The Urban Condition

This book will speak to the new human epoch, the Urban Age. A majority of humanity now lives for the first time in cities. The city, the highest invention of the modern age, is now the human heartland. And yet the same process that brought us the city and its wonders, modernisation, has also thrown up challenges and threats, especially climate change, resource depletion, social division and economic insecurity. This book will consider how these threats are to be encountered and countered in an urban age. It will focus on the issue of human knowledge and self-awareness, just as Hannah Arendt’s influential The Human Condition did half a century ago. The Human Condition is now The Urban Condition. And it is this condition that will define human prospects in an age of default and risk.

Brendan Gleeson is Professor of Urban Policy Studies at The University of Melbourne. He was previously Professor of Geography at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Gleeson is an internationally recognised geographer and urban planner whose books for Routledge include Justice, Society & Nature (with N.P.Low), The Green City (with Low, Green & Radovic) and Geographies of Disability. Justice, Society & Nature received the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award from the International Studies Association.