These shifts have markedly transformed occupational and income structures within cities, have imposed burdens of transport infrastructure and on the energy efficiency of cities, and have reordered the social and spatial composition of many neighbourhoods. Our research seeks to document and comprehend these factors more precisely using both historical and contemporary analysis. We examine the evolution of cities, specifically as they struggle for survival in a globalised competitive environment. Our research delves into the contradictory dynamics of urban growth and development as cities now supplant countries as the basic units of international financial and political power. A dogged hierarchical competition between cities now ensues.
Losers play dearly.
So do their citizens. Injustice and inequality, alongside class and social tensions are writ large in cities. Our research looks at such contradictions in a European, North American and Pacific-Asian context, and we have PhD studies conducting urban research in all of these continents. As well as seeking to understand processes of global city emergence, and factors associated with the maintenance of global city standings, we are concerned with the consequences that these processes have for individuals, neighbourhoods, social groupings, and public institutions. Our research is not only restricted to global cities, since it looks at how globalisation reverberates in uneven ways up and down the global urban hierarchy.