The City and The City and The City | The Global Sociology Blog. Bad pun, I know (great book though) One does not have to be an expert on Saskia Sassen to know that the city is at the heart of social change in the age of globalization, from global cities to planet of slums, a great deal of research has focused on how cities promote, or adapt to, social change and how cities are hubs of global social dynamics of class, inequalities, gender and ecology. For instance, take this first item on the rise of “slow cities”: “La municipalité est la première de France à adhérer à Cittaslow, le réseau international des “villes lentes”.
Inspiré du slow food, le mouvement est né en Italie en 1999 et promeut une gestion municipale centrée sur la qualité de vie, l’économie de proximité, le respect des paysages…, en réaction aux zones commerciales et industrielles, à l’étalement pavillonnaire et au tout-voiture devenus l’ordinaire d’un urbanisme débridé.Cette révolution tranquille compte de plus en plus de partisans. “There’s a new dimension in town. By Century’s End We Will be an Entirely Urban Species | Doug Saunders. My cover story for The Spectator. This is an introduction to one of the arguments in my new book Arrival City. Doug Saunders has visited 30 villages and cities on five continents to explore the great irreversible migration: from the countryside to vast megacities. This is the single most important change mankind faces Chongqing is a dense and smoky inland city, the heavy-industry, high-rise home to over 30 million people.
It is to China what Chicago was to 20th-century America, or Manchester to 19th-century England, and it’s growing at an extraordinary rate. I met Mr and Mrs Zhang on the day they first arrived in Chongqing from their rural village. The Zhangs are the archetypal people of the 21st century, and we ignore their story at our peril. The final great migration began in the developing world after the Second World War, and it is just reaching its peak now. It’s a great wave that will irreversibly shift the poorest two-thirds of the world to cities. When will the population peak? Doug Saunders (DougSaunders)