Emerging Global Cities - by Alejandro Portes & Ariel C Armony (Paperback)

About the Book

This book identifies the constellation of factors that allow certain urban places to become "emerging global cities"--centers of commerce, finance, art, and culture for entire regions. It traces the transformations of Dubai, Miami, and Singapore, identifying key features common to these cities.

Book Synopsis

Certain cities--most famously New York, London, and Tokyo--have been identified as "global cities," whose function in the world economy transcends national borders. Without the same fanfare, formerly peripheral and secondary cities have been growing in importance, emerging as global cities in their own right. The striking similarity of the skylines of Dubai, Miami, and Singapore is no coincidence: despite following different historical paths, all three have achieved newfound prominence through parallel trends.

In this groundbreaking book, Alejandro Portes and Ariel C. Armony demonstrate how the rapid and unexpected rise of these three cities recasts global urban studies. They identify the constellation of factors that allow certain urban places to become "emerging global cities"--centers of commerce, finance, art, and culture for entire regions. The book traces the transformations of Dubai, Miami, and Singapore, identifying key features common to these emerging global cities. It contrasts them with "global hopefuls," cities that, at one point or another, aspired to become global, and analyzes how Hong Kong is threatened with the loss of this status. Portes and Armony highlight the importance of climate change to the prospects of emerging global cities, showing how the same economic system that propelled their rise now imperils their future. Emerging Global Cities provides a powerful new framework for understanding the role of peripheral cities in the world economy and how they compete for and sometimes achieve global standing.

Review Quotes

I applaud the geographic range and historical detail of the case studies...The narrative and historical emphases make the book useful for undergraduate teaching in particular.-- "Contemporary Sociology"

A useful introduction for advanced students of urban studies.-- "Choice"

Emerging Global Cities examines the processes of globalization from below through distinct yet potentially generalizable historical sequences. Portes and Armony explain how and why some cities in the developing periphery have managed to rise from positions of inferiority and insignificance to become leading players in the global economy. This book will soon become a benchmark for the study of global cities and a new classic for urban studies, development studies, and economic sociology.--Min Zhou, University of California, Los Angeles

Emerging Global Cities breaks new ground by bringing together into one comparative study a set of emerging global cities (and hopefuls) to explain how the global capitalist system is devolving power to new regional hubs. Portes and Armony bring new perspectives--on climate change, poverty, and inequality, for example--to bear in their study, with great attention to class and ethnic structures in these cities.--James F. Hollifield, Ora Nixon Arnold Professor of International Political Economy, SMU

Emerging Global Cities sets a new standard for the comparative study of cities. Combining historical analysis, political economy, demography, and institutional analysis with a deep understanding of the global division of economic labor, the authors produce a set of gripping profiles of the successful, the also-rans, and the precarious, and place them all in a compelling theoretical framework.

--Paul DiMaggio, New York University

Portes and Armony offer us an exceptionally compelling and deeply perceptive rendering of twenty-first-century entrepôt cities--emergent urban centers driven and contoured by flows of people, ideas, money, and power. The conceptual tools they give us to understand how and why cities from Lagos to São Paulo to Miami are redrawing the global political map and charting our ecological future are indispensable for anyone interested in the rise and fall of cities and the flourishing of urban life.--Natasha Iskander, New York University

About the Author

Alejandro Portes is professor of law and distinguished scholar of arts and sciences at the University of Miami. He is the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle S. Beck Professor of Sociology (emeritus) and the founding director of the Center for Migration and Development at Princeton University. Portes is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the former president of the American Sociological Association. His books include City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami (1993) and Immigrant America: A Portrait (fourth edition, 2014).

Ariel C. Armony is vice chancellor for global affairs and director of the University Center for International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is also a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. He was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Fulbright scholar at Nankai University, and a resident fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. His publications include The Dubious Link: Civic Engagement and Democratization (2004) and, with Portes, The Global Edge: Miami in the Twenty-First Century (2018).