Urban sustainability and resilience
New, surprising, and valuable inventions that have altered the world, argues Eric Weiner in his book "The Geography of Genius", tend to occur in cities. Geniuses do not pop up randomly, he continues, but cluster in certain places and at certain times. This circumstance of a genius, as he puts it, produces a bumper crop of brilliant minds with revolutionary ideas." With that, Weiner takes us on a fascinating journey through six historical places, where, according to him, genius flourished at various times in ways that moved the world: Athens, Greece; Hangzhou, China; Florence, Italy; Edinburgh, Scotland; Calcutta (or currently, Kolkata), India; Vienna, Austria; Vienna Austria (yes, that is a repeat); and Silicon Valley, USA. Weiner goes on to say that some are large metropolises, such as Vienna of the 1900s, while others such as Renaissance Florence, are tiny by modern standards, and some, such as ancient Athens, are well-known, while others such as nineteenth-century Calcutta, less so.