BOOK REVIEWS CONTENTS The New Science of Cities, by Michael Batty. Review by Elizabeth Delmelle ....... 149 The Oxford Handbook of Offshoring and Global Employment, edited by Ashok Bardhan, Dwight M. Jaffee, and Cynthia A. Kroll. Review by Ronald V. Kalafsky ..... 150 The International Handbook on Social Innovation: Collective Action, Social Learning and Transdisciplinary Research, edited by Frank Moulaert, Diana MacCallum, Abid Mehmood, and Abdelillah Hamdouch. Review by Gordon Shockley ........................................................................ 152 Metropolitan Regions: Knowledge Infrastructures of the Global Economy, edited by Johan Klaesson, Bӧrje Johansson, and Charlie Karlsson. Review by Huaqun Li .............................................................................. 154 Smart Transport Networks: Market Structure, Sustainability and Decision Making, edited by Thomas Vanoutrive and Ann Verhetsel. Review by Irene Casas . . . 155 Names, Ethnicity and Populations: Tracing Identity in Space, by Pablo Mateos. Review by Richard Morrill .............................................................. 157 The New Science of Cities, by Michael Batty. 2013. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, U.K.: The MIT Press. 496 + xxi. ISBN: 9780262019521, $45. The answer to the age-old question of why cities exist, or, rather, still exist and even flourish in these times of fast and cheap communication—the so-called “central paradox of the modern metropolis” Glaeser (2011, p. 6)—very often centers around one notion: interactions. From the formation of the very first cities, to the more recent reemergence of many struggling cities whose obsolescence had been foretold thanks to the death of distance, interactions, communication, and relationships have formed the central tenets of explanation behind these phenomena. These critical concepts also make up the foundation of Michael Batty’s New Science of Cities, from which his latest book draws its title. Batty’s New Science is unabashedly methodological in focus. The casual reader, perhaps un- familiar with his scholarship, but drawn in by the broad suggestion of the book’s title, will quickly realize that this is not one for the masses; it is for the modelers. Urban modelers, on the other hand, are likely to embrace this compilation, which brings together the tools and the underpinning mathematics used to describe the physical form of cities, the flows, and interactions that happen within them, and ultimately the decision-making processes that will shape the future of cities. The book is segmented into three parts. The first two present a lineage of models and ideas from classic spatial interaction gravity models, to the view of cities as complex systems that ulti- mately gives rise to the third and most novel section of this book, “The Science of Design,” which blends these concepts with multiple stakeholder decision making. “Foundations and Prerequisites” forms the first part of the volume and is comprised of three chapters, in which Batty lays out his argument for a new paradigm, one that thinks of cities not in terms of location, but in terms of interactions. In this introduction, he notes that the new science of cities is one focused on what he terms “physicalism,” or the elements of the urban environment that can be “immediately observed and hence manipulated through city planning” (p. 20). Other key social and behavioral drivers of urban dynamics are therefore not the emphasis of this work. Following this initial justification, Batty segues into an overview of systems and complexity theories before covering the mathematics behind networks and flows in the second and third chapters. These latter two chapters provide a refresher on gravity-based, spatial interaction models and on the essential elements of graph theory necessary for describing networks. C  2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. DOI: 10.1111/jors.12180 149