This book is a manifesto for real urban change. Today, our urban areas are held back by corporate greed, loss of public space and rising inequality. This book highlights how cities are locked into unsustainable and damaging practices, and how exciting new routes can be unlocked for real change.

Across the world, city innovators are putting real sustainability into practice – from transforming abandoned public spaces and setting up community co-operatives, to rewilding urban nature and powering up civic energy.

Paul Chatterton explores the power of these city experiments that harness the creative power of the collective, focusing on five themes: compassion, imagination, experimentation, co-production and transformation; and four city systems: mobility, energy, community and nature. Imagining radical alternatives, such as car-free, post-carbon, common and ‘bio-cities’, this is a toolkit for unlocking real urban change.