Toronto's longtime urban strategist Jeb Brugmann joins the ranks of impassioned urban reformers with Welcome to the Urban Revolution. Reflecting on a future in which the majority of the population inhabit urban areas, Brugmann suggests the increasing economic, social and technological ties between these cities requires that urban planning examine how developments in one city might be affected by those in other urban settlements around the world. Welcome to the Urban Revolution is an attempt to explore different types of planning practices from across the globe and suggest forthcoming challenges that any future planning scenarios would likely have to face.

First of all, Brugmann is optimistic about the role and future of cities. For him, cities offer rural migrants a path to better lives through greater opportunities. Much of the first third of Welcome to the Urban Revolution is devoted to demonstrating the historical links that the old city cores had to democratic reforms as a result of the many grassroots social relationships caused by urban economics. Brugmann's work here rests on specific neighbourhood case studies such as Detroit and Tehran. Though this section is light on historical analysis, he does have a breezy narrative style and once he feels that he has justified cities to be worth saving, his work swiftly moves towards what it is, precisely, they need to be saved from.

Brugmann's descriptive writing allows cities like Dharavi, India, Curitiba, Brazil, and his own Toronto, to come alive through one-on-one interviews with their inhabitants, who range from business owners, to politicians, academics and the urban poor. Brugmann argues that as cities expand, attracting more and more diverse social groups, the central problem facing maturing cities is over the command of decision-making processes. Once a city's basic stability has been established and its resources secured, all of these different groups need to negotiate the future directions of the city. There are three basic types of scenarios that cities might find themselves in. The first are cities recently emerging into stability, such as Dharavi — a Mumbai-based slum experiencing tremendous economic growth — where the chief political groups are different from the groups profiting from the exploitation of resources. In Dharavi, each group is trying to exert control over the other to its own exclusive ends. Future developments in these "Cities of Crisis" are likely to remain stalled until some kind of accommodation between the political and de facto economic leaders can be met.

A struggle between equals, meanwhile, is part of the hallmark of “Cities of Great Opportunities,” such as Toronto, where groups may meet as equals, but self-interest prevents any one group from being able to present a coherent vision of the future agreeable to all. The key to a successful or “Strategic City” is to find a way to supplant the ad hoc organic growth that individual communities engage in with a comprehensive plan that is respective of their independent traditions. Brazil's city of Curitiba, whose planning for the last 30 years has been done under the auspices of local government, community groups and an independent association of urban researchers who provide feedback and analysis on various proposals.

Having set out in his introduction the notion of the global city, Brugmann is content to focus on isolated cities, largely ignoring any attempts to draft an image of what it would mean to have the traditional functions of a singular city distributed over the entire globe. Other than to suggest that particular cities, such as Dharavi, play a manufacturing role in the global economy, or serve to draw the rural population into the urban network, Brugmann only really talks about such dispersion of responsibilities in the case of the expansion of metropolitan Toronto and Detroit, where postwar suburban communities tended to separate residential and industrial functions. Brugmann makes it clear that successful cities, such as Vancouver, are able to reunite these diverse aspects into sustainable live-work neighbourhoods. However, other than these neighbourhoods being a destination for migrants from anywhere in the world, this image of the city is never really squared with the global one he discusses at the beginning of his book. While this doesn't lessen the importance of his takeaway lesson — that urban planning needs to be an essentially democratic and inclusive undertaking — it does leave the reader wishing for more.