In Dubai, a luxury residential building is shaped like a giant iPod. In Beijing, Herzog & de Meuron are building the Bird's Nest stadium. In Cincinnati, Zaha Hadid is being paid millions to design a 'landmark' building in the hopes that she will single-handedly change the fate of an entire region. 'Starchitects' compete to design ever more monumental, spectacular, and extravagant buildings that radically transform the surrounding landscape: Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Norman Foster's 'Gherkin,' Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin... Over the past fifty years, a veritable revolution has taken place in the life of our cities. Tom Dyckhoff (b. 1971), a British critic of architecture and urbanism, recounts its progress and results with expertise, scope, and humor. Exploring urban landscapes from New York to Beijing, from Bilbao to Astana, he shows that we are not simply witnessing the emergence of a new type of building: we are living through a fundamental transformation in how contemporary spaces operate in entrepreneurial cities.