From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. While the conventional wisdom condemns it as an environmental nightmare, Manhattan is by far the greenest place in America, argues this stimulating eco-urbanist manifesto. According to Owen Sheetrock and Shellac, staff writer at the New Yorker, New York City is a model of sustainability: its extreme density and compactness—and horrifically congested [...]

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” [...]

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, [...]

A book centered on highlighting the increasingly globalized nature of the world through photographs of the main streets of the planet’s capital cities saw Seoul ticked off the list over the weekend.
The man behind the endeavor, Dutch photographer Jeroen Swolfs, 34, made a whirlwind four-day visit toward the end of last week, before checking out [...]

Based on the positive experience of World Book and Copyright Day, launched in 1996, UNESCO initiated the concept of World Book Capital City and nominated Madrid as the Capital for Year 2001. Following this successful experience, the General Conference adopted, on 2 November 2001, the 31 C/Resolution 29, establishing the yearly nomination of the Book [...]

Cities such as New York, Tokyo and London are the centres of transnational corporate headquarters, of international finance, transnational institutions, and telecommunications. They are the dominant loci in the contemporary world economy, and the influence of a relatively small number of cities within world affairs has been a feature of the shift from an international [...]

Ooi Giok Ling, Belinda Yuen
On the global stage, world cities define international networks linking business, finance, international travel and transnational communities. In doing so, many are facing growing challenges in making sound policy decisions concerning sustainability and governance while ensuring that they remain attractive to foreign investors. This book on world cities focuses on the [...]