Cities for a Shared Planet

A powerful new vision of cities as engines of planetary evolution and multispecies cooperation.Evolution, once associated with remote places and deep time, is unfolding in real time, much closer to home. Cities have become a new ecological stage on which evolution is taking place. Humans are now active participants shaping the trajectory of life on Earth. How can we use this knowledge to build more resilient and just futures for humans and other species?In Cities for a Shared Planet, Marina Alberti envisions evolving urban ecosystems in which humans and other species shape their shared futures through new forms of cooperation. She argues that the convergence of rapid urbanization and accelerating environmental change may mark the onset of a major evolutionary transition—one that redefines the role of cities in planetary evolution. At the heart of this transformation is the emergence of bio-cooperative cities: adaptive, multispecies systems designed to sustain the evolutionary...