Cities continue to be key sites for the production and contestation of inequalities generated by an ongoing but troubled neoliberal project. Neoliberalism's onslaught across the globe now shapes diverse inequalities -- poverty, segregation, racism, social exclusion, homelessness -- as city inhabitants feel the brunt of privatization, state re-organization, and punishing social policy. This book examines the relationship between persistent neoliberalism and the production and contestation of inequalities in cities across the world. Case studies of current city realities reveal a richly place-specific and generalizable neoliberal condition that further deepens the economic, social, and political relations that give rise to diverse inequalities. Diverse cases also show how people struggle against a neoliberal ethos and hence the open-endedness of futures in these cities.

Global Heartland is the account of diverse, dispossessed, and displaced people brought together in a former sundown town in Illinois. Recruited to work in the local meat-processing plant, African Americans, Mexicans, and West Africans re-create the town in unexpected ways. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the US, Mexico, and Togo, Faranak Miraftab shows how this workforce is produced for the global labor market; how the displaced workers' transnational lives help them stay in these jobs; and how they negotiate their relationships with each other across the lines of ethnicity, race, language, and nationality as they make a new home. Beardstown is not an exception but an example of local-global connections that make for local development. Focusing on a locality in a non-metropolitan region, this work contributes to urban scholarship on globalization by offering a fresh perspective on politics and materialities of placemaking.

Global Heartland is the account of diverse, dispossessed, and displaced people brought together in a former sundown town in Illinois. Recruited to work in the local meat-processing plant, African Americans, Mexicans, and West Africans re-create the town in unexpected ways. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the US, Mexico, and Togo, Faranak Miraftab shows how this workforce is produced for the global labor market; how the displaced workers' transnational lives help them stay in these jobs; and how they negotiate their relationships with each other across the lines of ethnicity, race, language, and nationality as they make a new home. Beardstown is not an exception but an example of local-global connections that make for local development. Focusing on a locality in a non-metropolitan region, this work contributes to urban scholarship on globalization by offering a fresh perspective on politics and materialities of placemaking.

Framing the Global explores new and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of global issues. Essays are framed around the entry points or key concepts that have emerged in each contributor's engagement with global studies in the course of empirical research, offering a conceptual toolkit for global research in the 21st century. http: //framing.indiana.edu

The Cities of the Global South Reader adopts a fresh and critical approach to the field of urbanization in the developing world, which has seen significant shifts in its thematic and geographic focus since it first began to be defined in the mid-twentieth century. This Reader incorporates both early conversations and new and emerging debates that reflect the diverse trajectories of urbanization processes in the context of the restructured global alignments in the last three decades. The thematic structure and selection of texts in the Cities of the Global South Reader recognizes the entanglement of wealth/ poverty, development/ underdevelopment, first/ third worlds, and various forms of inclusion/ exclusion. This conceptual framework shapes the Reader s organization around global processes such as colonialism and development, similar yet different processes that occur two hundred years apart and shape cities in crucial ways, to specific issues that urban dwellers, planners, and policy makers face in the contemporary world. These include the urban economy, housing, basic services, infrastructure, the role of non-state civil society based actors, planned interventions and contestations, the role of diaspora capital, the looming problem of adapting to climate change, and the increasing specter of violence in a post 9/11 transnational world.

The Cities of the Global South Reader pulls together a diverse set of readings from scholars across the world to provide an essential resource for a broad interdisciplinary readership at undergraduate and graduate levels in urban geography, urban sociology, and urban planning as well as international studies, global studies and development studies. Editorial commentaries that introduce the central issues for each theme, summarize the state of the field and outline an associated bibliography. They will be of particular value for lecturers, researchers, and students, making the Cities of the Global South Reader a key text for those interested in understanding contemporary urbanization processes. "

The first in-depth study of the impact of economic and political decentralization on planning practice in developing economies, this innovative volume, using original case study research by leading experts drawn from diverse fields of inquiry, from planning to urban studies, geography and economics, explores the dramatic transformation that decentralization implies in responsibilities of the local planning and governance structures.

It examines a range of key issues, including:

• public and private finance
• local leadership and electoral issues
• planning in post-conflict societies.

Offering unique insights into how planning has changed in specific countries, paying particular attention to South East Asian economies, India and South Africa, this excellent volume is an invaluable resource for researchers, graduate students and planners interested in urban planning in its international political and economic context.

Cities continue to be key sites for the production and contestation of inequalities generated by an ongoing but troubled neoliberal project. Neoliberalism's onslaught across the globe now shapes diverse inequalities -- poverty, segregation, racism, social exclusion, homelessness -- as city inhabitants feel the brunt of privatization, state re-organization, and punishing social policy. This book examines the relationship between persistent neoliberalism and the production and contestation of inequalities in cities across the world. Case studies of current city realities reveal a richly place-specific and generalizable neoliberal condition that further deepens the economic, social, and political relations that give rise to diverse inequalities. Diverse cases also show how people struggle against a neoliberal ethos and hence the open-endedness of futures in these cities.

The Cities of the Global South Reader adopts a fresh and critical approach to the field of urbanization in the developing world, which has seen significant shifts in its thematic and geographic focus since it first began to be defined in the mid-twentieth century. This Reader incorporates both early conversations and new and emerging debates that reflect the diverse trajectories of urbanization processes in the context of the restructured global alignments in the last three decades. The thematic structure and selection of texts in the Cities of the Global South Reader recognizes the entanglement of wealth/ poverty, development/ underdevelopment, first/ third worlds, and various forms of inclusion/ exclusion. This conceptual framework shapes the Reader s organization around global processes such as colonialism and development, similar yet different processes that occur two hundred years apart and shape cities in crucial ways, to specific issues that urban dwellers, planners, and policy makers face in the contemporary world. These include the urban economy, housing, basic services, infrastructure, the role of non-state civil society based actors, planned interventions and contestations, the role of diaspora capital, the looming problem of adapting to climate change, and the increasing specter of violence in a post 9/11 transnational world.

The Cities of the Global South Reader pulls together a diverse set of readings from scholars across the world to provide an essential resource for a broad interdisciplinary readership at undergraduate and graduate levels in urban geography, urban sociology, and urban planning as well as international studies, global studies and development studies. Editorial commentaries that introduce the central issues for each theme, summarize the state of the field and outline an associated bibliography. They will be of particular value for lecturers, researchers, and students, making the Cities of the Global South Reader a key text for those interested in understanding contemporary urbanization processes. "