Book of the Moment

Phaidon's The Endless City bills itself as "an authoritative and visually rich survey of the contemporary city," the favorite subject of many thinkers today.

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Edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, the sizable book (approx. 9" square, 2" thick and just over 5 pounds) is an "unparalleled study of the growth of six of the World’s international cities (New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Berlin), encompassing key structural, economic and social factors."

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The book comes out of "a sequence of six conferences held by influential figures in the field of urban development and its related disciplines," organized by The Urban Age Project, the London School of Economics (LSE), and the Alfred Herrhausen Society.

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A sneak peek of the book shows presentations of the six cities with text, images, and statistics; data visualizations comparing the six cities; writings on issues facing these and other cities; projects exploring new urban thinking; and a brief summation that presents snippets from the six conferences.

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Here's just a sampling of the 30+ contributors:
:: Guy Battle (Battle McCarthy)
:: José Castillo (Arquitectura 911SC)
:: Jacques Herzog (Herzog & de Meuron)
:: Rem Koolhaas (OMA)
:: Enrique Peñalosa (Bogotá, Colombia)
:: Saskia Sassen (Columbia University)
:: Richard Sennett (LSE and MIT)
:: Ed Soja (UCLA and LSE)
:: Alejandro Zaera Polo (Foreign Office Architects)

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