Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City focuses on the controversial, neglected theme of citizenship. It examines the changing role of citizens; their rights, obligations and responsibilities as members of nation-states and the issue of accountability in a global society. Using this interdisciplinary approach, the book offers an innovative collection of work from Robert A. Beauregard, Anna Bounds, Janine Brodie, Richard Dagger, Gerard Delanty, Judith A. Garber, Robert J. Holton, Warren Magnusson, Raymond Rocco, Nikolas Rose, Evelyn S. Ruppert, Saskia Sassen, Bryan S. Turner, John Urry, Gerda R. Wekerle and Nira Yuval-Davis.

There are now more than three hundred city-regions around the world with populations greater than one million. These city-regions are expanding vigorously, and they present many new and deep challenges to researchers and policy-makers in both the more developed and less developed parts of the world. The processes of global economic integration and accelerated urban growth make traditional planning and policy strategies in these regions increasingly inadequate, while more effective approaches remain largely in various stages of hypothesis and experimentation. 'Global City-Regions' represents a multifaceted effort to deal with the many different issues raised by these developments. It seeks at once to define the question of global city-regions and to describe the internal and external dynamics that shape them; it proposes a theorization of global city-regions based on their economic and political responses to intensifying levels of globalization; and it offers a number of policy insights into the severe social problems that confront global city-regions as they come face to face with an economically and politically neoliberal world. At a moment when globalization is increasingly subject to critical scrutiny in many different quarters, this book provides a timely overview of its effects on urban and regional development, one of its most important (but perhaps least understood) corollaries. The book also offers a series of nuanced visions of alternative possible futures.

Because of severe domestic labor shortages, Japan has recently joined the increasing number of advanced industrialized nations that have begun importing large numbers of immigrant workers since the 1980s. Although the citizenship status of foreign workers is the most precarious in such recent countries of immigration, the national governments of these countries have become increasingly preoccupied with border enforcement, forcing local municipalities and organizations to offer basic rights and social services to the foreign residents who are settling in their local communities. This book analyzes the development of local citizenship in Japan by examining the role of local governments and NGOs as well as grass-roots political and judicial activism in the expansion of immigrant rights. In this manner, localities are emerging as important sites for the struggle for immigrant citizenship and social integration, enabling foreign workers to enjoy substantive rights even in the absence of national citizenship. The possibilities and limits of such local citizenship in Japan are then compared to three other recent countries of immigration (Italy, Spain, and South Korea).

Publisher description

What is a Global City? Who authorizes the World Class City? This edited volume interrogates the "global cities" literature, which views the city as a shimmering, financial "global network." Through a historical-ethnographic exploration of inter-ethnic relations in the "other global" cities of Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul, Bukhara, Lhasa, Delhi, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo, the well-known contributors highlight cartographies of the Other Global City. The volume contends that thinking about the city in the longue duree and as part of a topography of interconnected regions contests both imperial and nationalist ways of reading cities that have occasioned the many and particularly violent territorial partitions in Asia and the world.

′The contributions of Woodiwiss, Lister and Sassen are outstanding but not unrepresentative of the many merits of this excellent collection′- The British Journal of Sociology From women′s rights, civil rights, and sexual rights for gays and lesbians to disability rights and language rights, we have experienced in the past few decades a major trend in Western nation-states towards new claims for inclusion. This trend has echoed around the world: from the Zapatistas to Chechen and Kurdish nationalists, social and political movements are framing their struggles in the languages of rights and recognition, and hence, of citizenship. Citizenship has thus become an increasingly important axis in the social sciences. Social scientists have been rethinking the role of political agent or subject. Not only are the rights and obligations of citizens being redefined, but also what it means to be a citizen has become an issue of central concern. As the process of globalization produces multiple diasporas, we can expect increasingly complex relationships between homeland and host societies that will make the traditional idea of national citizenship problematic. As societies are forced to manage cultural difference and associated tensions and conflict, there will be changes in the processes by which states allocate citizenship and a differentiation of the category of citizen. This book constitutes the most authoritative and comprehensive guide to the terrain. Drawing on a wealth of interdisciplinary knowledge, and including some of the leading commentators of the day, it is an essential guide to understanding modern citizenship. About the editors: Engin F Isin is Associate Professor of Social Science at York University. His recent works include Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship (Minnesota, 2002) and, with P K Wood, Citizenship and Identity (Sage, 1999). He is the Managing Editor of Citizenship Studies. Bryan S Turner is Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. He has written widely on the sociology of citizenship in Citizenship and Capitalism (Unwin Hyman, 1986) and Citizenship and Social Theory (Sage, 1993). He is also the author of The Body and Society (Sage, 1996) and Classical Sociology (Sage, 1999), and has been editor of Citizenship Studies since 1997.

With the advent of multinational corporations, the traditional urban service function has 'gone global'. In order to provide services to globalizing corporate clients, the offices of major financial and business service firms across the world have formed a network. It is the myriad of flows between office towers in different metropolitan centres that has produced a world city network. Through an analysis of the intra-company flows of 100 leading global service firms across 315 cities, this book assesses cities in terms of their overall network connectivity, their connectivity by service sector, and their connectivity by world region. Peter Taylor's unique and illuminating book provides the first comprehensive and systematic description and analysis of the world city network as the 'skeleton' upon which contemporary globalization has been built. His analyses challenge the traditional view of the world as a 'mosaic map' of political boundaries. Written by one of the foremost authorities on the subject, this book provides a much needed mapping of the connecting relationships between world cities, and will be an enlightening book for students of urban studies, geography, sociology and planning.

Table of contents

Over the last three decades, our understanding of the city worldwide has been revolutionized by three innovative theoretical concepts – globalisation, postcolonialism and a radically contested notion of modernity. The idea and even the reality of the city has been extended out of the state and nation and re-positioned in the larger global world. In this book Anthony King brings together key essays written over this period, much of it dominated by debates about the world or global city. Challenging assumptions and silences behind these debates, King provides largely ignored historical and cultural dimensions to the understanding of world city formation as well as decline. Interdisciplinary and comparative, the essays address new ways of framing contemporary themes: the imperial and colonial origin of contemporary world and global cities, actually existing postcolonialisms, claims about urban and cultural homogenisation and the role of architecture and built environment in that process. Also addressed are arguments about indigenous and exogenous perspectives, Eurocentricism, ways of framing vernacular architecture, and the global historical sociology of building types. Wide-ranging and accessible, Writing the Global City provides essential historical contexts and theoretical frameworks for understanding contemporary urban and architectural debates. Extensive bibliographies will make it essential for teaching, reference and research.

Understanding worldwide gangs through the lens of globalization