Turnaround Challenge: Business and the City of the Future [Hardcover]

Do we have the rights to optimism? Can capitalism deliver?Turnaround Challengegauges the prospects for a next great wave of growth. Three cities of the future are possible. The first is Petropolis, the decreasingly resilient city, locked into fossil fuel driven mass production and consumption. The second isCyburbia, the citadel of state capital, censored and censored, where mass meets IT. The third is theDistributed City, where post-mass technologies help to construct a city for people, a built environment in which we are not just resilient but thrive. Lucid and polemical,Turnaround Challengeexamines not just the downside, the nexus of challenges confronting society, but the upside, deliveringa comprehensive overviewof the innovators driving the next wave of growth for business.Do we have the rights to optimism? Can capitalism deliver a next great wave of growth? The future, wrote William Gibson, 'is already here. It just isn't evenly distributed yet. Lucid and polemical,Turnaround Challengeis a dig into that future and its meaning for business. It dissects the nexus of social, economic, environmental and governance crises confronting us, and a series of colliding megatrends with the potential to reshape opportunities for growth.Three cities of the future are emerging. The first is Petropolis, the alluringly familiar but decreasingly resilient city, locked into the century old technologies of fossil fuel-driven mass production. This is the city of rising inequality, credit-fuelled consumption, offshored jobs, climate volatility, and unsustainable household and national debt. The second city isCyburbia. This is mass production on the steroids of IT: the latest manifestation of science fiction's city without pain, but one inhabited by voice-activated popcorn dispensers, of athletics' shoes with in-built Twitter feeds, of sensor-packed and censoring glass towers that risk reducing their citizens to digi