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 offes a series of nuanced visions of alternative possible futures. Contributors to this volume - Allen J. Scott (University of California, Los Angeles) John Agnew (University of California, Los Angeles) Edward W. Soja (University of California, Los Angeles) Michael Storper (UCLA/University of Paris/Marne-la-Vallee, France) Kenichi Ohmae (University of California, Los Angeles) James D. Wolfensohn (World Bank Group) Lucien Bouchard (Premier of Quebec and Chairman of the Parti Quebecois since 1996) Sir Peter Hall (University College, London) Saskia Sassen (University of Chicago/London School of Economics) Roberto Camagni (Politecnico di Milano, Italy) John Friedmann (University of California, Los Angeles) Michael E. Porter (Harvard Business School) Thomas J. Courchene (Queen's University, Ontario/Institute for Research on Public Policy, Montreal) Richard Stren (University of Toronto) Tim Campbell (World Bank) Michael Douglass (University of Hawaii) Won Bae Kim (Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements) Susan S. Fainstein (State University of New Jersey at Rutgers) Roger Waldinger (University of California, Los Angeles) James Holston (University of California, San Diego) Engin F. Isin (York University, Ontario/University of Cambridge) Michael Keating (University of Aberdeen/European University Institute, Florence) Douglas Henton (President of Collaborative Economics) Hubert Schmitz (University of Sussex) Theodore Panayotou (Harvard University)