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Summary Urban dwellers globally are experiencing systematic and intersectional inequalities—heightened by the COVID-19 crisis. In this regard, the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) have a key role in guiding sustainable and equitable urban planning and development. Yet enduring contradictions across the goals, siloed approaches, or the complexities of implementation, means that SDG localization may fall short of the transformative aim to “leave no one behind.” In this perspective, we provide a practical framework for mobilizing “urban equality” through the 2030 Agenda. We present a content analysis of the intersections between “urban” and “equality” references across the 17 SDGs, and associated targets and indicators, drawing out four key areas for accelerating an urban equality agenda. This framework is presented with the aim of identifying clear opportunities for mobilizing the SDGs through an urban equality lens—and shaping further research, policy, and practice, which ensures that we “leave no urban citizens behind.”

With billions worth of funding to city-based projects, urban dwellers and city leaders the world over, philanthropy is no small matter. It might shape the form, politics and direction of urban development worldwide, yet little discussion of its role is present in urban studies. In this commentary, we call for urban scholars and practitioners to become more explicitly conversant in its investment dynamics in cities and their impact on urban governance. We highlight a two-pronged research agenda focused on institutions and individuals. First, we argue that we need to understand the impact of philanthropic institutions not just generally on cities but specifically on urban governance. Second, we call for nuanced attention to the philanthropy of high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) and its relationship to urban policymaking and wealth redistribution in cities. Third, we highlight the value of a more ‘global urban’ outlook onto the landscape of philanthropic funding in cities, starting with greater attention to philanthropic practices beyond the Global North. We conclude by sketching possible empirical steps towards an action research agenda, whilst underlining the necessary reflexivity that urban scholars should have in their positioning vis-a-vis philanthropy and its engagement in urban academia.

Yasser Elsheshtawy’s Temporary Cities: Resisting Transience in Arabia is, a decade after its landmark predecessor Behind an Urban Spectacle (Elsheshtawy 2009), a must read for urbanists. Yasser’s b...

City diplomacy has a long history and has witnessed a clear sprawl over the last century. Successive “generations” of city diplomacy approaches have emerged over this period, with a heyday of networked urban governance in the last two decades. The covid-19 pandemic crisis presents a key opportunity to contemplate the direction of city diplomacy amid global systemic disruptions, raising questions about the effectiveness of differing diplomatic styles across cities but also the prospect of a new generational shift. This essay traces the history of generations in city diplomacy, examines prospects for novel ways of understanding city diplomacy, and contemplates how the pandemic’s impact heralds not the demise of internationalization in urban governance but an era in which city diplomacy is even more crucial amid fundamental limitations.

The existing networking dynamics in climate city networks are hierarchical as a few global cities are viewed as the leaders to be followed by other cities due to their higher visibility. Achieving ambitious climate goals requires expanding the knowledge of a diverse range of cities and networking opportunities. To expand knowledge of diverse cities, we provide evidence of cities’ similarity patterns based on their mitigation actions by a large-scale clustering method. Applying K-means clustering to Carbon Disclosure Project’s mitigation data, we find five clusters of cities based on two measures. Nature of actions indicates cities’ similarity based on their actions’ sectoral combinations, and finance profile indicates the commonality of their actions’ financial arrangements. Using these measures, we present a novel way to render socio-spatially diverse cities similar. Intersecting these two measures in a matrix, we offer ways to reimagine networking between cities and illuminate the complexity of cities’ climate actions.

The last decade has seen “global” and “comparative” forms of urbanism flourish, and critiques thereof expand. While in theory the discussion on the value or shortcomings of global city thinking has thrived, in practice many cities have applied it through expanding international outlooks and collaborations through mounting numbers of partnerships and networks. This has also witnessed a growing sense of competition between peers near and far for investment, talent, and tourism. The “comparative gestures” of cities are increasingly common not just in research but in practice, with expanding ranks of city benchmarking to testify to the popularity of “actually existing” comparative thinking. While there has been a significant rise in the number of city rankings and indexes, as well as increased scholarly interest in comparative urban analysis, how benchmarking is shaping the imagination of those driving urban policymaking or indeed how it relates to global city thinking is still little understood. This study aimed to identify correlations between an appreciation of city rankings and “global city” thinking, especially in cities that have emerged on the “map” of global urbanism. It draws on 170 interviews with a variety of key urban development stakeholders in Dubai, Singapore, and Sydney, focusing on how city rankings relate to the ways we speak of global cities. It suggests a close but nuanced correlation between global city thinking and benchmarking in these cities, but also a wider “map” of comparative gestures than we may have anticipated.

