The occasion for this comprehensive stocktaking is the new record levels of global urbanization reached in 2008. Now, for the first time in history, more people live in cities than in rural areas. Every day, more than 190,000 people worldwide move to cities—two every second. This inexorable process has been underway since the onset of industri- alization in the nineteenth century, but has reached hitherto unprecedented levels in recent decades in the developing world. There are currently 25 megacities that are home to more than ten million people. Simultaneously, many existing cities around the world are decaying, shrinking, or being destroyed.

Cities have changed the face of the planet and every one of its continents— in Africa they are growing fastest, while in Asia they are home to the largest number of people, and in Europe they extend furthest out into the surrounding countryside. The Ostkreuz photographers show human beings in their urban environments—places such as Ordos, a city built in the middle of the Chinese steppe with the most modern architecture for a million residents who still have not come to inhabit it. Or Prypjat in the Ukraine, which was abandoned by its residents after the disaster in Cherno- byl and is gradually being reclaimed by nature. In Lagos in Nigeria, the people live densely packed between glass skyscrapers and cobbled-together shacks. In the slums of Manila, corrugated metal huts nestle together in clusters, while Detroit’s residents are abandoning their downtown, leaving the city to disintegrate from the center out. Dubai in the United Arab Emirates is outgrowing its current boundaries at a breathtaking speed. The social cohesion in the Palestinian city of Gaza is collapsing under the weight of wars and embargos. Las Vegas lives entirely from superficial appearances; Auroville from the ideal, and Atlantis from myth. The anthology of the visual essays is a comprehensive stock-taking of contemporary urban existence and of the dramatically changing contemporary conceptions and ideas of the city worldwide.