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Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities Are Changing the World
The revolutions that have taken place around the world during the last fifty years-the ousting of Marcos and the Shah of Iran; the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe; the end of Apartheid in South Africa and, indeed, the civil rights revolution in America-were fundamentally urban revolutions. They were the revolutions of Manila, Teheran, Gdansk, Leipzig, Berlin, Johannesburg and Detroit, muscular assertions of new classes of city-dwellers intent on ending their marginalization as they struggled to build their new livelihoods, freedoms and communities in cities. In "Welcome to the ""Urban Revolution," Jeb Brugmann argues that the city itself had become our era's medium for revolutionary change: not only political, but technological as well. Though we think of them as a hotbed for poverty and crime, cities are not just a source of problems and conflict. They can also be a source of solutions to the major problems of our day: poverty, social inequality and environmental sustainability. In "Welcome to the Urban Revolution" Brugmann will show what is unique and important about cities and how they grow, the ways global issues are being solved in individual cities, and how real people are living with urban migration day in and day out.
432 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 1, 2009
10 people are currently reading
190 people want to read
About the author
Jeb Brugmann
2 booksFor 25 years Jeb Brugmann has developed strategies for governments, corporations, and international agencies to tackle global issues at the local level. From 1990-2000, he served as founding Secretary General of the international environmental agency for cities, where his initiatives involved thousands of cities in more than 50 countries. A strategy consultant to organizations internationally, he serves is a faculty member of the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership. "
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 30, 2009
One of my new favorites on modern urbanism...truly something I wish everyone would read, its take on the changing urban nature of our world and how to prepare for it provides insights that redefine my goals in going into urban planning.
November 28, 2017
Full Disclosure: My Uncle is the author of this book. That being said, I think this book is remarkable. I found myself deeply caring about the real world issues presented in this book, and I’m thinking of buying this book for my boss as we embark on a major building project. While I previously thought very little on urban design and planning, I now think the topic of utmost importance for communities seeking to benefit its members: real-life people. My only critique is that I wish the book and its concepts were more approachable for everyone as I find the insights in this book worth exploring and discussing by anyone.
December 8, 2025
Read this aloud to my 16 year old son as part of his geography curriculum. It was interesting and thought provoking, but slightly outdated (2009) so we are still on the search for more recent and relevant books about urban development.
October 2, 2009
Initially Brugmann seems to offer a thesis about how the logical outcome of combining an ever-increasing urban majority worldwide with globalized technologies, information networks, and commerce will result in a comprehensive “Citysystem.” “The City” is no longer that place with the Empire State Building, hot dog vendors, and a large Christmas tree, but the place with the Empire State Building, Gherkin, Petronas Towers, and contorted CCTV tower. It also includes Dharavi, Chicago’s Uptown, and whatever hutongs remain after CCTV. Basically the future of The City must interweave the issues and energy found in emergent slums as well as the more pedigreed power-structure represented by governments, corporations, and the elite. We should hope for a workable fusion of bottom-up and top-down strategies in pursuit of an integrated world city.
As much as one is willing to believe the US currently sports a Bos-Wash, or San Franjuana or whatever, this sort of seems like a reasonable, if not creepily idealistic prophesy. As the narrative unfolds, however, Brugmann delves into specific examples and never really returns to the big idea. He discusses some examples of faltering urbanisms – Detroit as the obvious red-headed poster child - and some middling cities (those that have much going for them yet lack a comprehensive, even-keeled organizational structure) like his hometown of Toronto. Then he praises the recent success stories of Curitiba, Barcelona, and Chicago as exemplars of a consciously pluralist approach to building a powerful urban realm. It’s all very interesting yet all very specific. Whereas the strategies and organizational networks developed in these cities (as well as such hyper-shanties like Dharavhi) can inform the way other cities might successfully develop or regenerate themselves, it’s all still rooted in individual places within the last few decades. “You have to keep sucking water up from your own roots,” he quotes the ex-Mayor of Toronto just at the point where I assumed he would return to his master-narrative. He does make a few concluding global references but it seems that he’s satisfied with the earlier inclusions of such worldly things as the internet, the global spread of SARS, and international crime organizations to impel the reader to understand Delhi and Seattle as mere antipodal neighborhoods of the [same:] City. Needless to say, I’m not particularly convinced.
This is all predicated on the well-documented influx of rural migrants to urban locales. Obviously this has been a trend for many centuries, with a startling uptick recently in the developing world. One wonders, however, if there might possibly be a reversal. It’s an inquiry that I can’t dive into here, but it never seems to cross Brugmann’s mind as a possibility despite the fact that Detroit, and Ancient Rome for that matter, might serve as precedents for such a potentiality in some distant or near future. At the very least one could begin to question urban population trends. Obviously Mumbai, Guangzhou, Sao Paolo et. al. have grown tremendously over the last few decades, but I don’t know that forecasts for 2030 or beyond can be deduced from such recent population explosions. Not everyone is going to leave the farm and I’m certain another historical trend is that families in urban milieus tend to have fewer offspring than their rural counterparts. Most Chinese apparently abide by the one-kid-per-couple mandate so how much larger could that nation really grow? A century ago experts were absolutely certain that New Haven, Connecticut would house over a million people by something like 1950. So who knows.
Conversely there’s this nagging statistical problem within the US that, while perhaps not overly-germane to this book, is also not addressed clearly. For instance, where the author can easily speak of tumbleweed-strewn Detroit’s alarming loss of a million inhabitants, one can look at the “Statistical Metropolitan Area” of Detroit in 2000, and find there are well over four million Detroiters! The MSA counts obviously include extremely generous territorial boundaries for each city and I suspect the author wouldn’t intend to present Detroit in this manner as zones of farmland and rural whatnot inevitably get mixed in. However when he points out that over seventy percent of the US is “urban” that’s exactly what that means! Some Connecticut farmer that lives 57 miles outside of Queens is “urban” by this tally.
Lest I lead whomever might have read this far to believe that I’m irritated by Brugmann’s effort, I’m absolutely not. My response is more a generally fatigued, information-era/post-grad school critique of the rather hyperbolic statistical logic that seems to plague every discussion of …everything! If Constantine got a Dell and enlisted some Statistical Institute of Rome to work up a forecast, I’m certain that the calculations would definitively show that the Roman Empire circa. 2009 would be populated by around 6.5 billion people. As to the book generally, I found this to be very readable and quite engaging. I definitely recommend to anyone interested in urban conditions and globalism.
As much as one is willing to believe the US currently sports a Bos-Wash, or San Franjuana or whatever, this sort of seems like a reasonable, if not creepily idealistic prophesy. As the narrative unfolds, however, Brugmann delves into specific examples and never really returns to the big idea. He discusses some examples of faltering urbanisms – Detroit as the obvious red-headed poster child - and some middling cities (those that have much going for them yet lack a comprehensive, even-keeled organizational structure) like his hometown of Toronto. Then he praises the recent success stories of Curitiba, Barcelona, and Chicago as exemplars of a consciously pluralist approach to building a powerful urban realm. It’s all very interesting yet all very specific. Whereas the strategies and organizational networks developed in these cities (as well as such hyper-shanties like Dharavhi) can inform the way other cities might successfully develop or regenerate themselves, it’s all still rooted in individual places within the last few decades. “You have to keep sucking water up from your own roots,” he quotes the ex-Mayor of Toronto just at the point where I assumed he would return to his master-narrative. He does make a few concluding global references but it seems that he’s satisfied with the earlier inclusions of such worldly things as the internet, the global spread of SARS, and international crime organizations to impel the reader to understand Delhi and Seattle as mere antipodal neighborhoods of the [same:] City. Needless to say, I’m not particularly convinced.
This is all predicated on the well-documented influx of rural migrants to urban locales. Obviously this has been a trend for many centuries, with a startling uptick recently in the developing world. One wonders, however, if there might possibly be a reversal. It’s an inquiry that I can’t dive into here, but it never seems to cross Brugmann’s mind as a possibility despite the fact that Detroit, and Ancient Rome for that matter, might serve as precedents for such a potentiality in some distant or near future. At the very least one could begin to question urban population trends. Obviously Mumbai, Guangzhou, Sao Paolo et. al. have grown tremendously over the last few decades, but I don’t know that forecasts for 2030 or beyond can be deduced from such recent population explosions. Not everyone is going to leave the farm and I’m certain another historical trend is that families in urban milieus tend to have fewer offspring than their rural counterparts. Most Chinese apparently abide by the one-kid-per-couple mandate so how much larger could that nation really grow? A century ago experts were absolutely certain that New Haven, Connecticut would house over a million people by something like 1950. So who knows.
Conversely there’s this nagging statistical problem within the US that, while perhaps not overly-germane to this book, is also not addressed clearly. For instance, where the author can easily speak of tumbleweed-strewn Detroit’s alarming loss of a million inhabitants, one can look at the “Statistical Metropolitan Area” of Detroit in 2000, and find there are well over four million Detroiters! The MSA counts obviously include extremely generous territorial boundaries for each city and I suspect the author wouldn’t intend to present Detroit in this manner as zones of farmland and rural whatnot inevitably get mixed in. However when he points out that over seventy percent of the US is “urban” that’s exactly what that means! Some Connecticut farmer that lives 57 miles outside of Queens is “urban” by this tally.
