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JEB BRUGMANN
“As of this decade, more than half the earth’s population lives in cities; our
world is not just globalized, but urbanized. This powerful reappraisal draws
on two decades of fieldwork and reserach to show how the metropolis has
become a medium for revolutionary social change. Not just political up-
heaval and business growth but technological, economic, and cultural inno-
vations are forged in our urban centers. From Chicago to Mumbai, in every
corner of the world, the city is now society’s laboratory, brewing potential
solutions to poverty, inequality, and sustainability. Bridging urban studies,
economics, and sociology, Jeb Brugmann’s Welcome to the Ubran Revolu-
tion turns traditional urbanism on its head and offers an inspiring new way
of understanding our cities.”
OVERVIEW
1. proposing ideas for the future development of cities
2. understanding cities and systems
Key Concepts:
small events in one city will affect international events because of the citysystem
(the interconnectivity of global cities)
new global urbanism
valued gained from urban environments
bottom-up activism
globalization is best looked at from a local scale
“grow organically”
“trial-and-error”
urban individualism
Global Problems:
Poverty
Marginalization
Conflict
Environmental Decline
CONTENTS
“...the urbanized part of the planet, which counts 3.5 billion residents and nearly two hundred metropolitan areas
with more than two million people...” (4).
“The evolution of individual cities into a city system, which I call the City, has radically changed the relationship be-
tween local and global affairs. Through the City, local conditions and events...are amplified into global events and
accelerated into global trends...” (5).
“...cities (are) having direct relationships with each other independent of relations between nations...” (11).
Whereas global affairs have always had impacts on local systems; local affairs now also have global impacts.
2 The Improbable Life of an Urban Patch
Deciphering the Hidden Logic of Global Urban Growth
Urban Advantage
Economies of:
density (increases efficiency)
scale (increases the volume of an opportunity)
association (collaborative)
extension (to other cities)
“...use technologies to link the unique advantages of different cities to create whole new strat
egies for advantage in the world” (28).
“Globalization is this process of developing new advantage from the unique economics of an extended group of cit-
ies - from their spatial urban affairs, therefore, are more (not less) important in the global era. They define the poten-
tial and the burdens of the expanding City” (28).
6 What We Can Learn from the Way Migrants Build Their Cities
Buildings, City Models, and Citysystems
2 Citysystems
3 City Models
We will see, “...two billion more people joining the world’s cities by 2035...” (110).
6 What We Can Learn from the Way Migrants Build Their Cities
Buildings, City Models, and Citysystems
“...each incremental addition to the city is designed for the tactical purposes of individual users...” (103).
without relations to others
“...this type of growth does not create any purposeful nature for the city...” (103).
individual purposes
6 What We Can Learn from the Way Migrants Build Their Cities
Buildings, City Models, and Citysystems
2 Citysystems
urbanism
community advantage
enhances the city’s utility, efficiency, productivity, emotional benefit “sense of place”
3 City Models
cost-optimized
compartmentalization of cities
“Master planning can achieve great social purposes when the dogmas of planners or architects about
the ‘right’ or ‘best’ city are outweighed by deep insight about the city’s users and their values and strate
gies...” (110).
“Architects, engineers, planners, and developers play roles along the way, but they
can’t design citysystems alone... A citysystem has to be designed and brought to life by
the community of people who will use it as a hyper-productive system to achieve their
own ambitious common purpose. The citysystem is the most potent way to build a city
to gain strategic advantage in an urbanizing world because it is the product of a com-
munity, rich or poor, that has mastered a very robust practice of urbanism” (107).
8 Cities of Crisis
Sources of Global Vulnerability
the constant chain of negative effects from every possible source
cities without collaboration: the inability to cocreate a new urbanism
diseases energy
floods economics
To aliviate crisis: create a new urbanism don’t imitate models of other cities
“But to overcome the impasse, space must be created for more innovative design. In cities, design is the method
that makes alignment of urban strategies possible” (155).
there is no urbanism
no alliance of interests
imitate global models rather than building on their city’s history and uniquiness
lacks a strategy
only develops by negotiating deal by deal
11 The Strategic City
From Global Burden to Global Solution