Today we launch the Global Urbanist, an online newspaper on urban affairs from cities across the developed and developing world.
The issues that confront our cities are overwhelmingly international in their reach and global in their scale. Nowhere is this more clear right now than in Copenhagen, where alongside the national leaders mapping out the world's strategy on climate change are mayors from forty of the world's largest cities, united through the support of the Clinton Climate Initiative under the name "C40 Climate Leadership Group".
Now that the majority of the world's population live in urban areas, their fates more intertwined than ever, our cities need a newspaper that understands the world through their eyes, wherein the nebulous forces of global trade, migration and culture touch down and create real change in our communities, our businesses, our environments, and our individual futures.
Our knowledge on these issues must be gathered together to bring into focus the central role of our cities in our social, political and economic life.
We aim to support this task by identifying urban reportage of a high standard from around the world, increasingly supplemented by our own editorial and our growing team of contributors, amongst them social and political scientists, development professionals, architects and planners.
In doing so, we support the work and professional life of our audience, themselves urban and regional planners, local public servants and policymakers, civil society leaders, and scholars and observers of cities and their communities.
We help improve the status of cities as the object of political and governmental discourse, and promote the use and understanding of the term urbanist as a professional occupation concerned with the making of cities.
In this work, we welcome your contributions, either by bringing to our attention news articles, books or academic literature for inclusion on the site, by integrating your blog within our blogcentre or by submitting news articles, opinion pieces or photography of your own observations of urban affairs.
We will soon be creating Job and Event forums where urbanists can keep each other abreast of conferences and workshops, and find collaborative partners, wherever in the world they may be.
We hope you enjoy reading the articles we select and write from day to day, and are encouraged to join in the debate on the future of our cities.
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