The Exploding City

Offers profiles of nine major cities around the world and looks at the problems they will face in the future

Schiffer ( Looking Outward ) and Cooke (staff photographer for Time Inc.) take the reader on a nine-city tour of the world in approximately 100 color and 300 black-and-white photographs. Stopping at Cairo, Shanghai, Rome, Lagos, Tokyo, Bombay, Moscow, Mexico City and New York, we are introduced to problematic aspects of "megapolis" living, particularly those of still-developing countries where urban populations are growing astronomically. Many of the black-and-white pictures, unfortunately grainy and overexposed, depict the homeless and the squalid living conditions of the near-homeless; others record traffic jams of bicycles, buses, cars and pedestrians. Incongruously, many of the illustrations are simple snapshots--smiling children, classical architecture, people at work--unrelated to the dire predictions of the text, itself speculative and cliched. The points brought up in this book merit more thoughtful treatment than accorded here.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The nine cities profiled "offer a glimpse of what much of the world will look like in the year 2000." Cooke's photographs graphically document poverty, overcrowding, and the cities' inability to cope. But the images of individual city-dwellers are full of life and hope, contradicting the surrounding grimness. Schiffer's text is brief, describing the concerns unique to each city. Much of the research is drawn from two conferences held by the United Nations Population Fund. Neither an in-depth analysis nor a book of solutions, this is a graphic introduction to urban problems. Recommended for large public libraries.
- Diane K. Harvey, SAIS Lib., Johns Hopkins Univ., Washington D.C.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.