Global City-Regions: Trends, Theory, Policy

There are now more than three hundred city-regions around the world with populations greater than one million. These city-regions are expanding vigorously, and they present many new and deep challenges to researchers and policy-makers in both the more developed and less developed parts of the world. The processes of global economic integration and accelerated urban growth make traditional planning and policy strategies in these regions increasingly inadequate, while more effective approaches remain largely in various stages of hypothesis and experimentation. 'Global City-Regions' represents a multifaceted effort to deal with the many different issues raised by these developments. It seeks at once to define the question of global city-regions and to describe the internal and external dynamics that shape them; it proposes a theorization of global city-regions based on their economic and political responses to intensifying levels of globalization; and it offers a number of policy insights into the severe social problems that confront global city-regions as they come face to face with an economically and politically neoliberal world. At a moment when globalization is increasingly subject to critical scrutiny in many different quarters, this book provides a timely overview of its effects on urban and regional development, one of its most important (but perhaps least understood) corollaries. The book also offers a series of nuanced visions of alternative possible futures. Contributors to this volume - John Agnew is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at UCLA. Lucien Bouchard has been Premier of Quebec and Chairman of the Parti Quebecois since 1996. Roberto Camagni is Professor of Economics and of Urban Economics, Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Tim Campbell is an Adviser in Urban Development at the World Bank. Thomas J. Courchene is the Jarislowsky-Deutsch Professor of Economic and Financial Policy at Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario) and Senior Scholar at the Institute for Research on Public Policy (Montreal). Michael Douglass is Professor and former Chair of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Hawaii. Susan S. Fainstein is Professor of Urban Planning and Policy Development at the State University of New Jersey at Rutgers. John Friedmann is Professor Emeritus in the School of Public Policy and Social Research, University of California, Los Angeles. Peter Hall is Professor of Planning at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning, University College, London. Douglas Henton is President of Collaborative Economics. James Holston is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. Engin F. Isin is Associate Professor in the Division of Social Science at York University, Ontario, and Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cambridge. Michael Keating is a political scientist and holds chairs in Scottish Politics at the University of Aberdeen and in Regions at the European University Institute in Florence. Won Bae Kim is Senior Fellow at the Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements. Kenichi Ohmae is Managing Director of Ohmae & Associates and Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at UCLA. Theodore Panayotou is a Fellow of the Harvard Institute for International Development and Director of the Institute's International Environment Program, and Director of the Environment Program of the Center for International Development at Harvard University. Michael E. Porter is the C. Roland Christensen Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Saskia Sassen is Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago, and Centennial Visiting Professor, London School of Economics. Hubert Schmitz is a Fellow of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex. Allen J. Scott is Professor in the Departments of Policy Studies and Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Edward W. Soja is Professor of Urban Planning, School of Public Policy and Social Research, University of California, Los Angeles. Michael Storper holds positions with both the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Paris/Marne-la-Vallee in France. Richard Stren is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, and Director of the Center for Urban and Community Studies. Roger Waldinger is Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, UCLA. James D. Wolfensohn is the ninth President of the World Bank Group.