Author Archive

This brochure is a prospectus for one of the main scientific themes of the International Year of Planet Earth 2005. It was published a few years ago but it still provides a good overview of some facts about megacities. [issuu width=420 height=297 backgroundColor=%23222222 documentId=120315104055-9230c72a625c4f08a05624dbd2b9371a name=megacities_-_our_global_urban_future username=futurechallenges tag=cities unit=px id=a86bfa5e-250a-3f05-40a5-f5d0bc50cd8a v=2]

Thomas Friedman has argued in The World is Flat that those who deny rapid globalizationwill not survive in the global economy. In this paper the authors critically discuss Friedman’s views and highlight the new globalization driven by outsourcing and vertical specialization. Second, they argue that Friedman pays insufficient attention to […]

Oil‐rich
 Abu
 Dhabi 
is 
building 
a 
green
 metropolis.
 Should
 the
 rest
 of
 the
 world 
care? “If 
the 
Masdar 
project 
doesn’t
 justify 
itself 
financially, 
it
 could 
indeed
 be 
just
 a
 green
 playground 
for
 the 
rich, 
an 
environmental
 theme
 park 
that 
is
largely 
irrelevant 
for 
the 
development
 of
 sustainable 
technology 
on
 a
 broader
 […]

“China’s economic success over the last 20-30 years has been accompanied by rapid urbanisation based mainly on rural-to-urban migration flows. Many observers expect highspeed urbanisation and massive population redistribution to continue for another one or two decades. Nevertheless, China seeks and claims to be pursuing a process of urbanisation that […]

“The expression creative city is on everyone‟s lips. If there has been talk of a „Renaissance in cities‟ since the 1990s, then at the interface of political, media and social science debates, this is regularly linked with the concept of the „creative city‟. From the widely discussed revitalisation of Berlin‟s […]