Shortly after the completion of the Empire State Building, the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald was shattered by a visit to its observation deck. “Full of vaunting pride,” he wrote, “the New Yorker had climbed here, and seen with dismay what he had never suspected. That the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits, fading out into the country on all sides into an expanse of green and blue. That alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his mind came crashing down.”

The present is a moment when we view cities from even further away than the top of the Empire State Building. The central image of our age has become the bright necklace of electrical lights revealed in nighttime photographs of the Earth taken from the cosmos. This new reality transforms every aspect of life, replacing the city as Fitzgerald knew it by a flowing global urban system. Cities have become limitless once again; and they have become our collective home. The world is now urban.

Present-day recognition of the importance of cities in the global agenda for inclusive and sustainable development is unprecedented. In September 2015, UN member states agreed on 17 global goals to end poverty, fight inequality, and tackle climate change by 2030. Among the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), is an “urban” goal, SDG 11, calling on the international community to make cities “inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.” A few months later, in October 2016, the United Nations’ HABITAT III conference – an international gathering convened every 20 years – adopted the “New Urban Agenda” which would further align domestic policies and international cooperation across the globe with the objectives of SDG 11.

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