Cities in transition : Globalization, political change and urban development

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This book was written with the aim of showing that even in the era of globalization developments appearing in cities are not subject to almost unconditional global forces. Rather, universal forces are decisive eventualities in the process of urban restructuring, often influencing its course and speed, yet developments and particularities within a city strongly influence the course of events and the extent to which negative characteristics of globalization might occur. Local forces are central in the process of change and they may influence the perceived unstoppable process of globalization, leading to considerable qualitative and quantitative differences in the urban development processes of the globalization era. It thus challenges Sassen’s hypothesis that globalization as a process forces uniformity upon individual regions or cities and imprints macro-cultural structural patterns onto local forms. It focuses on the interplay between local and global forces whose influence is strongly affected by the very different spatial and temporal local constellations and development factors which give globalization a local flavour.

Berlin, Brussels, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Hong Kong, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sarajevo and Vienna: Using these important cities the special relationship between global and local/regional forces is analyzed. The case studies were selected based on their political and cultural context and the fact that their social and political fabric was subject to major changes in the recent past. How global processes manifest themselves locally depends to a great extent on how development processes and endogenic potentials are initiated locally in order to cope with the new global economic and societal conditions.