The Urban Paradox Cities in Search of the Future

By 2030, 9 percent of the world’ s population will live in the world’ s 33 largest cities, which will produce 15 percent of global GDP. The capital of cities, the super megacity, will not be in Europe or America, but in Asia. The world’ s most populous city will be Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, which will be home to 35 million people by 2030. Increasingly, cities will be the places where the future of the planet will be worked out, where new social models and attempts at lasting peace will be experimented with, where frontier research will be conducted, and where unprecedented models of cultural cooperation will be developed. The focus will be less on competition than on the exchange of good projects and good information. Just as Barcelona, Turin, Pittsburgh, Lyon, Milan, Istanbul, Tokyo, Wroclaw, and Matera have done. The nine stories in this volume tell of world cities that have overcome crises, adopted innovative strategies and achieved concrete results. But they also tell of the need not to rest on one’ s laurels. A city can never say “ I did it” : a city is a a turtle of extraordinary longevity and beauty, to which no citizen will ever be an Achilles.

is one of the best-known cultural managers in Europe. Director of the Turin International Book Fair from 1993 to 1997, he has been involved in urban development for over 20 years. As an “ urban practitioner” he launched Luci d’ artista and the Murazzi del Po strategy in 1998, directed the strategic plan of Turin from 2000 to 2006, managed the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy from 2007 to 2011, the events of the Italian Pavilion at Expo Milano 2015, and Matera 2019 European Capital of Culture. He is a consultant to numerous Italian and foreign adminis