An Essay on Globalisation, Urbanisation and Digitalisation (GUD) Age and its impacts on Cities' Sustainability and Resilience Shima Beigi, PhD Free University of Brussels University of Oxford shima.beigi@gmail.com shima.beigi@kellogg.ox.ac.uk With the rise of urbanisation across the world, cities have pushed their way to the forefront of global socio-political and socio-economical change. Cities are also called as a force for change in the era marked by increasing impact of human actions on Earth (Grimm et al., 2008). In this globally changing environment, many argue that the future of cities has to be consciously redirected toward better consumption of resources, toward enhancing social cohesion and toward making sustainability a framework of evolution (Hall and Pfeiffer, 2013). These arguments predominately have noted that manifesting change requires building a closer connection between citizens and the city itself. In pursuit of such goal, building a better connection between people and city, some scholars began to question the extent to which cities’ size can contribute to building better cities. Better in this argument refers to better consumption of resources, enhanced connectivity between cities’ elements, and improved social cohesion. In search for a better urban future it is inevitable to explore, ponder and interrogate ways in which cities are built because most of the cities across the world are exposed to the increasing changes of climatic patterns and thus are in the consequent need of introducing adaptation methods and enhancing urban resilience. Envisioning of a novel future for urban systems, the literature of urban change (Hunt and Watkiss, 2011), future of urbanisation, urban sustainability and adaptation (Change, 2014) is mainly categorised in two directions. The first argument for rethinking future of cities is focused on the need for adaptation in the cities that are growing with a rapid race aka big cities such as New York, Dubai, Johannesburg. The second form of the need for urban adaptation is manifesting itself in the relationship between cities’ scale, size and its impact on urban sustainability. Following the second trend, impact of cities’ size and other physical characteristics such as density and population level on sustainability and in predicting a viable future scenario of urban growth, Kunstler (2012) speculates the following: “... I see that cities getting ‘smaller and denser, with fewer people, and lower, with the skyscraper obsolete, travel greatly reduced, and the rural edge growing more distinct (Kunstler, 2012)”. In his book, Too much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation, Kunstler (2012) argues that because of the continuous gap between population growth and resource availability, and because of existence of “wishful thinking” in solving problems in our world, the apparent growing trend of big cities popularity will change. Kunstler further justifies that: “... A recognition that a whole new disposition of things is under way will prompt demographic shifts into our smaller cities and smaller towns, especially places that have some relationship with the local food production, water power and water transport (Kunstler, 2012)”.