Meet a man with a mission to help cities better understand themselves.

Richard Saul Wurman has a passion—he wants to help you understand the world around you. Trained as an architect and graphic designer, he coined the term "information architecture" and has spent nearly 50 years championing clear communication. He has 81 books to his credit, including the best-selling Information Anxiety and the award-winning ACCESS travel guides, which map and organize content by neighborhoods, a departure from traditional guidebooks. A bear of a man, with probing eyes and a mind to match, he is constantly in motion, and always asking: Why? He has a genius for seeing patterns where others see nothing. Wurman has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim fellowship, two Graham fellowships, two Chandler fellowships, and the Chrysler Design Award, along with a host of other honors. From 1984 to 2002, he chaired the renowned TED (Technology/Entertainment/Design) conferences—an annual gathering he created that attracts the world's leading thinkers. Wurman's latest project—19.20.21.—focuses on the cities of the world.

What draws us to cities? People flock to cities because of the possibilities for doing things that interest them. Those interests—and the economics that make them possible—are based on people living together. We really have turned into a world of cities. Cities cooperate with each other. Cities trade with each other. Cities are where you put museums, where you put universities, where you put the centers of government, the centers of corporations. The inventions, the discoveries, the music and art in our world, all take place in these intense gatherings of individuals.

Tell us about 19.20.21. In the spring of last year, it was announced that during 2008—for the first time in history—more people would live in cities than outside them. I thought I'd try to discover what this new phenomenon really means. I went to the Web, and I tried to find the appropriate books and lists that would give me information, data, maps, so I could understand. And I couldn't find what I was looking for. I couldn't find maps of cities to the same scale. Much of the statistical information is gathered independently by each city, and the questions they ask are often not the same. For instance, some places have median income, some average income. They look at cost of living differently and quality of life. There's no readily available information on the speed of growth of cities. Diagrams on power, water distribution and quality, health care, and education aren't available, so a metropolis can't find out any information about itself relative to other cities, and therefore can't judge the success or failure of programs. This information gives us the fundamental way of comparing cities. Countries and corporations need it to understand where to put resources. So I decided to gather consistent information on 19 cities that will have more than 20 million people in the 21st century. That's what 19.20.21. is about. We'll have a varied group of young cities, old cities, third-world cities, second-world cities, first-world cities, fast-growing cities, slow-growing cities, coastal cities, inland cities, industrial cities, cultural cities. The methodology will allow a city of any size to collect information about itself and see itself within this new world of cities. Much of this can be presented online, but we're also planning to have exhibits and urban observatories so that cities around the world can see themselves relative to others.