Book Description

Absurd, extreme, pleasure-filled, crime-ridden. Sky-high meccas of opportunity, vast swathes of squalor. This is the megacity and this, in many ways, is our future. Not long ago these massive urban hubs with over 10 million people were an anomaly - in 1950 only New York and Tokyo could claim the title. Now, eight of the world's population live in thirty-three megacities with many more predicted to arrive and make these places their home in the coming years. MEGACITY brings together new writing from some of the most impenetrable corners of the world today with creativity, resilience and beautifully black humour. COVID-19 has thrived in megacities and poses unique challenges to the world’s densest urban hubs. Beat lockdown by travelling virtually, into the homes and lives of global megacity writers from Karachi, Paris, Manila, Lagos, Tokyo and others. MEGACITY collect twenty-two individual creative responses to the megacity, infiltrating some of the densest, most difficult corners of the world today. From the tightly packed slums of Delhi and the violent favelas of São Paulo, to eye-watering London property prices and Chinese megacities constructed seemingly overnight - if you boggle at how anyone negotiates today’s rampant, unchecked city growth, this book is for you. Witchcraft, terrorism, chemical swamps, modern slavery, and corpses for rent are all day to day events within these pages. Translated from native languages such as DRC’s Lingala to Portuguese written in deepest Brazilian slang, this collection goes to places which are, for most of us, completely impenetrable. Some of today’s most renowned scientists, economists, architects and urban planners have turned their attention to the megacity in order to understand pressing contemporary dilemmas. It can be difficult, however, when we read their criticism of demographics, economics, infrastructure and environment, to imagine the individual amongst the teeming masses. MEGACITY redresses this problem: giving the reader a many-faceted sense of the megacity character, their stories and their settings. Contributing authors Dele Adeyemo, Kunlé Adayemi, Jessica Zafra, Richard Ali A Mutu, Uday Prakesh, Diego Gerard, Emily Ruth Ford, Liza Alexandrova-Zorina, Deepti Kapoor, Ayodele Olofintuade, Wu Jun, Anna Pook, Daniel Saldaña París, Hideo Furukawa, Ahmed Naji, Ferréz, Bilal Tanweer, Sheyla Smanioto, Montasser Al-Qaffash, and Jeffrey Pascual Yap