Building more resilient and prosperous cities is perhaps the grandest of the grand challenges facing the world today. By now, virtually all urbanists know that half the world's population lives in urban areas, a figure than will likely rise to 75 percent by 2100, when 7.5 to 8.8 billion people will live in cities. In his just-released Planet of Cities, Shlomo Angel argues that urban policy-makers and planners must do more to meet the challenge of urbanization. Angel, who is a member of the Urbanization Project at New York University and who conducted his research as a visiting fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, provides a detailed, data-driven analysis filled with maps of world urbanization patterns, as well as charts and tables documenting the challenges facing global cities. He took time out from his busy schedule to talk to Atlantic Cities about the key challenges facing our increasingly urban world.
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