Cities have been recognized as important players in some of today’s most visible global agendas, from the Paris Agreement on climate to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. This is a ...

A shift away from the city as the default unit of analysis in urban studies is one of the widely agreed-upon advances brought about by the planetary urbanization thesis. Yet academic critique of me...

Cities are formalising collaborations across borders at an unprecedented rate: ‘city networks’ now form a wide ecosystem of global partnerships between local authorities that is often underestimated. It might be time to think of city networks more explicitly as institutionalised and presenting a challenging form of more-than-local urban governance. To do so, our essay mixes a review of the overall global landscape (beyond the environmental sector where most of the literature is to be found), with both a network analysis of how these institutions work as a web of connections, as well as an ‘inside out’ view of how they are managed and what the challenges of that are. We do this by analysing a database of 202 of these networks, both statistically as well as via social network analysis. We find that: international initiatives are on the rise, but this context of partnerships has a well-established history, producing a wealth of information and outputs and offering a complex organisational landscape for cities to reach out beyond their local confines. We measure the relationship this has to the integration of cities into the global economy, the pathways it opens for further internationalisation of city leadership and the patterns of partnership with business and international organisations that it implies.

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis offers a chance for urban scholars to play an even more explicit role in shaping ‘global urban governance’. Recognizing this international political realm, and the fundamental role that information exchange plays within it, urban studies can help drive a more progressive and inclusive global urban imagination.

Phelps and Miao are rightly reappraising the idea ‘urban entrepreneurialism’ at a time when calls for city leaders to be outgoing abound. In a brief response to their proposition as to better qualify the varieties of entrepreneurialism at work in cities, I argue that we need to attend more explicitly to the politics underpinning these varieties, not to forget the urban governance that underscores urban entrepreneurship. Only by taking into account the interdisciplinary encounter of geography and politics, as in the case of more aptly qualifying urban (or city) diplomacy, can we grasp the fundamental reconfigurations of urban governance these varieties are prompting.

Cities are playing an increasingly vital role in global sustainability. Yet there is still little systematic and international evidence on the recognition and formal role of cities in multilateral affairs. Where and how are cities acknowledged as part of global efforts? How do the United Nations frame this ‘urban’ contribution to major international processes and agendas? To offer some initial evidence‐based pointers to this set of problems, we present an analysis of explicit references to cities in major UN frameworks (n = 32) underpinning the current Agenda 2030 on sustainable development. We investigate how cities are cited to determine the role, key themes and contextual trends framing the engagement between United Nations and cities. Contra arguments for the uniqueness of the current ‘rise’ of mayors, our review demonstrates a weak rise in the recognition of cities over time in UN frameworks and shows historical continuity in this acknowledgement since the 1970s. Our review confirms that two prevailing themes determining this are those of ‘development’ and the ‘environment’ but other issues (like ‘infrastructure’ and ‘health’) are following closely behind. It also highlights acknowledgment of cities as ‘actors’ is on the rise since the 2000s and raises fundamental questions as to the status of cities internationally. We argue it becomes imperative to more systematically and strategically think of the role of cities in the UN system, but also flag that raises fundamental challenges for multilateral governance.

This chapter cites the key ideas supporting global city research and juxtaposes them in a disaggregated way against the ways key elites are shaping urban development, from planners and architects to government officers and corporate managers. It provides viewpoints about the urban development, as well as the global urban imagination. It also addresses the inquiry into the imagination that stands behind the global city-speak and diverse urban aspirations that bolster it. The chapter discusses imagination, which is the symbolic power to cast and recast its orientation, the future of cities, and globalization. It refers to the progressive and cosmopolitan way of thinking about the “global” in the “global city” that can be found, fought, and socialized.

This chapter cites Ola Söderström, who demonstrated how off the map cities in the Global South are enmeshed in transnational relationships that determine their growth. It emphasizes closer attention to the politics of translocal connections as clear determinants of the intensity and orientation of the trajectories of urban development. Understanding how politics play out is an exercise in contemporaneously appreciating future orientations and the historical processes that led to today in relation to places such as Dubai, Sydney, and Singapore. The chapter emphasizes how the creation of governing relationships between those who control the city and those who live under such rule is no short-term feat. Even behind the myth of super-fast urbanism, Dubai, Sydney, and Singapore can showcase both historical and international trajectories.

