The Connecting Machine: Cities in the Rich and Poor World

The ultimate function of the city is to enable connections between people. Cities fail either because segregation means that those connections fail to occur or because those connections create calamities, such as epidemic outbreaks. New data sources increasingly enable us to measure the economic segregation of American children and adult workers in the poor cities of northern Brazil. New data also makes it possible for us to better understand which urban governments are providing the core urban services that enable the collaborative creativity that can make cities so magical.