Welcome To The Urban Revolution

What does it mean that half the world's population now lives in cities? How do global health, financial, and environmental crises arise from local approaches to urban development? Why do some cities achieve their ambitious development plans, while most others—even the wealthiest cities—so often fail? Where do Indian cities stand?  Jeb Brugmann shows how India's continued rise is inextricably linked to its success in becoming an urban nation.  Drawing on two decades of fieldwork he takes his readers on a street-level tour of the world's cities, challenging conventional thinking about globalization and revealing cities as the medium for revolutionary change. Brugmann argues that the 21st century's greatest challenges can—and must—be met through improved approaches to city building. Over the next 30 years, India's urban population will double. In ten years, some 20 million new urban migrants, largely poor, will join the 62 million slum dwellers in India today. The country's basic productivity, economic efficiency, and political stability, he explains, depends upon a renewal of Indian forms of urbanism, which cannot be substituted with imported designs and master planning schemes for the 'next Shanghai.' Exploring the successes of cities like Barcelona, Chicago, Vancouver, and Brazil's Curitiba, Brugmann shows how the world's most progressive cities develop their own "practices of urbanism," from the sidewalk up. These local urbanisms—ways of designing, governing, and living in cities that align competing interests behind common purposes—are what India needs today to manage its entry into the world's first urban century.