Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century

by Leonie Sandercock, Peter Lyssiotis

The 21st century will be the century of multicultural cities, of the struggle for equality and diversity and the struggle against fundamentalism. Cosmopolis II presents a truly global tour of contemporary cities - from Birmingham to Rotterdam, Frankfurt to Berlin, Sydney to Vancouver, and Chicago to East St. Louis. Passionately written and superbly illustrated with a range of specially commissioned images, Cosmopolis II is a visionary book of our urban future.

Genres: Urban Planning, Urbanism, Cities

288 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2003

About the author

Leonie Sandercock (born 1949) is an urban planner and academic focusing on community planning and multiculturalism. She has been teaching at the School of Community & Regional Planning at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, since 2001.

Reviews

[Sekar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century is an excellent reading to understand the nature of modernist urban planning and how it has been crumbling for at least four decades. Sandercock presents a contemporary thinking on planning practice in the multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial cities of the 21st century. This book is written in intricate writing style and illustrated with artistic images. She adopts a literary vocabulary borrowed from Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses to describe the fusion of different cultures, ethnicity, races in an urban scene: mongrelization.

This book is one of compulsory readings for Urban Planning course at Stockholm University. It has been 10 years after its publication in 2003, no wonder if this book is quite rare to find in today's bookstores. But this book is worth to be reprinted as its content is still relevant until now. And I will be looking forward for the next edition, if Sandercock plans to make it...