Urban Resilience is seen by many as a tool to mitigate harm in times of extreme social, political, financial, and environmental stress. Despite its widespread usage, however, resilience is used in different ways by policy makers, activists, academics, and practitioners. Some see it as a key to unlocking a more stable and secure urban future in times of extreme global insecurity; for others, it is a neoliberal technology that marginalizes the voices of already marginal peoples. This volume moves beyond praise and critique by focusing on the actors, narratives and temporalities that define urban resilience in a global context. By exploring the past, present, and future of urban resilience, this volume unlocks the potential of this concept to build more sustainable, inclusive, and secure cities in the 21st century.

This book brings together the literature of urban sociology and film studies to explore new analytical and theoretical approaches to the relationship between cinema and the city, and to show how these impact on the realities of life in urban societies.

We live in the ‘urban century’. Cities all over the world – in both developing and developed countries – display complex evolutionary patterns. Urban Empires charts the backgrounds, mechanisms, drivers, and consequences of these radical changes in our contemporary systems from a global perspective and analyses the dominant position of modern cities in the ‘New Urban World’. This volume views the drastic change cities have undergone internationally through a broad perspective and considers their emerging roles in our global network society. Chapters from renowned scholars provide advanced analytical contributions, scaling applied and theoretical perspectives on the competitive profile of urban agglomerations in a globalizing world. Together, the volume traces and investigates the economic and political drivers of network cities in a global context and explores the challenges over governance that are presented by mega-cities. It also identifies and maps out the new geography of the emergent ‘urban century’. With contributions from well-known and influential scholars from around the world, Urban Empires serves as a touchstone for students and researchers keen to explore the scientific and policy needs of cities as they become our age’s global power centers.

Cities around the world are striving to be 'global'. This book tells the story of one of them, and in so doing raises questions of identity, place and political responsibility that are essential for all cities. World City focuses its account on London, one of the greatest of these global cities. London is a city of delight and of creativity. It also presides over a country increasingly divided between North and South and over a neo-liberal form of globalisation - the deregulation, financialisation and commercialisation of all aspects of life - that is resulting in an evermore unequal world. World City explores how we can understand this complex narrative and asks a question that should be asked of any city: what does this place stand for? Following the implosion within the financial sector, such issues are even more vital. In a new Preface, Doreen Massey addresses these changed times. She argues that, whatever happens, the evidence of this book is that we must not go back to 'business as usual', and she asks whether the financial crisis might open up a space for a deeper rethinking of both our economy and our society.

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.

The City in the Developing World is a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to urbanisation in developing countries. The goal of this text is to place an understanding of the developing world city in its wider global context. First, this is done by developing the concept of social surplus product as a key to understanding the character of the contemporary Third World city. Second, throughout this text, the city in developing areas is centrally placed in the context of global, social, economic, political and cultural change. Thus, the important themes of globalisation, modernity and postmodernity are examined both in relation to the structure of sets of towns and cities which make up the national or regional urban system, and in respect of ideas and concepts dealing with the morphology, structure and social patterning of individual urban areas. The City in the Developing World is a core text for second and third year undergraduates in the fields of geography, development studies, planning, economics and the social sciences, taking options which deal with development issues, development theory, gender and development and Third World development.