The world is increasingly organized into cities. As a result, urban designs, technologies, infrastructures, and governance make a growing contribution to the structure of societies and economies. Materials and information flows, business models and their cost structures, and social and political relations are increasingly extra-local, but they still work within the infrastructures, building clusters, and communities of distinct urban geographies. As the urban world expands to include another billion people by 2025, and then nearly a billion more by 2035, the ways we build, connect, and manage cities will further (re)structure world commerce, politics, consumption, and ecology. “Globalization” is an abstract description of this very material, continuing re-engineering of the world. The tangible end-result of globalization is a world urban system, the global “City” that we are building today.
Urban strategy is the practice of shaping development in city districts, cities, and networks of cities: