Future Cities

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.

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.

Brought to you by Penguin. WINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY TRIVEDI SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2024 ONE OF THE TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW SCIENTIST BEST SCIENCE BOOKS OF THE YEAR GUARDIAN BEST SCIENCE AND NATURE BOOK 2024 A HUGO AWARD WINNER FOR BEST RELATED WORK 2024 THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER From the...

"A casually wondrous experience; it made me feel like the city was unfolding beneath my feet.” —Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror In place-names lie stories. That’s the truth that animates this fascinating journey through the names of New York City’s streets and parks, boroughs...

We have released the genie from the bottle: climate change is coming, and there's no stopping it. The question, according to Matthew Kahn, is not how were going to avoid a hotter future but how were going to adapt to it. In Climatopolis, Kahn, one of the worlds foremost experts on the economics of the environment, argues that cities and regions will adapt to rising temperatures over time, slowly transforming our everyday lives.

The year is 2381. The place is Urban Monad 116 of the constellation Chippitts. The population of this one-thousand storey super-structure is 800,000+ and always growing. After two centuries of ruthless, selective breeding, the essence of life is to be blessworthy and to multiply; to afford one's neighbours any type of sexual fulfilment and, above all, to avoid the evil of frustration. But, within this seemingly blissful vertical world there are individuals who feel such perverse desires as a longing for privacy, a wish to descend from the heights, to walk on earth and bask in the sunshine.

A deeply reported personal investigation by a Miami journalist examines the present and future effects of climate change in the Magic City -- a watery harbinger for coastal cities worldwide. Miami, Florida, is likely to be entirely underwater by the end of this century. Residents are already...

One of The New Yorker's Best Books of the Year 'A finely drawn portrait of the kind of friendship we rarely see in contemporary fiction' - The Guardian 'Impressive and sophisticated' - The Daily Telegraph How much knowledge do you need in order to know someone? As her grandmother is dying...

An elemental witch and her shieldmaiden navigate a dangerous world of forgotten myth and deep magic in the second volume of New York Times bestselling author Lilith Saintcrow’s sweeping Norse-inspired epic fantasy series. Solveig and her shieldmaiden have finally made it to Waterstone, a...

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.

Bloomsbury presents Age of the City by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin, read by Nathaniel Priestley. One of the Financial Times' Best Economics Books of 2023 Visionary Oxford professor Ian Goldin and The Economist's Tom Lee-Devlin show why the city is where the battles of inequality, social...

Pre-order Simon Reynold's forthcoming Still in a Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers, and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984-1994, publishing June 2026. 'A captivating celebration of the music that pushes us forward' RECORD COLLECTOR Futuromania is a celebration of music that feels like a taste of tomorrow...

A novel about an unlikely pair of lonely outsiders--one human, one AI--on an adventure to save the great American city of Metropolis written by "one of the most exciting new voices in fiction" (Charles Yu) *Named one of the best books of the month by Library Journal ("Debut of the Month"), The...

In an ocean of weightless air where sunlight has never been seen, only the running lights of the city of Pacquaea glitter in the dark. One woman, Leal Hieronyma Maspeth, lives and dreams of love among the gaslit streets and cafés. And somewhere in the abyss of wind and twisted cloud through which Pacquaea eternally falls, a great voice has begun speaking. As its cold words reach from space to the city walls—and as outlying towns and travelers' ships start to mysteriously disappear—only Leal has the courage to try to understand the message thundering from the distance.

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.

Global war devastated the environment, a zombie-like plague wiped out much of humanity, and civilization as we once understood it came to a standstill. But that was a thousand years ago, and the world is now a very different place. Conflict between city states is constant, superstition is rife...

How the emerging field of speculative futures can help us dream--and build--better, sustainable, and more equitable cities for everyone. Speculative futures--design approaches that help us visualize new and potential worlds--move us beyond what currently exists into what could one day be...

'Mind-shifting, heart-lifting' ISABELLA TREE 'Inspiring and essential' ALASTAIR HUMPHREYS 'As entertaining as it is enlightening' INDEPENDENT The majority of the world now lives in some form of urban environment. But as the human footprint of brick, concrete and metal expands, our proximity to...

From the internationally bestselling, Man Booker Prize-longlisted Siri Hustvedt comes a provocative, exuberant novel about time, desire, memory and the imagination, which tells the story of a young Midwestern woman's first year in New York in the late 1970s and her obsession with her mysterious...