The Woodrow Wilson Center Press

More and more of the world's people live in urban areas, which share the same problems: unemployment, corroding infrastructure, deteriorating environment, a collapsing social compact, and weakening institutions. To ask why this is happening and what can be done, twenty-two leading social scientists and experienced public officials have pooled their experience and their research in preparation for the June 1996 United Nations conference on human settlement in Istanbul. Their collaborative effort is published in Preparing for the Urban Future: Global Pressures and Local Forces.

The contributors find commonalities in the globalized economy in which all cities compete and in the mixes of squalor and splendor found in urban environments east and west, north and south. But common, too, in these accounts, are local, rather than national, solutions to urban challenges, which local community groups often view in purely local terms.