Lure of the city : from slums to suburbs / edited by Austin Williams

The Civilised City; What is Civilisation?; Defensive Arguments; The Civilising Undercurrent; A Citizen's Agora. NotesFurther Reading; Contributors; Index.

Intro; Title Page; Copyright; Contents; Introduction: The Paradoxical City; The Challenges; Make no Big Plans?; Reasserting Urban Autonomy; Imagining the Future; Making Humanity Visible; Notes; 1. The Dynamic City: Citizens Make Cities; Hongqiao Central Business District; Chinese Urbanisation; Conceptualising The City; The Central Relationship; Expo 2010: Better City, Better Life; Notes; --2. The Emerging City: Africa's Metropolitan Mindset; London: The City Illimitable; Nairobi: The Transient City; The Urban Emergence; The Anti-Modernist Imagination; Slum Tourists; Celebrating Flux; Notes.-- 3. The Crowded City: People on the MoveCities 'Packed to Blackness'; Megacity or Misanthropy?; Rising East; India: A Demographic Dividend, or Time-Bomb?; Slowing Down London; The Irreconcilable City; Notes;-- 4. The Planned City: Make No Little Plans; The Public Sphere; Urban Revolutions; Break with The Past; Modernism's Discontents; Complex Cities; Collaborative Planners; Can We Have Our Public Back Please?; Notes;-- 5. The Historic City: False Urban Memory Syndrome; Urban Memory Theory; The Changing Face of Localism; Modern Man; Memories Reinterpreted; Non-Collective Authority; The Role of Self. Notes6. The Sanitised City: If You've Done Nothing Wrong ... ; Unequal Equity; Past Versus Present; Autonomy; Notes;-- 7. The Eco-City: Utopia, Then and Now; Prefix-Cities; Fewer Choices; Underdeveloped Plans; Don't Mention the Industry; Prometheus Unbound; Positive Development; Notes; --8. The Visionary City: Things Will Endure Less than Us; Modernism's Promise and Promise Denied; Modern Nostalgia; Retreats from Reason; The New 'Visionary' Cities; Reclaiming the Future;

Short, accessibly written essays make the case for cities, arguing that the metropolitan mindset is essential to the struggle for human liberation.