

Each issue presents a selection of cities as seen through the eyes of contributors from all over the world, reading into architectural styles, public transit infrastructures, café cultures and those many things that make up a city, to recreate that urban experience in magazine form.

Natassa Pappa, the founder and editor of Desired Landscapes, was kind enough to guide us through the making of the latest issue, transporting us to Athens, Berlin, Phnom Penh, Casablanca and more fascinating cities around the globe. You can watch the video here…