Excerpt

If you are reading this, you are very likely living in a city. City dwellers are now more than half the world’s population, and this proportion is increasing in every nation, rich and poor, creating for the first time in history a planet of cities.

In light of the many problems of large cities—high costs, crime, pollution, disease, congestion—why are so many people choosing to live in them?

It could be the conveniences and amenities we enjoy only in cities: a library, a hospital, the pleasure of music on the streets, or a great cup of coffee served up by an expert barista.

But it turns out that these are only part of the city’s allure. Research is revealing that cities have a unique transformational power in terms of both individual fulfillment and collective development—by bringing us closer to each other, cities enhance the benefits of our species’ sociality. 

The Nature of Cities

What’s really happening within each city is a massive exchange of information across social and economic networks of people and organizations, all taking place on a complex infrastructural landscape of buildings, roads, pipes, and wires. For the most part there is no maestro; the properties of cities emerge from countless interactions of millions of people, driven by their individual goals and motivations.

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