Future Cities

Ivar The Destroyer is dead. Killed by my hands. Now, I hold the throne, and the Berserkers look to me for leadership. But loyalty runs deep-can I really trust the men who followed Ivar's ruthless orders? So much blood has been spilled to end this fight before it ever began, but bigger challenges loom.

A pioneering exploration of four cities where East meets West and past becomes future: St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai. Every month, five million people move from the past to the future. Pouring into developing-world “instant cities” like Dubai and Shenzhen, these urban newcomers confront a modern world cobbled together from fragments of a West they have never seen. Do these fantastical boomtowns, where blueprints spring to life overnight on virgin land, represent the dawning of a brave new world? Or is their vaunted newness a mirage?

No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together". To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it". To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide-ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias.

The land of Jarell's ancestors is still not safe, and he must return if he is to stop the sorcerer Ikala from gaining power. Together with the help of Kimisi and their new ally Bo-de, the trio must journey to a city of clay if they are to find what they need to defeat their enemy.

A tremendous upheaval is coming this century: with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. While we can and should do everything we can to mitigate the impact of climate change, the brutal truth is that huge swathes of the world are becoming uninhabitable. Mass migration will remake the world in the 21st century, either by accident, or design—and as Royal Society Science Prize-winning science journalist Gaia Vince shows us, far better the latter.

An unflinching look at the aspiring city-builders of our smart, mobile, connected future. We live in a world defined by urbanization and digital ubiquity, where mobile broadband connections outnumber fixed ones, machines dominate a new "internet of things," and more people live in cities than in the countryside.

From the essentials of smart home design to advanced topics like AI-driven healthcare, sustainable energy solutions, and immersive entertainment systems, this book offers actionable insights and inspiring case studies to empower you to embrace the future of living. Whether you're a tech-savvy homeowner, an architect, or an enthusiast dreaming of a smarter world, this book provides the knowledge and tools to bring your vision to life. Explore detailed case studies, forward-thinking predictions, and step-by-step guidance to make the smart home of tomorrow a reality today.

"Smart Ecosystems: Integrating Nature and Technology in Future Cities", the latest installment in the acclaimed Building Digital Twin Metaverse Cities series, delivers a visionary blueprint for urban environments of the future—where cutting-edge technology harmonizes with the beauty of nature. In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Samuel Li explores how cities can transition from resource-intensive hubs to regenerative spaces that nurture biodiversity, promote sustainability, and enhance human well-being.

America's most storied urban underdog, Brooklyn has become an internationally recognized brand in recent decades - celebrated and scorned as one of the hippest destinations in the world. In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J. Campanella unearths long-lost threads of the urban past, telling the rich history of the rise, fall, and reinvention of one of the world’s most resurgent cities.

From centres of antiquity like Athens or Rome to modern metropolises like New York or Shanghai, cities throughout history have been the engines of human progress and the epicentres of our greatest achievements. Now, for the first time, more than half of humanity lives in cities, a share that continues to rise. In the developing world, cities are growing at a rate never seen before. In this book, Professor Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin show why making our societies fairer, more cohesive and sustainable must start with our cities.

Over the past 10 years, urban planners, technology companies, and governments have promoted smart cities with a somewhat utopian vision of urban life made knowable and manageable through data collection and analysis. Emerging smart cities have become both crucibles and showrooms for the practical application of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and the integration of big data into everyday life. Are smart cities optimized, sustainable, digitally networked solutions to urban problems? Or are they neoliberal, corporate-controlled, undemocratic non-places?

Baltimore City Public Schools is one of America’s largest and most funded school systems. Yet, historically, it is among the lowest performing. In 2024, despite a $1.7 billion budget, just 10% of students tested proficient in math. Investigative journalist Chris Papst follows the money to uncover why students continue to fail within a school system that’s failing Baltimore. Failure Factory shines a critical light on America’s public education system by exposing what’s really happening inside classrooms and behind administrative doors.

Dickson D. Despommier proposes a visionary yet achievable plan for creating a new, self-sustaining urban landscape. He argues that we can find solutions through the concept of biomimicry: emulating successful strategies found in nature. A better city is possible if we heed the lessons that forests and trees teach about how to store carbon, grow food, collect rainwater, and convert sunlight into energy.

Speculative futures—design approaches that help us visualize new and potential worlds—move us beyond what currently exists into what could one day be. Inspired by art, film, fiction, and industrial design, they use speculation to provoke, imagine, and dream into what lies ahead. Written for futurists, urbanists, and artists looking to enact city-wide transformation—and for listeners at the intersection of disruption, design, innovation, and city living—this book offers creative paths toward urban resilience, using design tools that already exist.

Because Israel has contributed so much to all of us, what was once just an Israelite culture has grown to become what is by and large an inherited world culture. As the scriptures promised to Abraham, "I will make your descendants countless as the dust of the earth; if anyone could count the dust upon the ground, then he could count your descendants." I believe that this scripture does hold true.

It was a Roman historian and writer, St. Augustine, who coined the phrase "City of God" in a book of the very same title. But the city of God that Augustine was referring to was not in Jerusalem. When Augustine wrote his book, it was hundreds of years after the Jewish city of Jerusalem had been overrun and destroyed by the Roman legions; he was writing of Rome as the city of God and the center of the Roman Catholic faith.

After smartphones, smart TVs, smart windows, and other smart products on the horizon, smart cities were the next logical step in trying to create a better, brighter, more sustainable, and economically sound future. A relatively new term, smart cities conjures images of a cooperative, wired, prosperous utopia where citizens of all classes achieve a high quality of life. In this audiobook, we look at the qualities needed for future cities to survive and thrive.

Miami, Florida, is likely to be entirely underwater by the end of this century. Residents are already starting to see the effects of sea level rise today. From sunny day flooding caused by higher tides to a sewer system on the brink of total collapse, the city undeniably lives in a climate changed world. In Disposable City, Miami resident Mario Alejandro Ariza shows us not only what climate change looks like on the ground today, but also what Miami will look like 100 years from now, and how that future has been shaped by the city's racist past and present.

Since cities emerged 10,000 years ago, they have become one of the most impressive artifacts of humanity. But their evolution has been anything but linear - cities have gone through moments of radical change, turning points that redefine their very essence. In this book a renowned architect and urban planner who studies the intersection of cities and technology argues that we are in such a moment. The authors explain some of the forces behind urban change and offer new visions.

Exploring the power of naming to shape experience and our sense of place, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro traces the ways in which native Lenape, Dutch settlers, British invaders, and successive waves of immigrants have left their marks on New York City’s map. He excavates the roots of many names, from Brooklyn to Harlem, that have gained iconic meaning worldwide. He interviews the last living speakers of Lenape, visits the harbor’s forgotten islands, lingers on street corners named for ballplayers and saints, and meets linguists who study the estimated 800 languages now spoken in New York.