"This is a book about cities, a topic that seems familiar enough but that most of us have not considered in any great depth. There are plenty of reasons why we should. We can estimate statistically that most of you live or have lived in a city or metropolitan area; more than half of the worlds population now lives in cities (see Figure 1.1). Cities are also the centers of the worlds economy. They are not only sites of production, where industries cluster, but also the central nodes in service and distribution networks and the command points from which economic decisions are made. Across the globe, wealth is already overwhelmingly generated, and spent, in cities (see Table 1.1).

But cities are also sites of profound environmental challenges and social problems ranging from pronounced poverty and uneven access to the most basic of human necessities, to crime, violence, and even warfare. We would like to draw this attention, at the very outset, to the much faster pace of urbanization and much larger scale of cities in developing countries, which account for the overwhelming shares of the worlds urban growth, energy consumption, and needed social services. Without a doubt, cities deserve our attention now more than ever"-- Provided by publisher.