New open access book available
Urban Planet
Our urban planet. In the coming decades our cities around the world will grow by 2.6 billion more people. “Global urbanization promises better services, stronger economies, and more connections; it also carries risks and unforeseeable consequences”. This sentence draws the reader into the new book, Urban Planet, launching today.
The authors make the journey to the city more legible, highlighting the hopes and hindrances its brings, and the need for a parallel evolution of our science and systems if we are to reap the rewards of the great urban trek that we are now on.
100 contributors from research and practice
Urban Planet brings together scholars and thought leaders from a diverse range of disciplines: from sociology and political science to evolutionary biology, geography, economics, and engineering.
It includes provocations from diverse practitioner communities, whose voices are often neglected. The book sets out an ambitious enterprise “These urban stakeholders are critical, because ours is a book that aspires to make a difference in the real world of city building, city renovation, and city invention. To do so, the ideas of academics and thought leaders are paralleled by voices on the front lines of urban development and change – by stakeholders such as journalists, artists, designers, architects, landscape archi¬tects, activists, youth, and urban practitioners from city governments to civil society – whose perspectives are typically left out of academic books.”.
This large-scale undertaking with over 100 contributors is the result of a collaborative project within Future Earth. Centre Director, Professor David Simon, is an editor and co-author of two chapters on Rethinking Urban Sustainability and Resilience and The UN, the Urban Sustainable Development Goal, and the New Urban Agenda and contributor to the synthesis New Integrated Urban Knowledge for the Cities We Want.
Prominent thought leaders
The other editors includes prominent thought leaders, Thomas Elmqvist, Stockholm Resilience Centre and Mistra Urban Futures Board member, Xuemei Bai, Australian National University, Niki Frantzeskaki, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Corrie Griffith, Arizona State University, David Maddox, The Nature of Cities (New York), Timon McPhearson, The New School, Susan Parnell, University of Bristol & University of Cape Town, Patricia Romero-Lankao, National Center for Atmospheric Research, David Simon, Mistra Urban Futures and Mark Watkins, Arizona State University.
Open Access
This title is published by Cambridge University Press and available on Open Access. It’s launching this week at ICLEI’s Resilient Cities 2018 in Bonn. Find reviews by Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris and Greg Clark, CBE, Urban Innovation Centre, London here.
Questions?
David Simon, david.simon@chalmers.se
