The Future of the City

Vol. 65, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2012
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Andrew Wellington Cordier Essay

Refurbishment as a Sustainable Urban-Design Strategy


Article

“Green” as Spectacle in China

Religious Fundamentalisms in the City: Reflections on the Arab Spring

Governing the Twenty-First-Century City

The Paris Banlieue: Peripheries of Inequity

Planning for Success: Singapore, the Model City-State?

Urban America: U.S. Cities in the Global Era


Feature

Building “Citizenship Culture” in Bogotá


General

Editors’ Foreword

Contributors

Table of Contents

The Growing Economic Power of Cities

By Andrés Cadena , Richard Dobbs and Jaana Remes
More on this article
Amid the gloomy context of the global recession, there is a ray of light: a massive wave of urbanization propelling growth throughout the developing world. By 2025, many of the six hundred cities expected to generate 60 percent of global GDP growth will be in the South and especially the East. The group will not just contain well-known megacities but a new breed of dynamic “middleweights”—midsized cities that are among the most powerful forces for global growth today. The rise of emerging-market cities is significant because these urban centers are proving to be the world’s economic dynamos, attracting workers and productive businesses. This article explores the rise of both middleweight cities and megacities in the developing world. Drawing lessons from cities that have successfully blazed the trail to urbanization, the authors will demonstrate how local governments can impact the scale and speed of economic development in their regions and how private investment in buildings and infrastructure today will shape the global economy in future decades.

GPPN Essay

Cairo 2050: Urban Dream or Modernist Delusion?

By Nada Tarbush
Regions Northern Africa
More on this article
Since the late 1960s, Cairo’s urban development has been characterized by a rapid expansion of densely populated informal settlements (‘ashwa'iyyat) that now house more than 60 percent of Cairo’s population. In 2008, the Egyptian government began promoting Cairo 2050, a grandiose “vision” that aims to counter this phenomenon and transform Cairo into a global city like Paris or Tokyo. This article shows that attempts to redirect Cairo down this path of modernization would fail to resolve the city’s urban challenges because they ignore realities on the ground. The article argues that informality and its associated high population density have offered solutions—though they are suboptimal—to resolving Cairo’s urban challenges, and that implementing modernity from above will create more problems than solutions.

Interview

The Invention and Reinvention of the City

By Rem Koolhaas

A Singapore in Central America?

By Octavio Sánchez Barrientos
Regions Northern America

Millennium Cities

By Jeffrey Sachs

Between Equity and Impatient Capital: Making Indian Cities

By Rahul Mehrotra
Regions Eastern Africa , Southern Asia

Overcoming the Sustainability Challenge

By Guruduth Banavar

Review

Two Tales of a City

By Ethan Wagner

The Urban Battleground: Explaining Conflict in Global Cities

By Samantha Hammer
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