Endless City

The Endless City is an immense, 6 pound tome produced from the Urban Age Project run by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society. Combining urban the proceedings from international mayoral conferences and years of research, travel and investigation, it profiles six world cities - New York, London, Berlin, Shanghai, Johannesberg and Mexico City - as well as other global urban issues going into the 21st century. It is awesome, and I'm going to be spending much of the summer reading and discussing it. But tonight, I just want to throw this quote up, from the last paragraph of the introduction:

"... [B]eneath the skin of at least these six world cities lie deep connections between social cohesion and built form, between sustainibility and density, between public transportation and social justice, between public space and tolerance, and between good governance and good cities that matter to the way urban citizens live their lives. Perhaps moreso than ever before, the shape of cities, how much land they occupy, how much energy they consume, how their transport infrastructure is organized and where people are housed - in remote, segregated environments behind walls or in integrated neighborhoods close to jobs, facilities, and transport - all effect the environmental, economic, and social sustainability of global society. One of the overriding realizations of the urban age is that cities are not just concentrations of problems - which they are - but that they are also where problems can be solved."

Words for any urban planner to live by.