Global City-Regions Trends, Theory, Policy

There are now more than three hundred city-regions around the world with populations of more than one million. As globalization intensifies, these city-regions come to pose many new questions and problems. This book presents a highly original and multifaceted review of these issues by some of the leading researchers in the field. 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.

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.

1 - Global City-Regions
2 - How to Invite Prosperity from the Global Economy into a Region
3 - The World Bank and Global City-Regions: Reaching the Poor
4 - Quebec in an Era of Global City-Regions
5 - Global City-Regions in the Twenty-First Century
6 - Global Cities and Global City-Regions: A Comparison
7 - The Economic Role and Spatial Contradictions of Global City-Regions: The Functional, Cognitive, and Evolutionary Context
8 - Intercity Networks in a Globalizing Era
9 - Regions and the New Economics of Competition
10 - Ontario as a North American Region-State, Toronto as a Global City-Region: Responding to the NAFTA Challenge
11 - Local Governance and Social Diversity in the Developing World: New Challenges for Globalizing City-Regions
12 - Innovation and Risk-Taking: Urban Governance in Latin America
13 - Intercity Competition and the Question of Economic Resilience: Globalization and Crisis in Asia
14 - Repositioning of City-Regions: Korea after the Crisis
15 - Inequality in Global City-Regions
16 - The Immigrant Niche in Global City-Regions: Concept, Patterns, Controversy
17 - Urban Citizenship and Globalization
18 - Istanbul's Conflicting Paths to Citizenship: Islamization and Globalization
19 - Governing Cities and Regions: Territorial Restructuring in a Global Age
20 - Lessons from Silicon Valley: Governance in a Global City-Region
21 - Local Governance and Conflict Management: Reflections on a Brazilian Cluster
22 - Environmental Sustainability and Services in Developing Global City-Regions

Allen J. Scott is Professor in both the Department of Policy Studies and the Department of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in 1986-7 and was awarded Honors by the Association of American Geographers in 1987. He was elected as corresponding fellow of the British Academy in 1999. In the winter of 1998-9 he occupied the Andre Siegfried Chair in the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Paris. His most recent books are Regions and the World Economy (Oxford University Press, 1998) and The Cultural Economy of Cities (Sage, 2000).