How Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China deal with such urban environmental issues as ports, goods movement, air pollution, water quality, transportation, and public space. Over the past four decades, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and key urban regions of China have emerged as global cities—in financial, political, cultural, environmental, and demographic terms. In this book, Robert Gottlieb and Simon Ng trace the global emergence of these urban areas and compare their responses to a set of six urban environmental issues. These cities have different patterns of development: Los Angeles has been the quintessential horizontal city, the capital of sprawl; Hong Kong is dense and vertical; China's new megacities in the Pearl River Delta, created by an explosion in industrial development and a vast migration from rural to urban areas, combine the vertical and the horizontal. All three have experienced major environmental changes in a relatively short period of time. Gottlieb and Ng document how each has dealt with challenges posed by ports and the movement of goods, air pollution (Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and urban China are all notorious for their hazardous air quality), water supply (all three places are dependent on massive transfers of water) and water quality, the food system (from seed to table), transportation, and public and private space. Finally they discuss the possibility of change brought about by policy initiatives and social movements.

Since the late 1970s the role of key world cities such as Los Angeles, New York and London as centres of global control and co-ordination has come under increasing scrutiny. This book provides an overview and critique of work on the global context of metropolitan growth, world city formation and the theory it has generated. Suggesting ‘post-imperialism’ as the most appropriate framework for analysis, the author demonstrates the extent to which urban and regional development, both in Britain and elsewhere, were linked to a colonial mode of production, and highlights the effects of its disappearance. Against this background, the author charts the transformation of London from imperial capital in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to world city in the capitalist world economy of today.

This classic work chronicles how New York, London, and Tokyo became command centers for the global economy and in the process underwent a series of massive and parallel changes. What distinguishes Sassen's theoretical framework is the emphasis on the formation of cross-border dynamics through which these cities and the growing number of other global cities begin to form strategic transnational networks. All the core data in this new edition have been updated, while the preface and epilogue discuss the relevant trends in globalization since the book originally came out in 1991.

Cinema and audiovisual media are integral to the culture, economy and social experience of the contemporary global city. But how has the relationship between cinema and the urban environment evolved in the era of digital technology, new media and globalization? And what are the critical tools and concepts with which we can grasp this vital interconnection between space and screen, viewer and built environment? Engaging with a rapidly transforming urban world, the contributions to this collection rethink the 'cinematic city' at a global scale. By presenting a global constellation of screen cities within one volume, the book encourages juxtapositions and comparisons across the North and South to capture the global city and its dynamics of exchange, hybridity, and circulation. The contributions examine film and screen cultures in a range of locations spanning five continents: Antibes, Beijing, Buenos Aires, Busan, Cairo, Caracas, Copenhagen, Jakarta, Kolkata, Lagos, Los Angeles, Malmö, Manila, Mumbai, Nairobi, Paris, Seoul, Sète, and Shanghai. The chapters address topics that range across the contemporary film and media landscape, from popular cinema, art cinema, and film festivals to serial television, public screens, multimedia installations, and video art. Contributors: Chris Berry, Yomi Braester, Jinhee Choi, Pei-Sze Chow, Thomas Elsaesser, Malini Guha, Jonathan Haynes, Will Higbee, Igor Krstic, Christian B. Long, Joanna Page, Lawrence Webb.

Abrahamson's book, accessible to undergraduates with little background in sociology or social science, investigates the effect of globalizationon the world's major cities through an exploration of both the economic and cultural dimensions associated with this phenomenon. Unlike other books on the topic, Abrahamson produces a detailed and multi-faceted picture of these cities, covering leading urban centres such as London, New York, Tokyo and Paris, but also branching out to other cities in the global system.

The book argues that looking at global cities can bring about three fundamental advantages on traditional IR paradigms. First, it facilitates an eclectic turn towards more nuanced analyses of world politics. Second, it widens the horizon of the discipline through a multiscalar image of global governance. Third, it underscores how global cities have a strategic diplomatic positioning when it comes to core contemporary challenges such as climate change.

For millennia, urban centers were pivots of power and trade that ruled and linked rural majorities. After 1950, explosive urbanization led to unprecedented urban majorities around the world. That transformation--inextricably tied to rising globalization--changed almost everything for nearly everybody: production, politics, and daily lives. In this book, seven eminent scholars look at the similar but nevertheless divergent courses taken by Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Montreal, Los Angeles, and Houston in the twentieth century, attending to the challenges of rapid growth, the gains and limits of popular politics, and the profound local effects of a swiftly modernizing, globalizing economy. By exploring the rise of these six cities across five nations, New World Cities investigates the complexities of power and prosperity, difficulty and desperation, while reckoning with the social, cultural, and ethnic dynamics that mark all metropolitan areas. Contributors: Michele Dagenais, Mark Healey, Martin V. Melosi, Bryan McCann, Joseph A. Pratt, George J. Sanchez, and John Tutino.

This Handbook offers an unrivalled overview of current research into how globalization is affecting the external relations and internal structures of major cities in the world. By treating cities at a global scale, it focuses on the 'stretching' of urban functions beyond specific place locations, without losing sight of the multiple divisions in contemporary world cities. The book firmly bases city networks in their historical context, critically discusses contemporary concepts and key empirical measures, and analyses major issues relating to world city infrastructures, economies, governance and divisions. The variety of urban outcomes in contemporary globalization is explored through detailed case studies. Edited by leading scholars of the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) Research Network and written by over 60 experts in the field, the Handbook is a unique resource for students, researchers and academics in urban and globalization studies as well as for city professionals in planning and policy.

Creative solutions for global cities addressing their urgent homeless crises. This book takes on perhaps the most formidable issue facing metropolitan areas today: the large numbers of people experiencing homelessness within cities. Four dedicated experts with first-hand experience profile ten cities—Bogota, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Houston, Nashville, New York City, Baltimore, Edmonton, Paris, and Athens—to explore ideas, strategies, successes, and failures. Together they bring an array of government, nonprofit, and academic perspectives to offer a truly global perspective. The authors answer essential questions about the nature and causes of homelessness and analyze how cities have used innovation and local political coordination to address this pervasive problem. Ten Global Cities will be an invaluable resource not only for students of policy and social work but for municipal, regional, and national policymakers; nonprofit service providers; community advocates and activists; and all citizens who want to collaborate for real change. These authors argue that homelessness is not an insurmountable social condition, and their examples show that cities and individuals working in coordination can lead the charge for better outcomes.

In How to Build a Global City, Michele Acuto considers the rise of a new generation of so-called global cities—Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai—and the power that this concept had in their ascent, in order to analyze the general relationship between global city theory and its urban public policy practice. The global city is often invoked in theory and practice as an ideal model of development and a logic of internationalization for cities the world over. But the global city also creates deep social polarization and challenges how much local planning can achieve in a world economy. Presenting a unique elite ethnography in Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai, Acuto discusses the global urban discourses, aspirations, and strategies vital to the planning and management of such metropolitan growth. The global city, he shows, is not one single idea, but a complex of ways to imagine a place to be global and aspirations to make it so, often deeply steeped in politics. His resulting book is a call to reconcile proponents and critics of the global city toward a more explicit engagement with the politics of this global urban imagination.