BOOKS

摘要

The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society, edited by Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic. London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2007 Reviewed by Reinhold MartinrnCities are big. And so they deserve big books, like this one, which runs to 510 lavishly illustrated, large format pages. On some of those pages there are numbers, printed in very large type. These numbers declare, for example, that in 1900 only .4 million people lived in Mexico City's metropolitan zone, but that by 1950 it was 3.1 million and by 2000,19 million. Like those reports of a "population explosion" that so exercised urban planners in the 1960s or the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth of 1972, such enumerations speak of a crisis that is simultaneously infrastructural, ecological, and humanitarian. But unlike the more apocalyptic visionrnthat is offered, say, by Mike Davis in his Planet of Slums (2006), The Endless City seems on the whole convinced that this crisis can be managed, mainly through technical expertise.