Scholarly concern over the role of cities as sites for global governance and the organization of global activities has increased substantially over the past 25 years. The partial denationalization of global politics has been accompanied by the increasing importance of non-state and sub-national state actors, including municipal governments. It has further resulted in the rising significance of cities as sites in and for global governance. Cities serve as platforms for scale-jumping—the movement of organizations and issues across scalar boundaries—locales for networking, and sites for the convergence of disparate global ideologies. Global actors, by concentrating in cities, take advantage of propinquity and the dense networks available in the urban landscape to organize their activities, and in doing so, also establish certain cities as "nodes" in their global networks. At the same time, global ideologies are expressed in urban landscapes and global politics takes concrete form in cities.
Because of these developments, scholars of global affairs have expressed increasing interest in the presence and influence of the city in global governance. This series will feature unique perspectives on theoretical and empirical issues in the relationship between cities and global governance. The series will serve as a platform to theorize previously undertheorized aspects of the relationship, to challenge conventional wisdom in the field, and to offer new empirical analysis of the role of cities as sites and actors in global governance as well as the role of global governance on the ground in cities. Each volume will make a distinct contribution to one or more of these questions. Volumes may take various conceptual and methodological approaches. Some will study cases, others will examine networks; some will have a regional focus, others will have a global focus; some will be focused on cities as they intersect with particular issues in global governance.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
Edited
By Janne Nijman, Barbara Oomen, Elif Durmuş, Sara Miellet, Lisa Roodenburg
November 14, 2022
Increasingly, urban actors invoke human rights to address inequalities, combat privatisation, and underline common aspirations, or to protect vested (private) interests. The potential and the pitfalls of these processes are conditioned by the urban, and deeply political. These urban politics of ...
Edited
By Helmut Philipp Aust, Anél du Plessis
December 10, 2018
The adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the UN General Assembly in 2015 represents the latest attempt by the international community to live up to the challenges of a planet that is out of control. Sustainable Development Goal 11 envisages inclusive, safe, resilient and ...
By Kristin Ljungkvist
October 23, 2017
Global cities all over the world are taking on new roles as they increasingly participate directly and independently in international affairs and global politics. So far, surprisingly few studies have analyzed the role of the Global City beyond its already well explicated role in the globalized ...
By Corina McKendry
September 26, 2017
City greening has been heralded for contributing to environmental governance and critiqued for exacerbating displacement and inequality. Bringing these two disparate analyses into conversation, this book offers a comparative understanding of how tensions between growth, environmental protection, ...
Edited
By Craig Johnson, Noah Toly, Heike Schroeder
March 15, 2017
Drawing upon a variety of empirical and theoretical perspectives, The Urban Climate Challenge provides a hands-on perspective about the political and technical challenges now facing cities and transnational urban networks in the global climate regime. Bringing together experts working in the fields...
By Taedong Lee
November 16, 2016
Cities have led the way to combat climate change by planning and implementing climate mitigation and adaptation policies. These local efforts go beyond national boundaries. Cities are forming transnational networks to enhance their understandings and practices for climate policies. In contrast to ...
Edited
By Simon Curtis
June 01, 2016
Cities have become increasingly important to global politics, but have largely occupied a peripheral place in the academic study of International Relations (IR). This is a notable oversight for the discipline, although one which may be explained by IR’s traditional state centrism, the subjugation ...
By Sofie Bouteligier
September 12, 2014
As a result of global dynamics—the increasing interconnection of people and places—innovations in global environmental governance haved altered the role of cities in shaping the future of the planet. This book is a timely study of the importance of these social transformations in our ...
