Book excerpt: This powerful resource identifies wide-scale health challenges facing a rapidly urbanizing planet--including key concerns in nutrition, health status, health care, and safety--and strategies toward possible solutions. Theoretical and empirical analysis focuses on maximizing the benefits of urban living and minimizing negative outcomes across areas for improvement (health education, maternal and child health) and threats to well-being (noise pollution, drug counterfeiting). For each challenge, contributors discuss implications for health, specific practices that fuel them, and emerging ideas for solving them efficiently and effectively. Not only are these issues of immediate salience, they will become dangerously urgent in years to come. Included in the coverage: Food fortification and other innovations to address child malnutrition. Anti-trafficking innovations, urbanization, and global health. Innovations to address global climate change in cities. Innovations in disaster preparedness: implications for urbanization and health. Medical diagnostic innovations in urban developing settings. The case for comprehensive, integrated, and standardized measures of health in cities. Recent studies suggest that urban areas will be a large majority in both the developing and developed worlds. Innovations to Address Urbanization & Global Health is a proactive idea book to be read by undergraduates, graduate students and researchers in public and urban health.