Living in the Endless City

This book investigates the links between the physical and the social in cities. It is not an academic exercise, but one that stems from a sense of urgency that something needs to be done to address the dynamics of urban change described by the statistics on the front cover. With half of the seven billion people on earth living in cities, a substantial proportion of global GDP will be invested in energy and resources to accommodate a mass of new city dwellers over the next decades.1 The form of this new wave of urban construction and the shape of our cities will have profound impacts on the ecological balance of the planet and the human conditions of people growing up and growing old in cities. That is why cities, and their design, matter. 

A sequel to The Endless City, this book adds to the global debate on the future of cities with new research on Mumbai, São Paulo and Istanbul, yet builds on the accumulated knowledge and experiences of six other cities – New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Berlin. 8 It is a distillation of more than five years of collaborative work that has brought together several hundred people who perhaps, before the Urban Age project, did not see themselves as ‘urbanists’ per se. Traffic engineers, mayors, criminologists, architects, sociologists, planners … perhaps, but not urbanists.

The book is divided into three sections: ‘Cities’ contains visual essays and analytic texts which mirror the content of Urban Age conferences held in the three core cities from 2007 to 2009; ‘Data’ is a compendium of vital statistics of all nine Urban Age cities, accompanied by a critical narrative and the results of opinion polls carried out among local residents; ‘Reflections’ collects the thoughts of scholars and practitioners who have followed our project, offering their perspectives on the lessons learnt for the twenty-first-century city.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
• Foreword  
Wolfgang Nowak
• Living in the Urban Age
Ricky Burdett and Philipp Rode
• The Architecture of the Endless City  
Deyan Sudjic
• The Economies of Cities 
Saskia Sassen

CITIES

• MUMBAI
Democracy and Self-Interest, by K. C. Sivaramakrishnan
A Matter of People, by Darryl D’Monte
Looking for the Bird of Gold, by Suketu Mehta
The Static and the Kinetic, by Rahul Mehrotra
The Long View, by Charles Correa
Beyond the Maximum, by Geetam Tiwari
•SÃO PAULO
The Urban Giant, by Deyan Sudjic
Filling the Political Vacuum, by Jeroen Klink
The Cultures of the Metropolis, by Gareth A. Jones
Looking for a Shared Identity, by José de Souza Martins
Worlds Set Apart, by Teresa Caldeira
The Mirage and Its Limits, by Raul Juste Lores
Living on the Edge, by Fernando de Mello Franco
• ISTANBUL
The City Too Big to Fail, by Deyan Sudjic
Bridging Histories, by İlhan Tekeli
The Hinge City, by Richard Sennett
It’s Istanbul (not Globalization), by Hashim Sarkis
The Violence of Change, by Asu Aksoy
The Contours of Concrete, by Ömer Kanıpak
Measuring Success, by Çağlar Keyder 

DATA
• Vital Statistics: Nine Cities Compared
• Understanding the Numbers  
Justin McGuirk
• Understanding What People Think
Tony Travers

REFLECTIONS
• Boundaries and Borders, by Richard Sennett
• No Frills and Bare Life, by Alejandro Zaera-Polo
• City Solutions to Global Problems, by Nicholas Stern, Dimitri Zenghelis and Philipp Rode
• Democracy and Governance, by Gerald E. Frug
• The Urban Earthquake, by Anthony Williams
• Uneven Landscapes, by Sophie Body-Gendrot
• From Utopia to Youtopia, by Alejandro Aravena
• Surviving in an Urban Age, by David Satterthwaite
• Getting to Work, by Fabio Casiroli
• Facing the Metro Challenge, by Bruce Katz
• On the Ground, by Adam Kaasa with Marcos Rosa and Priya Shankar

INDEX 
• Notes
• Credits
• Contributors
• Urban Age Conference Participants
• Index
• Editors’ Acknowledgments 

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Ricky Burdett is Professor of Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and director of LSE Cities and the Urban Age programme. He is a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. He was Chief Adviser on Architecture and Urbanism for the London 2012 Olympics and now advises the Olympic Legacy Park Company. 
Deyan Sudjic is Director of the Design Museum in London. Founded in 1989, the Design Museum is the UK's cultural champion of design and has won international acclaim for exhibitions of modern design history and contemporary design. From 2000 to 2004 he was Editor of Domus, the international magazine of art, architecture and design, and he was Founding Editor of Blueprint magazine from 1983 to 1996. Before joining the Design Museum in August 2006, Deyan Sudjic was Dean of the Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design at Kingston University, Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art, and the Observer design and architecture writer.