Global Urban Policy
A Framework for Analyzing State and Society
How to see like a city
Description
Cities are active policy innovators of global importance, whether responding to climate change, migration, poverty, or health disparities, or aiming to generate growth. Since cities adapt to the needs and interests of global capital, they may implement policies that slight the well-being of everyday residents and the most vulnerable. How cities choose to contribute to a democratic and sustainable future reveals dimensions of political life playing out in society at large.
Global Urban Policy suggests that to understand contemporary societal transformation—and political and policy processes more generally—we need to study the policies that cities create and implement. Going beyond thinking of “urban” as a physical site, the authors show that an urban mode of life is one marked by diversity, complexity, chaos, flexibility, and ongoing change. With eleven empirical case studies, the authors examine issues including housing and urban development, migration, climate change, and crime in cities as varied as Berlin, Medellín, Chicago, Accra, Guangzhou, São Paulo, Mumbai, and Saint Etienne. The studies show how contemporary confrontations between public and private property, power and justice, participation and exclusion, wealth and poverty, and emerging technology and existing economic, social, and political structures take physical form in cities. Global Urban Policy engages with theoretical developments in public policy, urban politics, and urban studies to develop and demonstrate a framework for urban policy analysis.
David Kaufmann is Assistant Professor of Spatial Development and Urban Policy at ETH Zürich.
Mara Sidney is Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University–Newark and Director of the Global Urban Studies PhD program.
Reviews
“This book is a welcomed major contribution to a better understanding of the politics of cities, proposing an analytical approach constructed by intellectual bridges between politics and policies, state and civil society actors and institutions. It is attentive to urban conflicts, and fit for studying both global north and south cities.”
- Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques, University of São Paulo
“Global Urban Policy brings together a rich collection of vivid comparative case studies that reveal the global reach of urban policymaking. Moving beyond the state, it highlights the crucial roles that nonstate actors play in shaping urban policies. Insightful and wide-ranging, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in how cities are governed and imagined in the twenty-first century.”
- Xuefei Ren, Michigan State University
“Urbanization and the rise of metropolitan governments all over the world have paved the way for a renewal of urban policies with more resources, more innovation, more circulation, more imitations and renewed conflicts. This important and timely book comprises an innovative conceptual framework to analyze urban policies based on original research—i.e., a tour de force. The book decisively demonstrates why and how urban policies are becoming central in the world of comparative global urban studies!”
- Patrick Le Galès, Sciences Po