Professor Shlomo Angel's new book, Planet of Cities, seems likely to command a place on the authoritative bookshelf of urbanization between Tertius Chandler's Four Thousand Years of Urban Growthand Sir Peter Hall's Cities and Civilization and The Containment of Urban England. Chandler produced the definitive volume of gross population figures for urban areas (cities) over millennia. Angel, takes the subject much further, describing detail how urban areas have grown over the last two centuries, both in population and continuous urban land area. The book focuses principally on population growth, urban spatial expanse, and density. Moreover, Professor Angel develops both a statistical and analytic framework that complements the voluminous work of Peter Hall. Planet of Cities is liberally illustrated, which greatly aids understanding the trends.
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