Age of the City: How Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together

“Age of the City” is a book about the challenges facing cities worldwide and the strengths cities can draw on to meet these challenges, which include climate change, rising inequality and the problems of a globalized, post-industrial economy.

Ian Goldin is a professor of globalization and development at Oxford University in England. Tom Lee-Devlin is a writer for The Economist, the British business magazine.

The big ideas for Urban Atlanta:

1. Cities have many strengths, but the most important is their capacity for creative collaboration by putting many minds, resources and approaches to work in solving difficult problems.
2. Talented leaders solve complex problems by viewing them as potential opportunities. Example: In Urban Atlanta, hybrid work schedules are seen as a threat to cities. A talented leader would ask, what can we do to make hybrid work an asset for urban places?
3. One of Urban Atlanta’s greatest problems today is inequality and segregation. As the book suggests, the answer lies in building mixed-income neighborhoods. Good news: We have examples in Atlanta of mixed-income communities that work.
4. Another difficult problem for Urban Atlanta is transit. We could create transit that works well for our region if we put many minds, resources and approaches to work in search of it.