Lest I lead whomever might have read this far to believe that I’m irritated by Brugmann’s effort, I’m absolutely not. My response is more a generally fatigued, information-era/post-grad school critique of the rather hyperbolic statistical logic that seems to plague every discussion of …everything! If Constantine got a Dell and enlisted some Statistical Institute of Rome to work up a forecast, I’m certain that the calculations would definitively show that the Roman Empire circa. 2009 would be populated by around 6.5 billion people. As to the book generally, I found this to be very readable and quite engaging. I definitely recommend to anyone interested in urban conditions and globalism.
July 15, 2012
I had made a promise to myself: no more books with the word "revolution" in the title. You know, unless they were about, like, the American or French or Industrial revolutions.
Then again, I came to think half way through this book, maybe urbanization really is as consequential a factor in human history as, say, the agrarian, scientific, and industrial revolutions. Author Jeb Brugmann makes the case — and does a decent job at it, but he sure could have benefited from a more demanding editor. This book would have been 200% stronger if it were at 25% of its length. If you don't read this book, which would be my recommendation unless you're fascinated by the development of cities, I still would recommend Brugmann's "5 Key Ideas" from the book, which are available on his website.
My favorite parts of the book — when Brugmann travels to cities like Curitiba, Barcelona, and Chicago to better understand what they are doing right from an urban planning perspective — are relatively few and far between. Instead chapters drone on to justify a complicated taxonamony and general theory or urbanism. Still, there was enough of interest to continue reading on. When the book is at its best I began to highlight more text than not. I came away with these new thoughts:
Residents of low-density neighborhoods (i.e.. suburbs) should have to pay more for public services and utilities than residents of high-density neighborhoods.
Slums will continue to grow worldwide. Neither ignoring them nor removing is realistic or sustainable.
Cities tend to be more progressive than rural towns because the most progressive individuals from rural towns head to the cities to escape the restrictions and injustices of most rural towns.
We think of the transatlantic slave trade as having a lasting impact on the history and organization of the larger world, which it did. But when you look at the raw numbers, the 28 - 40 million Africans that were forcefully migrated during the century plus of the slave trade pales in comparison to the number of urban migrants over just the past ten years. An estimated two billion people will migrate from villages to cities in the next 25 years.
Brugmann also argues that urbanization is not given sufficient credit as a factor that has led to democratization over the past 100 years. In fact, I think he even has a chapter titled (ridiculously) "why urbanization makes democracy inevitable." I agree that urbanization is surely one of the many factors that lead to democratization (for example, by allowing large segments of society to gather in public plazas and due to the freedom that anonymity grants). But in the 1980's Latin America was one of the most urban and least democratic regions in the world. Not only that, but Brugmann's three model cities — Curitiba, Barcelona, and Chicago — all developed their urban strategy under very undemocratic circumstances. In fact, good urban planning is sadly often a result of hard-handed leadership like New York under Giuliani and Bloomberg.
For work I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how civic participation affects city governance and urban planning. Brugmann's book gave me much to mull over, but it lacks a cohesive argument and narrative.
Then again, I came to think half way through this book, maybe urbanization really is as consequential a factor in human history as, say, the agrarian, scientific, and industrial revolutions. Author Jeb Brugmann makes the case — and does a decent job at it, but he sure could have benefited from a more demanding editor. This book would have been 200% stronger if it were at 25% of its length. If you don't read this book, which would be my recommendation unless you're fascinated by the development of cities, I still would recommend Brugmann's "5 Key Ideas" from the book, which are available on his website.
My favorite parts of the book — when Brugmann travels to cities like Curitiba, Barcelona, and Chicago to better understand what they are doing right from an urban planning perspective — are relatively few and far between. Instead chapters drone on to justify a complicated taxonamony and general theory or urbanism. Still, there was enough of interest to continue reading on. When the book is at its best I began to highlight more text than not. I came away with these new thoughts:
Residents of low-density neighborhoods (i.e.. suburbs) should have to pay more for public services and utilities than residents of high-density neighborhoods.
Slums will continue to grow worldwide. Neither ignoring them nor removing is realistic or sustainable.
Cities tend to be more progressive than rural towns because the most progressive individuals from rural towns head to the cities to escape the restrictions and injustices of most rural towns.
