MANILA, Philippines—Manila is among the world’s cheapest cities but is also one of those that pay the lowest hourly wages, according to a study comparing the purchasing power of 73 cities around the globe.
via Manila among world’s cheapest cities–UBS – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos.

Sanaa, 50 years ago a sleepy, walled town of perhaps 50,000, is among the world’s fastest-growing cities, with a population exploding at an estimated 8 percent a year, according to the World Bank, of which 5 percent is due to rural migration.
via Water crisis threatens Yemen’s swelling population | Green Business | Reuters .

SYDNEY – The Indian city of Udaipur, known as the “Venice of the East,” was voted the world’s best city for travellers in 2009 in an online poll by Travel + Leisure magazine, trumping last year’s winner Bangkok.
via Udaipur, India, voted world’s best city in travel poll .

Greetings from “America’s Most Livable City!” (According to Places Rated Almanac and the Economist.)
Tired of hearing that yet? Well, with the eyes of the world briefly upon us next month for the Group of 20 economic summit, that vague, curiously elastic adjective “livable” will likely be trotted out again and again, as journalists attempt to [...]

The world is on a path of “blind urbanization.” And the issue’s not just in sheer numbers, the amazing country-to-town migration that last year pushed cities to a majority of mankind, roughly 3.4 billion inhabitants with an added 2.3 billion predicted for 2040.
Rather, writes Jeb Brugmann in his new book, “Welcome to the Urban Revolution” [...]

Which cities will out-perform economically & socially based on change trends? These are the #Innovation75 – the 2thinknow NEXUS & HUB Innovation Cities for 2009 – key city destinations for economic & social out-performance globally emerging from recession, ranked based on 2thinknow’s leading innovation analysis.
via NEXUS & HUB Innovation Cities Index 2009 Ranking Innovation>75 – [...]

Condensing centuries of history into one volume, Cities of the World traces the historic form and special character of the world’s greatest cities through a breathtaking collection of maps and panoramic views. Peter Whitfield focuses on more than sixty cities—from Athens to Brasilia, Washington to Moscow, San Francisco to Saigon, and Venice to Lhasa. He [...]

The 21st century is the Century of the City. Half of humanity now lives in cities, and within the next two decades, 60 per cent of the world’s people will reside in urban areas. How can city planners and policymakers harmonize the various interests, diversity and inherent contradictions within cities? What ingredients are needed to [...]

Cities around the world are experiencing profound economic and social change as they seek to compete in a globalizing world. “Global Metropolitan” seeks to explain such changes. It explores how the discourse of globalizing has become a major narrative in the restructuring of cities around the world. It illustrates how a similar range of globalizing [...]

“The whole world can be found in this city. . . .”
–from the Preface
Fifty years ago, New York City had only a handful of ethnic groups. Today, the whole world can be found within the city’s five boroughs–and celebrated New York Times reporter Joseph Berger sets out to discover it, bringing alive the sights, smells, [...]