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Ramya Swayamprakash, The Rise of the City: Spatial Dynamics in the Urban Century (New Horizons in Regional Science series), Science and Public Policy, Volume 44, Issue 3, June 2017, Pages 429–431, https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scw060
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Our rapidly urbanizing world presents a challenge to researchers. The traditional analytical perspective has focused on cities as externality-driven economic entities. Instead, renewed interest in cities (especially megacities) has undertaken a more symbiotic interpretation of cities as powerhouses of social and economic capital which are able to generate wealth and well-being at local, regional and national scales. Thus cities can no longer be considered to be ‘problem issues’. If anything they are new opportunity creators in an open global socio-economic system. It is against this backdrop that Karima Kourtit, Peter Nikamp and Roger Stough have edited The Rise of the City: Spatial Dynamics in the Urban Century, offering a systematic and multi-faceted perspective on urban dynamics in an effort to enable a better comprehension of the complexities of the ‘urban century’. The book is laid out in three thematic categories that investigate the following three questions. Are cities great places for innovation and knowledge creation? How do cities foster (or not) innovation and/or entrepreneurship? What lessons does the creation of sustainable urban infrastructure in certain cities hold? Offering case studies from across the world, the book is an important starting point for innovative thinking on urban areas, especially for urban planners and economists.