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A pioneering exploration of four cities where East matches West and past becomes future: St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai. Every month, five million people move from the past to the future. Pouring into developing-world "instant cities" like Dubai and Shenzhen, these urban newcomers confront today's world cobbled alongside one another from fragments of a West they haven't seen. Do these fantastical boomtowns, where plans spring alive overnight on virgin land, stand for the dawning of a brave " new world "? Or is their vaunted newness a mirage?Inside a captivating blend of record and reportage, Daniel Brook trips to a series of major metropolitan hubs which were once themselves instant cities - St. Petersburg, Shanghai, and Mumbai - to view their "dress rehearsals for the 21st century." Understanding today's appearing global order, he argues, requires comprehending the West's profound and conflicted influence on developing-world cities over the centuries. In 1703, Tsar Peter the Great personally oversaw the development of a new Russian capital, a "window on the West" carefully modeled on Amsterdam, that he thought would wrench Russia in to the modern world. Inside the 19th century, Shanghai became the fastest-growing city on the planet as it mushroomed into an English-speaking, Western-looking metropolis that just happened to be in the Far East. In the mean time, Bombay, the cosmopolitan hub of the British Raj, morphed into a tropical London as a result of its pith-helmeted imperialists. Juxtaposing the reviews of the architects and authoritarians, the performers and revolutionaries who seized the reins to enhance each of these precociously modern places into avatars of the global future, Brook shows that the drive for modernization was primarily conflated with inexpensive Westernization.
