The eighth edition of the highly successful The City Reader juxtaposes the very best classic and contemporary writings on the city to provide the comprehensive mapping of the terrain of Urban Studies and Planning old and new. The City Reader is the anchor volume in the Routledge Urban Reader Series and is now integrated with all ten other titles in the series. It has been extensively updated and expanded to reflect the latest thinking in each of the disciplinary areas included and in topical areas such as urban history, place making, sustainable urban development, globalization, resilience, artificial intelligence in planning cities, climate change, the world city network, the impact of technology on cities, cities in Africa, and urban theory.

The new edition places greater emphasis on cities in the developing world, globalization and the global city system of the future. The plate sections have been more than doubled to include 93 plates.

The 8th edition includes fifty-eight generous selections: forty-seven from the 7th edition, one from the 6th edition, and ten new selections, including four newly written exclusively for the 8th edition. This new edition retains classic writings by authors such as Ebenezer Howard, Ernest W. Burgess, H.D.F. Kitto, LeCorbusier, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, Louis Wirth, and Peter Hall as well as the best contemporary writings of, among others David Harvey, Manuel Castells, Michael Batty, Sara Meerow, Fulong Wu, Saskia Sassen, Richard LeGates, Michael Smith, John McWhorter, and a co-authored selection by Xuefei Ren and Roger Keil.

The City Reader 8th Edition features general and section introductions as well as individual introductions to the selected articles introducing the authors, providing context, and relating the selection to other selections. The 8th edition includes a greatly expanded bibliography with up-to-date information on books, articles, professional reports, and videos for all the topics covered.