This chapter investigates the line between the “governors” and the “governed” when it comes to high-powered global urbanists shaping the growth of global cities the world over. It considers the politics of the global city as fundamentally a question of politics of boundaries: not just the relations of power over a defined territory, but the making of the shape, boundaries, and global–local relations of that place. The edifice of global city politics is generally a complex interplay of different layers of government within and beyond the boundaries of the city in question. The chapter investigates how global city politics are intertwined with the complexity of public–private relationships and community-driven advocacy. Speaking of leadership requires speaking of governance, including the whole edifice of governing a city, whether formal, private, and even informal.

This chapter looks at strategic urban plans that are used by cities around the world to establish leadership priorities and set out what a city and its leaders aim to achieve in a certain time span. Strategic plans connect leaders to structures and institutions and aim to catalyze action. The chapter investigates the process of developing a strategic plan that can bring actors together to establish governance priorities. It explains how strategic plans, when completed and adopted by a city, identify an approach to achieve those priorities. The process of strategic planning and the resulting strategic plan document, as tools, complement the work of city leaders and municipal institutions in cities and provide a platform for bridging silos and building coalitions across the transitional constituencies that underpin the governance of global cities.

This chapter analyzes leadership by describing how the authority in Dubai remains relatively one-tiered despite financial obligations to its neighbor and of the expanding neoliberal climate. Dubai's governance is still solidly centralized despite the growing influence of business actors and the relative political-economic dependence on Abu Dhabi. The chapter underlines the key drivers that allow for the continuation of management and how Dubai's monarchic government has managed to maintain a strong hold on its development process over the past few decades in order to grasp the clout of leadership on the global city. It highlights the fundamental element of the domestic–international relationship, placing city leaders as key middlemen between the street and the globe. Leadership is a theme that comes predominantly from the practice and the media/business discourse around the globalization of cities.

This chapter discusses comparison and perhaps competition built into the global city-state DNA, noting Singapore's built-in comparative imagination that drives its global city goals. It mentions how Singapore's developmental elites have been increasingly putting an emphasis on linking the city's future to an explicitly internationalist ethos. The chapter analyzes the twin imagination–aspiration of Singapore rising through the ranks, which is a common reference point with senior government and business figures. It elaborates how elements of the comparison are pitted against each other for success and commonality is abandoned for competition. There is some degree of built-in comparative and relational thinking in the “global” of the global city and it is necessary to be wary of the seduction of choosing which city is best when making these comparisons.

This chapter discusses how government leaders have been constituting a continuing rhetoric, and time and time again restated the global city as an objective and a model to be followed in the developmental trajectory of the city state. It refers to Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, who sought to solve the mystery of why post-independence Singapore was not collapsing. For Rajaratnam, the path ahead is a global character that distinguishes the global city and its connectedness to the fortunes of other planetary hubs that makes it unique. The chapter examines the importance of distinction to the global city, but it needs to happen in a reality where cities are interlinked and where global flows and fortunes are determined by relatively common terms of a global game. Symbolic power does not come without contrast and globalization appears to many as the only viable developmental pathway in an interconnected age.

This book considers the rise of a new generation of so-called global cities—Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai—and the power that this concept had in their ascent, in order to analyze the general relationship between global city theory and its urban public policy practice. The global city is often invoked in theory and practice as an ideal model of development and a logic of internationalization for cities the world over. But the global city also creates deep social polarization and challenges how much local planning can achieve in a world economy. Presenting a unique elite ethnography in Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai, the book discusses the global urban discourses, aspirations, and strategies vital to the planning and management of such metropolitan growth. The global city, the book shows, is not one single idea, but a complex of ways to imagine a place to be global and aspirations to make it so, often deeply steeped in politics. The book is a call to reconcile proponents and critics of the global city toward a more explicit engagement with the politics of this global urban imagination.

This chapter recounts the discussion on Dubai's global aspirations, wherein global ideas about the city are constantly and hurriedly translated into a very localized materiality. It highlights the urban imagination of Dubai as a global gateway and destination that ends up in tangible manifestations of glass, concrete, and people performing activities that are key to sustaining the edifice of the global city. Tim Bunnell has stressed how material consumption is an important component of many people's aspirations and urban imaginations and may be entangled with claims to social inclusion and political rights. The chapter argues that the processes and governance dynamics that lead to the ascent of global cities and sustain their globalizing centrality remain largely overlooked. It illustrates the idea of the emergence of global cities from off the map by describing how Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai emerged on the world stage.

