Global Urban Policy: A New Framework for Analysis

Cities are active policy innovators of global importance, whether responding to climate change, migration, poverty, or health disparities, or aiming to generate growth. Since cities adapt to the needs and interests of global capital, they may implement policies that slight the well-being of everyday residents and the most vulnerable. How cities choose to contribute to a democratic and sustainable future reveals dimensions of political life playing out in society at large.

Global Urban Policy suggests that to understand contemporary societal transformation—and political and policy processes more generally—we need to study the policies that cities create and implement. Going beyond thinking of “urban” as a physical site, the authors show that an urban mode of life is one marked by diversity, complexity, chaos, flexibility, and ongoing change. With eleven empirical case studies, the authors examine issues including housing and urban development, migration, climate change, and crime in cities as varied as Berlin, Medellín, Chicago, Accra, Guangzhou, São Paulo, Mumbai, and Saint Etienne. The studies show how contemporary confrontations between public and private property, power and justice, participation and exclusion, wealth and poverty, and emerging technology and existing economic, social, and political structures take physical form in cities. Global Urban Policy engages with theoretical developments in public policy, urban politics, and urban studies to develop and demonstrate a framework for urban policy analysis.

David Kaufmann is Assistant Professor of Spatial Development and Urban Policy at ETH Zürich.

Mara Sidney is Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University–Newark and Director of the Global Urban Studies PhD program.