Many urbanisms : divergent trajectories of global city building Rethinking global urbanism at the start of the 21st century Part one. Conventional urban theory at a crossroads The narrow preoccupations of conventional urban studies The universalizing pretensions of mainstream urban studies: generic cities and the convergence thesis Part two. Trajectories of global urbanism at the start of the 21st century: a first approximation Globalizing cities with world class aspirations: the emergence of the post industrial tourist entertainment city Struggling post industrial cities in decline Sprawling megacities of hyper growth: the unplanned urbanism of the 21st century Building cities on a grand scale: the instant urbanism of the 21st century Part three. The future of urbanism Urban futures. Now for the first time in history the majority of the worlds population lives in cities. But urbanization is accelerating in some places and slowing down in others. The sprawling megacities of Asia and Africa as well as many other smaller and medium sized cities throughout the Global South are expected to continue growing. At the same time older industrial cities in wealthier countries are experiencing protracted socioeconomic decline. Nonetheless mainstream urban studies continues to treat a handful of superstar cities in Europe and North America as the exemplars of world urbanism even though current global growth and development represent a dramatic break with past patterns. Martin J. Murray offers a groundbreaking guide to the multiplicity heterogeneity and complexity of contemporary global urbanism. He identifies and traces four distinct pathways that characterize cities today: tourist entertainment cities with world class aspirations; struggling postindustrial cities; megacities experiencing hypergrowth; and instant cities or master planned cities built from scratch. Murray shows how these different types of cities respond to different pressures and logics rather than progressing through the stages of a predetermined linear path. He highlights new spatial patterns of urbanization that have undermined conventional understandings of the city exploring the emergence of polycentric fragmented haphazard and unbounded metropolises. Such cities he argues should not be seen as deviations from a norm but rather as alternatives within a constellation of urban possibility. Innovative and wide ranging Many Urbanisms offers ways to understand the disparate forms of global cities today on their own terms