The Real Population Bomb: Megacities, Global Security & the Map of the Future

By 2025, twenty-seven cities will have populations greater than ten million - the common measure by which an urban population constitutes a 'megacity.' Some of these megacities will pose the most significant security threat in the coming decades. If countermeasures are not taken soon, P. H. Liotta and James F. Miskel argue that megacities will become havens for terrorists and criminal networks as well as centers of major environmental depletion. They will serve as freakish natural laboratories where all elements most harmful to international and human security are grown. Crowded masses within these unaccommodating spaces will have literally nowhere else to go; if left to their own devices by inept or uncaring governments, collective rage, despair, and hunger will inevitably erupt. In the face of rising expectations that globalization engenders, these petri dishes of despair and danger will spill over municipal boundaries and international borders rapidly with devastating results. Through penetrating analysis and vivid narratives, Liotta and Miskel give us a stark and often alarming portrait of how major urban centers in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America are redrawing the global map in ways that affect us all.