Global Urban Analysis provides a unique insight into the contemporary world economy through a focus on cities. It is based upon a large-scale customised data collection on how leading businesses use cities across the world: as headquarter locations, for finance, for professional and creative services, for media. These data - involving up to 2000 firms and over 500 cities - provide evidence for both how the leading cities, sometimes called global cities, are coming to dominate the world economy, and how hundreds of other cities are faring in this brave new urban world. Thus can the likes of London, New York and Hong Kong be tracked as well as Manchester, Cleveland and Guangzhou, and even Plymouth, Chattanooga and Xi'an. Cities are assessed and ranked in terms of their importance for various functions such as for financial services, legal services and advertising, plus novel findings are reported for the geographical orientations of their connections. This is truly a comprehensive survey of cities in globalization covering global, world-regional, and national scales of analysis: - 4 key chapters outline the global structure of the world economy featuring the leading cities; - 9 regional chapters covering the whole world also feature the level of services provided by 'medium' cities; - 22 chapters on selected countries and sub-regions indicate global-ness and local-ness and feature an even wider range of cities. Written in an easy to understand style, this book is a must read for anybody interested in their own city in the world and how it relates to other cities.

This book unpacks the challenge of how to make sense of urban complexity. With contributions from key global scholars, it explores various methodological approaches including Comparative Urbanism, Social Network Analysis and Data Visualisation.

Cities and towns are the original producers of many of the global environmental problems related to waste disposal, and air and water pollution. There is a rapidly growing need for technologies that will enable monitoring of the world's natural resources and urban assets, and managing exposure to natural and man-made risks. The Group on Earth Obser

Peter Taylor's compelling insights challenge us to view cities as part of a global network, divorced from the constraints of national or even regional boundaries.

Since the 1950s and the advance of urban renewal, local governments and urban policy have focused heavily on the central business district. However, such development has all but ignored the inner-city neighborhoods that continue to struggle in the shadows of high-rise America. This analysis of urban neighborhoods in the United States from 1960 to 1995 presents fifteen essays by scholars of urban planning and development. Together they show how urban neighborhoods can and must be preserved as economic, cultural, and political centers.

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 generated networks of work. It is the myriad of flows between office towers in different metropolitan centres that has produced a world city network. Taylor and Derudder's unique and illuminating book provides both an update and a substantial revision of the first edition that was published in 2004. It provides a comprehensive and systematic description and analysis of the world city network as the 'skeleton' upon which contemporary globalization has been built. Through an analysis of the intra-company flows of 175 leading global service firms across 526 cities in 2012, this book assesses cities in terms of their overall network connectivity, the regional configurations they form, and their changing position in the period 2000-12. Results are used to reflect on cities and city/state relations in the context of the global ecological and economic crisis. Written by two of the foremost authorities on the subject, this book provides a much-needed mapping of the connecting relationships between world cities, and will be a valuable resource for students of urban studies, geography, sociology and planning.

Given the pervasiveness of the informal sector and the lack of adequate universal safety nets, livelihoods of the poor depend heavily on their ability to access and accumulate assets, obtain decent returns on those assets, and use their asset base to manage risks. The papers in this volume discuss the strategies adopted by people to accumulate assets through migration, housing investments, natural resources management and informal businesses and consider how an asset-based social policy could enable those strategies or help them overcome the constraints of an unfavorable institutional environment.

Issues and themes / Gregory K. Ingram and Yu-hung Hong -- Public actions and property prices -- Restricting residential construction / Edward L. Glaeser -- Regulation and property values in the United States : the high cost of monopoly / John M. Quigley -- Commentary / Katherine A. Kiel -- The efficiency and equity of tiebout in the United States : taxes, services, and property values / Thomas J. Nechyba -- Commentary / Daphne A. Kenyon -- The economics of conservation easements / Andrew J. Plantinga -- Commentary / Kerry Smith -- The importance of land value in today's economy -- The value of land in the United States : 1975-2005 / Karl E. Case -- Commentary / Stephen Malpezzi -- Urban land rents in the United States / David Barker -- Commentary / Robin Dubin -- Land and property taxation -- Land value taxation as a method of financing municipal expenditures in U.S. cities / Richard W. England -- Commentary / Robert M. Schwab -- Taxing land and property in emerging economies : raising revenue . . . and more? / Richard M. Bird and Enid Slack -- Commentary / Miguel Urrutia -- Urban development and revitalization -- Asia's urban century : emerging trends / Rakesh Mohan -- The U.K.'s experience in revitalizing inner cities / Peter Hall -- Commentary / Jody Tableporter -- Hopeful signs : U.S. urban revitalization in the twenty-first century / Eugnie L. Birch -- Commentary / William C. Apgar -- New developments in land and housing markets -- Community land trusts and affordable housing / Steven C. Bourassa -- Commentary / Stephen C. Sheppard -- Multiple home ownership and the income elasticity of housing demand / Eric Belsky, Xiao di Zhu, and Dan McCue -- Commentary / Michael Carliner -- Brazil's urban land and housing markets : how well are they working? / David E. Dowall -- Commentary / J. Vernon Henderson -- Contributors -- Index -- About the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

A comprehensive review and analysis of the natural hazards menacing humanity. It also provides new and arresting evidence on how, where and why disaster risk is increasing globally. Drawing on detailed studies, this Global Assessment urges a radical shift in development practices, and a major new emphasis on resilience and disaster planning.