Great book!

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Very good book for all beginners wanting to learn more about the world's greatest and largest cities. This book also discusses the history of many of these cities along with their social geography. Overall, a very good read!

2003? seems more like 1950

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This book is poorly written, full of factual and gramatical errors, and suffers from what I would nicely call "eurocentricity." The book blames the problems of less developed countries on the populations of those countries and does not discuss the effects of colonialism or neocolonialism. I was expecting an unbiased, interesting, enlightening text on world cities, history, culture, and urban systems, what I got is a lot of population ecology and an unabashed advertisement for globalization and the IMF.

This can also be considered a book on world history

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An important reason that I think this book gives a balanced, non-biased overview of the development of cities throughout the world is because it was written by a diverse group of authors. While in every chapter or section of the book we find that "Western imperialists" are always involved in the evolution of world cities, this book also emphasizes how indigenous city planning still shape the cities and offer the means for cities to be friendlier places to live.

Since cities are sources of power of soverignty for nations, countries, and empires, one finds that this city planning book is also a type of world history book.