Rem Koolhaas, known internationally as one of the most important contemporary architects, has set himself another ambitious goal: the Project on the City. Each year for five years, Koolhaas is organizing a studio at the Harvard Graduate School of Design that will focus on an international site or theme. The work from that studio will be documented in an engaging, multifaceted volume emblematic of the radical study of urbanism today. The first studio took the Pearl River Delta in China as its subject. Since the 1960s, Asia has been in the grip of a relentless process of building, on an unprecedented & barely comprehensible scale. An absence of plausible urban doctrines, however, has resulted in a critical, theoretical, & operational impasse that can be solved neither by practice nor by academia. The Pearl River Delta studio produced a series of related analyses that attempt to give an overview of the emerging urban condition(s) in this Chinese region. The result was a new entity, a new urban condition, a new form of urban coexistence: the City of Exacerbated Difference (COED).