Urban 3.0: Synergy for Sustainable Cities

This book is about building the urban ‘shared intelligence’ – the synergy city – the capacity for thinking ahead, with creative innovation, turning problems into opportunities. The synergy city can often evolve and self-organize, but there are many barriers to be overcome, and to address the challenges of the global urban system we need to scale up the shared intelligence to global levels. The synergy city principle applies to whole urban systems, and also to the economic, political and ecological systems which shape them. Each of these four main agendas is presented here as a ‘pathway’ for strategic action, with in-depth exploration of selected topics.

Urban 3.0 is the first major application of new thinking on complexity to the practical challenges of urban development. It builds on the author’s previous bookCity-Region 2020 with a decade of reality-testing. With the help of a visual graphic narrative style, and a manual of techniques and tools, this book will be indispensable to students, politicians, planners, engineers, researchers and many others.