Roger Keil

Don Parson

Mathew Coleman

Sapana Doshi

Judy Branfman

A Private City's Activist Futures

Public Los Angeles

David Bell

Leesa Fawcett

Peter Penz

This collection addresses environmental issues from a contemporary political economy perspective. The papers explore issues such as the link between culture and nature, the impact of humanity on the environment, technology's role and communications.

Global and Local

Political Ecology

Rianne Mahon

Caught in the trap of the nation-state and frozen in postwar bloc logic, critical political economy has been found wanting when it comes to problematizing space and scale. Globalization and the rise of world cities and regions have shaken the discipline's foundations and fostered new interest in the concept of scale. Leviathan Undone? brings together leading theorists and scholars from a variety of disciplines to develop a new language to understand the spatial restructuring that has accompanied globalization. By treating scale as the core concept of our time, these innovative, groundbreaking essays bring a new sensibility to classical and contemporary concerns in Canadian and international political economy.

Towards a Political Economy of Scale

Leviathan Undone?

Maria Kaika

Tait Mandler

Yannis Tzaninis

Since its emergence in the 1990s, the field of Urban Political Ecology (UPE) has focused on unsettling traditional understandings of the ‘city’ as entirely distinct from nature, showing instead how cities are metabolically linked with ecological processes and the flow of resources. More recently, a new generation of scholars has turned the focus towards the climate emergency. Turning up the heat seeks to turn UPE's critical energies towards a politically engaged debate over the role of extensive urbanisation in addressing socio-environmental equality in the context of climate change. The collection brings together theoretical discussions and rigorous empirical analysis by key scholars spanning three generations, engaging UPE in current debates about urbanisation and climate change. Engaging with cutting edge approaches including feminist political ecology, circular economies, and the Anthropocene, case studies in the book range from Singapore and Amsterdam to Nairobi and Vancouver. Contributors make the case for a UPE better informed by situated knowledges: an embodied UPE that pays equal attention to the role of postcolonial processes and more-than-human ontologies of capital accumulation within the context of the climate emergency. Acknowledging UPE’s rich intellectual history and aiming to enrich rather than split the field, Turning up the heat reveals how UPE is ideally positioned to address contemporary environmental issues in theory and practice.

Urban political ecology for a climate emergency

Turning up the heat

K. Murat Güney

Murat Üço?lu

Providing a systematic overview of large-scale housing projects, Massive Suburbanization investigates the building and rebuilding of urban peripheries on a global scale. Offering a universal inter-referencing point for research on the dynamics of "massive suburbia," this book builds a new discussion pertaining to the problems of the urban periphery, urbanization, and the neoliberal production of space. Conceptual and empirical chapters revisit the classic cases of large-scale suburban building in Canada, the former Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, and the United States and examine the new peripheral estates in China, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, the Philippines, South Africa, and Turkey. The contributors examine a broad variety of cases that speak to the building or redevelopment of large-scale peripheral housing estates, tower neighbourhoods, Grands Ensembles, Gro?wohnsiedlungen, and Toplu Konut. Concerned with state and corporate policy for building suburban estates, Massive Suburbanization confronts the politics surrounding local inhabitants and their "right to the suburb."

(Re)Building the Global Periphery

Massive Suburbanization

Stefan Kipfer

Pierre Hamel

Julie-Anne Boudreau

The region is back in town. Galloping urbanization has pushed beyond historical notions of metropolitanism. City-regions have experienced, in Edward Soja’s terms, “an epochal shift in the nature of the city and the urbanization process, marking the beginning of the end of the modern metropolis as we knew it.” Governing Cities Through Regions broadens and deepens our understanding of metropolitan governance through an innovative comparative project that engages with Anglo-American, French, and German literatures on the subject of regional governance. It expands the comparative angle from issues of economic competiveness and social cohesion to topical and relevant fields such as housing and transportation, and it expands comparative work on municipal governance to the regional scale. With contributions from established and emerging international scholars of urban and regional governance, the volume covers conceptual topics and case studies that contrast the experience of a range of Canadian metropolitan regions with a strong selection of European regions. It starts from assumptions of limited conversion among regions across the Atlantic but is keenly aware of the remarkable differences in urban regions’ path dependencies in which the larger processes of globalization and neo-liberalization are situated and materialized.

Canadian and European Perspectives

Governing Cities Through Regions

Xuefei Ren

The newly revised Globalizing Cities Reader reflects how the geographies of theory have recently shifted away from the western vantage points from which much of the classic work in this field was developed. The expanded volume continues to make available many of the original and foundational works that underpin the research field, while expanding coverage to familiarize students with new theoretical and epistemological positions as well as emerging research foci and horizons. It contains 38 new chapters, including key writings on globalizing cities from leading thinkers such as John Friedmann, Michael Peter Smith, Saskia Sassen, Peter Taylor, Manuel Castells, Anthony King, Jennifer Robinson, Ananya Roy, and Fulong Wu. The new Reader reflects the fact that world and global city studies have evolved in exciting and wide-ranging ways, and the very notion of a distinct "global" class of cities has recently been called into question. The sections examine the foundations of the field and processes of urban restructuring and global city formation. A large number of new entries focus on the emerging urban worlds of Asia, Latin America and Africa, including Beijing, Bogota, Cairo, Cape Town, Delhi, Istanbul, Medellin, Mumbai, Phnom Penh, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Shanghai. The book also presents cases off the conventional map of global cities research, such as smaller cities and less known urban regions that are undergoing processes of globalization. The book is a key resource for students and scholars alike who seek an accessible compendium of the intellectual foundations of global urban studies as well as an overview of the emergent patterns of early 21st century urbanization and associated sociopolitical contestation around the world.

The Globalizing Cities Reader

Neil Brenner

Since the mid-1990s, research on global cities has exploded throughout the social sciences. It has now become one of the most exciting, if controversial, approaches to the study of urban life today.

The Global Cities Reader

Caught in the trap of the nation-state and frozen in post-war bloc logic, critical political economy has been found wanting when it comes to problematizing space and scale. Globalization and the prominence of world cities and regions have shaken the foundations of contemporary social science and fostered a new interest in the concept of scale, one which has its own contradictions and dynamics, but is also articulated with other related spatialities such topologies, places, territories, and levels of government. Leviathan Undone? Brings together leading theorists and scholars, offering innovative analyses and classical and contemporary concerns in Canadian and international political economy. The essays range in topic from the role of the nation-state to aboriginal governance, and from public health to child care. This groundbreaking volume will be of interest to students and scholars of social science and anyone interest in politics, geography, and political economy. -- Back cover.

The urban century manifests itself at the peripheries. While the massive wave of present urbanization is often referred to as an 'urban revolution', most of this startling urban growth worldwide is happening at the margins of cities. This book is about the process that creates the global urban periphery – suburbanization – and the ways of life – suburbanisms – we encounter there. Richly detailed with examples from around the world, the book argues that suburbanization is a global process and part of the extended urbanization of the planet. This includes the gated communities of elites, the squatter settlements of the poor, and many built forms and ways of life in-between. The reality of life in the urban century is suburban: most of the earth's future 10 billion inhabitants will not live in conventional cities but in suburban constellations of one kind or another. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's demand not to give up urban theory when the city in its classical form disappears, this book is a challenge to urban thought more generally as it invites the reader to reconsider the city from the outside in.

Roger Keil

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