“The Age of Megacities”, an engaging Esri project, maps the growth of ten global megacities by examining the expanding urban footprint of each city over the past 100 years. The Esri team has selected 10 international cities to show the wind-whistling clip of modern development. Continue reading →

The coming decades will see the next wave of mass migration to cities, especially in Asia and Africa, according to Prof. Razeen Sally, visiting associate professor at National University of Singapore. The World Economic Forum City Competitiveness Report identifies six megatrends that are likely to determine how well cities do in the future and in one of his latest articles Prof. Razeen Sally presents briefly the following six megatrends: Continue reading →

This interactive data visual illustrates the scale and speed of urban transformation that research by the International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED) has sought to document and describe. A guide to its use can be found underneath the visual. Continue reading →

This book examines the ways in which urban dwellers–who used to be merely “clients” of development–are taking ownership of their neighborhoods. Through five cases in five cities (Amsterdam, Moscow, New York, Hong Kong, Taipei), different dynamics and intensities of citizen-driven urban redevelopment processes are examined, with the goal of providing new recommendations and methods that respond to community needs and individual aspirations. Continue reading →

Neal Peirce wrote this week (Citiscope) about the new standard to measure the performance of cities. The new standard, known as ISO 37120, was produced by the International Organisation for Standardisation Continue reading →

The report “A Civil Economy for Manchester: A new vision of an economic framework for the city” explores how it could be build a civil economy in Manchester and the role of social capital in that. At the heart of the local civil economy idea is a need for a deeper set of collaboration and mutual coexistence across all three sectors: public (local state), private and the social sector. Continue reading →

A new report, from Grosvenor scores 50 cities both for their “vulnerability” (for example, to climate change) and their “adaptive capacity” (their ability to react), producing an overall “resilience” ranking. The rankings are based on five categories of vulnerability (climate, environment, resources, infrastructure, and community) and five categories of adaptability (governance, institutions, technical capacity, planning systems, and funding structures). Continue reading →