Questions increasingly dominant urban planning orthodoxies and whether they truly serve everyday city dwellers What makes some cities world class? Increasingly, that designation reflects the use of a toolkit of urban planning practices and policies that circulates around the globe. These strategies—establishing creative districts dedicated to technology and design, “greening” the streets, reinventing historic districts as tourist draws—were deployed to build a globally competitive Buenos Aires after its devastating 2001 economic crisis. In this richly drawn account, Jacob Lederman explores what those efforts teach us about fast-evolving changes in city planning practices and why so many local officials chase a nearly identical vision of world-class urbanism. Lederman explores the influence of Northern nongovernmental organizations and multilateral agencies on a prominent city of the global South. Using empirical data, keen observations, and interviews with people ranging from urban planners to street vendors he explores how transnational best practices actually affect the lives of city dwellers. His research also documents the forms of resistance enacted by everyday residents and the tendency of local institutions and social relations to undermine the top-down plans of officials. Most important, Lederman highlights the paradoxes of world-class urbanism: for instance, while the priorities identified by international agencies are expressed through nonmarket values such as sustainability, inclusion, and livability, local officials often use market-centric solutions to pursue them. Further, despite the progressive rhetoric used to describe urban planning goals, in most cases their result has been greater social, economic, and geographic stratification. Chasing World-Class Urbanism is a much-needed guide to the intersections of culture, ideology, and the realities of twenty-first-century life in a major Latin American city, one that illuminates the tension between technocratic aspirations and lived experience.

The Routledge International Handbook of Transnational Studies offers a comprehensive overview of the dynamic evolution and the most recent debates in this interdisciplinary field. The collection assembles scholarship from the social sciences and the humanities that share a critical perspective extending beyond the nation-state. The contributions investigate sustained connections, events, and activities across state borders and acknowledge prevailing global power asymmetries. The handbook examines the dynamics of transnational processes across seven main themes: epistemological and methodological principles; transnational migrant practices and family remittances; mobilities and (self-)identities; social protection; organizations and social movements; culture, religion, and the arts; and architecture and urban planning. The contributors engage with theoretical developments and analyze empirical cases involving a wide array of critical contemporary topics such as expatriate voting, first- and second-generation return migration, state-sponsored cross-border marriages, access to health care, transnational social work, global religious aesthetics, transnational art corridors, literary translation, remittance-financed architecture, and transnational processes of real estate development and gentrification, among others. They display a series of cross-cutting approaches including postcolonial theory, racism, and gender, and a focus on agency, state policies and macro-structures, and transnational inequalities. This book features multidisciplinary scholars in transnational studies from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This handbook will be of interest to scholars interested in global and transnational perspectives across a wide range of disciplines. It will serve as a key resource for academics, students, and other interested audiences seeking to familiarize themselves with the study of contemporary issues that cross state borders.

This important Handbook brings together preeminent international scholars, sharing their comparative and international perspectives on the topic. Their original contributions cover the key issues and questions around policy transfer, diffusion and circulation research. Altogether, chapters illuminate how rich and provocative the current debate on the interpretation of how public policies travels is and the vibrancy of the area’s research within the broad planet of public policy analysis.

"This book explains why nearly 30 years after the transition to democracy, the South African government continues to evict squatters from urban land. It argues that housing officials view occupiers as threats to the government's housing delivery program, which, they insist, requires order and state control. New occupations are therefore stigmatized as "disorderly" threats, and government actors represent their removal as a precondition for access to housing. Drawing on a decade of sustained ethnographic fieldwork in two such occupations in Cape Town, this study explains why one was evicted, whereas the other was ultimately tolerated, answering a central question in urban studies: how do governments decide when to evict, and conversely, when to tolerate? These decisions are not made in a vacuum but instead require an analysis that expands what we typically call "the state." This book argues that the state does not simply "see" occupations, as if they were a feature of the natural landscape. Rather, occupiers collectively project themselves to government actors, affecting how they are seen. But residents are not only seen; they also see, which shapes how they organize themselves. When residents see the state as an antagonist, they tend to unify under a single leadership; but when they see it as a potential ally, they often remain atomized as if they were individual customers. The unity in the former case projects an orderly population, less likely to be evicted; but the fragmentation in the latter case projects a disorderly mass, serving to legitimate eviction rulings"--

This book examines the dynamics of neoliberal urban governance through a comparative analysis of Buenos Aires and Chicago, with a special focus on gentrification processes in both cities from 2011 to 2021. This work argues that neoliberal principles, rationales and institutions, along with the elaborate rhetoric that has contributed to their success, are forever present in the US and Latin American region, particularly in global cities like Buenos Aires and Chicago. The year of 2011 marks the (almost) simultaneous election of new executive authorities in each city, and finalizes in 2021—a sufficient time span to observe key patterns, narratives and developments of each neoliberal urban governance. First, this book chronicles the evolving urban neoliberal policies implemented since 2011 in both cities, with special attention to the systematic reduction of affordable housing and privatization of public land that have paved the way for gentrification to advance at a fast pace. Second, it also exposes readers to the prominent rhetoric crafted by local boards, developers, architects, and real estate agents in both cities. Third, this study chronicles how these contemporary neoliberal urban governances currently operate, a critical aspect that remains vastly unexplored. Lastly, until now these governances have been scantly explored from a comparative perspective in Latin American and North American urban settings, and so this book offers a rich new approach.

A unique and engaging account of local urban decision-making within the globalizing world High Point, North Carolina, is known as the “Furniture Capital of the World.” Once a manufacturing stronghold, most of its furniture factories have closed over the past forty years, with production shipped off to low-wage countries. Yet as manufacturing left, the city tightened its hold on a biannual global exposition that serves as the world’s furniture fashion runway. At the High Point Market, visitors from more than one hundred nations traverse twelve million square feet of meticulous design. Downtown buildings—once courthouses, movie theaters, post offices, and gas stations—are now chic showroom spaces, even as many sit empty between each exposition. In Showroom City, John Joe Schlichtman applies an ethnographic lens to the global exposition’s relationship with High Point after it defeated rival Chicago in the 1960s and established itself as the world’s dominant furniture center. In recent decades, following trends in global finance, private equity firms were increasingly behind downtown High Point’s real estate transactions, coordinated by buyers far removed from the region. Then, in one massive transaction in 2011, a firm funded by Bain Capital purchased every major showroom building, and the majority of downtown real estate was under one owner. Showroom City is a story of exclusionary growth and unchecked development, of a city flailing to fill the void left by its dwindling factories. But beyond that Schlichtman engages the general lessons behind both High Point’s deindustrialization and its stunning reinvention as a furniture fashion, merchandising, and design node. With great nuance, he delves deeply to reveal how power operates locally and how citizens may affirm, exploit, influence, and resist the takeover of their community.