This chapter addresses questions on whether global cities, as the turnstiles of globalization, withstand the disruption of the deadly coronavirus and for how long. The chapter determines what is next in a crisis hitting at the foundations of the global city. In places like London, New York, and Melbourne, urban economies are seriously threatened by global connections put into question and slowly halting as many of those world city gateway functions are in check. The chapter describes a spiraling world economy that does not seem to lend itself to be commanded and controlled from prime spots on the atlas that are also major gateways for global contagion. Countless global cities have confronted a crisis perhaps deeper than anything they had witnessed since the two World Wars.

This chapter describes the imprint of global urbanism that has a distinct infrastructural presence across continents and a sizable reality in global markets. It investigates the political economy of global city-speaking, particularly the money, bricks, and aspirations embedded in the politics of global urbanism. It also considers a monolithic concept of a global city and a stand in for a body of meaning of global urban thinking and research. The chapter talks about the field of urban imagination that gazes globally from a specific place. Urban imagination holds a powerful status in urban practice and offers a unique gateway into the powers that are shaping the so-called “urban age.”

This chapter pays close attention to the politics of building global cities, arguing that in the cases of Singapore, Dubai, and Sydney, this does not mean discarding global city as a vague and inconsistent buzzword. It considers the politics of building global cities, the responsibilities of those who partake in them, and the often-absent voices of those who live their ordinary lives within the confines that global city makers are setting today. Global city-speak remains central in urban development and holds much symbolic power that most are quick to dismiss. The chapter addresses the question of what is in an idea, citing a century of discussion and debate surrounding the ingredients of the causes and consequences of globalization in cities. The idea of the global city is anything but a new phenomenon, and its imagination runs deep into the history of the twentieth century at the very least.

This chapter cites Daniel A. Bell and Avner de-Shalit's The Spirit of Cities, which revives the classical idea that a city expresses its own distinctive ethos or values. Bell and de-Shalit wrote of the nation-building spirit embedded in Singapore, the ambition that characterizes New Yorkers, and the materialism of the Cantonese in Hong Kong. The chapter highlights the spirit of the global city that seems to be an entrepreneurial one, whether speaking of elites molding the cities as global hubs or everyday urban dwellers devising strategies to open up opportunities. It looks at contestations to the seemingly incessant advance of neoliberal globalization in the case study of cities that contrast and refute that there is a spirit in the city. As taught by splintering urbanism, many cities are folded in one at the same time and many social justice problems are embedded in that ethos.

The abstract is available here: https://uscholar.univie.ac.at/o:1648829

The book’s introduction takes cue from an emerging, and exciting we would argue, interdisciplinary crowd of “night studies” that has in the last few years expanded as a collaboration between night-time practitioners and scholars, and we step in with an intervention aimed at offering an accessible introduction as to why, and how, our cities’ night-time should be governed. The chapter highlights this growing night studies call to put the ‘afterhours’ in the spotlight, and we make a case for both the importance of governing the night-time and the necessity to do so in way that recognises the value of the many international experiences out there setting night-time governance as a trend, rather than a passing fad. We introduce here some of the grounding stances of this primer, as well as some of the core ideas emerging from the book and this mounting practice.

What does one need to know about managing cities at night? And what is the ‘case’ for thinking of commonplace urban issues, debates and policies, but at night-time and in dialogues with what happens ‘after hours’? In the spirit of practical applicability, this final chapter provides a practical closing guideline structured around eight key lessons we learned as scholars and practitioners of the night-time. We put these as recommendations for both policymakers and others involved in this emerging field to consider. This is structured explicitly as a propositional list, pointing at a set of key successes, shortcomings and continuing inequalities, as well as some of what we think are practical ways past the COVID-19 crisis into a more effective (and inclusive) management of the night-time in cities.

The question of how night-time governance is ‘placed’ in respect to the organisation of urban governance more generally is, for us, an essential one especially for the many municipal practitioners and urban researchers focusing on this theme. In this second empirical chapter, we suggest it might be useful to start from a broad generalization: should the night-time be the purview of local government, within the edifice of city policy, or should it be set outside of it? Of course, there is no easy answer to this query, but this simple differentiation helps us, we think, chart some commonplace realities within the multitude of examples we present here. Both realities emerge as equally productive and at the same time characterized by tensions, but in the meantime, they also help us clarifying some initial challenges that night-time practitioners confront when trying to project a pragmatic stance on recognizing the value of night-time discussions in urban governance. In turn, as we illustrate, this also takes us to an additional type of night-time governance institution, that of the night ‘council’ (or ‘committee’ or ‘commission’), which is perhaps as important in our story as the more widely chronicled and media-prone appointment of night mayors. We offer an initial typology of these institutions before beginning an initial foray into the common agendas that, whether within or without local government, are emerging in night-time governance.

The trajectories of night-time governance presented in the previous chapter speak to the need to understand the institutionalisation of how we manage the NTE within the broader context of urban governance. This chapter introduces four more case studies: those of Tokyo in Japan, Berlin in Germany, and Valparaiso in Chile and Bogota in Colombia. In doing so we stress the necessity of paying closer attention to the scalar depth of night-time governance and the ‘bottom up’ attention for the night-time economy that might emerge, as the Tokyo story tells us, in the absence of strong government action. The chapter seeks to gesture explicitly to the need to de-centre stories of the night-time beyond the much discussed ‘West’ and account for stories and histories hailing from different ‘Eastern’ and ‘Southern’ experiences. It underlines the necessity to both situate in, and attend to, the broader urban politics the NTE unfolds whilst keeping a close eye on the capacity of non-governmental realities to drive the trajectory of night-time governance.

The global crisis ushered by the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 hit hard cities the world over. Even harder hit, through lockdowns but also stretched essential services, has been the world of night-time economy and management. Yet at the same time the movement to institutionalise and discuss and campaign for the night in cities (depicted in the previous chapters) also laid some important ground for tackling this, and night-time recovery movements are already afoot. Drawing from media reports, current research, events and direct experiences by the authors, this chapter analyses how these night-time governance structures have responded to COVID-19 and shares some insights on how this crisis might reshape the way night scenes are managed around the world. The goal of the chapter is to contextualise the ‘primer’ introduction of the previous sections in the wake of one of the deepest disruptions of our century.

This chapter aims to underline the importance of the urban policy context, its history and trajectory when considering night-time governance cases from around the planet. In order to think through the evolution of the governance of the night in cities with a deeper sense of context, our goal in this first of two in-depth comparative case studies chapters is to stress the value and he institutional positioning of the urban night and the underpinning economic imperatives that drive it in one or another direction. This chapter offers more information on the cases of London, Sydney, Melbourne and New York building on our own work in several of these contexts.

Whose night is it anyway? What questions of equality and participation underline much of the sprawl of night-time governance? In this chapter we explore issues of what we could call ‘(in)visibilisation’ (Vergès 2019) in current approaches to night-time governance. Specifically, we argue that the ways in which ‘night-time economies’ are framed, discussed, defined, delimited and understood in policy conversations tend to obscure the intersecting racial, gender-based and socio-economic inequalities that shape and indeed maintain ‘thriving’ night-time economies (and urban economies more broadly).

With urban politics come urban interests and agendas – even at night-time. To acknowledge this even more explicitly than in the previous two chapters, this chapter discusses common themes and strategies described throughout the various cases in the book with an emphasis on what commonplace issues have driven NTE action. It journeys across night-time economy strategies, sound and crowd management methods, safety and crime schemes, and transport and logistics solutions, to depict what key themes emerge in the night-time governance of cities, but also what is left out. The chapter focuses on what is being governed in cities afterhours from a relatively restrictive view on the NTE as fulcrum of entertainment and hospitality to include the likes of transport, logistics, healthcare, further into those voices and activities that are often silenced by night-time discussions. Critically, we underscore here the importance of strategic visions and strategic plans in consolidating what night-time agendas are at play in cities.

As lights come on in the streets and darkness descends on cities, most ‘call it a day’. The night is rarely a popular issue for news headlines, local governments or urban researchers. Yet what in our cities happens afterhours, and how city leaders manage it, is far from inconsequential. Managing Cities at Night intervenes in this landscape with an accessible, evidence-based and internationally minded volume capable of inspiring a greater appreciation of the night-time economy in research and practice. It offers a useful guide to urban governance after hours with a unique stock-take of this reality with an eye at questions of urban equality, not least by taking into account the momentous impact of COVID-19 on night-time activity. The book presents an updated review of night-time governance across five continents, with insights from realities as different as London, New York, Valparaiso, Sydney, Tokyo, Berlin, Bogota and Melbourne. It does so to explicitly broaden the imagination of what it means to manage cities ‘after hours’, as an explicitly ‘scholarly’ guide for practitioners and novices of the night-time economy. It presents a distinctive focus on night governance, the role of night mayors and night commissions, and does so in an informative case-based way that sketches one of the widest variety of vignettes and case studies currently available on night-time economies of cities the world over.