We think of the transatlantic slave trade as having a lasting impact on the history and organization of the larger world, which it did. But when you look at the raw numbers, the 28 - 40 million Africans that were forcefully migrated during the century plus of the slave trade pales in comparison to the number of urban migrants over just the past ten years. An estimated two billion people will migrate from villages to cities in the next 25 years.
Brugmann also argues that urbanization is not given sufficient credit as a factor that has led to democratization over the past 100 years. In fact, I think he even has a chapter titled (ridiculously) "why urbanization makes democracy inevitable." I agree that urbanization is surely one of the many factors that lead to democratization (for example, by allowing large segments of society to gather in public plazas and due to the freedom that anonymity grants). But in the 1980's Latin America was one of the most urban and least democratic regions in the world. Not only that, but Brugmann's three model cities — Curitiba, Barcelona, and Chicago — all developed their urban strategy under very undemocratic circumstances. In fact, good urban planning is sadly often a result of hard-handed leadership like New York under Giuliani and Bloomberg.
For work I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how civic participation affects city governance and urban planning. Brugmann's book gave me much to mull over, but it lacks a cohesive argument and narrative.
January 29, 2015
After a brief drought of enjoyable reading material I discovered Jeb Brugmann's Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities are Changing the World (New York: Viking, 2009). Listening to the CBC one day in the car I heard Brugmann on The Current discussing his work on urban issues. I was intrigued and ordered his book from my local library. Brugmann's book discusses the developments of cities and urbanism using examples from across the globe and places all these issues in a broad comparative context. In the book he offers a new paradigm for understanding cities and urban environments suggesting that much of the events of the past twenty to thirty years (including the SARS epidemic, the Iranian revolution and the subprime mortgage crisis) can be related to larger developments in urbanism. Although sometimes he reaches too far with his overarching ideology, the ideas he offers are fascinating and intriquing. He offers lucid examples of failures (and successes) to understand the development of cities critiquing traditional approaches that offer only an urban/rural divide and instead suggests The City (a term he uses to describe this new type of development) is the form of future development and that it offers new opportunities and challenges for the future. One of the most interesting approaches is to suggest that traditional views of "slum" developments are an inherently poor places. Instead Brugmann using street-level examples illustrates the energy and agency that can develop from such places. Brugmann's ideas are truly unique and important for anyone seeking to understand urban developments.
November 20, 2010
If there is a take-home message to Welcome to the Urban Revolution it is that if you want to see the forefront of human endeavour (technology, business, art, social interaction) the city is the place to go to find it.
Overall, a very interesting read. Living in Sydney, Australia I'm painfully aware of what Brugmann describes as the Great Opportunities City. I'm going to go back to this for a skim/notes read after the next book on my list (Absolution Gap). My score might go up to 4 stars then, as some bits that I found hard to follow might be clearer on a second reading.
"If hope, potential and opportunity are what we seek in the face of the global challenges we know too well, then we also need to learn how to see the new spaces that these urbanists imagine and to rally with them behind out cities - and the City they are fast becoming."
As such, development of urban areas needs to be managed (so they can develop somewhat organically, within set parameters), but not controlled (from top-down planning by developers and government).
Overall, a very interesting read. Living in Sydney, Australia I'm painfully aware of what Brugmann describes as the Great Opportunities City. I'm going to go back to this for a skim/notes read after the next book on my list (Absolution Gap). My score might go up to 4 stars then, as some bits that I found hard to follow might be clearer on a second reading.
"If hope, potential and opportunity are what we seek in the face of the global challenges we know too well, then we also need to learn how to see the new spaces that these urbanists imagine and to rally with them behind out cities - and the City they are fast becoming."
As such, development of urban areas needs to be managed (so they can develop somewhat organically, within set parameters), but not controlled (from top-down planning by developers and government).
March 22, 2015
As a newcomer who picked up urbanism as a hobby this book is an excellent crash course to building cities and preserving neighborhoods. I learned fascinating details about Chicago especially during the '08 subprime mortgage crisis that I had no idea happened. Former Mayor Daley was brilliant in providing mortgage counselors, getting pastors and other community leaders involved and allowing a variable property tax rate to let underwater homeowners keep their homes.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 10, 2011
An interesting read that gets very drawn-out and repetitive in the middle. Some definitely good takeaway points are to be found, it's just a shame that some may give up reading the book and miss them due to it's receptiveness. If you like urbanization, check this one out. I still enjoyed it overall, but it was a struggle in certain areas.
October 12, 2013
I thought this book was great. It was an easy read and the author lays his points very out in a very easy to comprehend manner.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews