The aim of this book is to understand the causes and consequences of new scales and forms of territorial restructuring in a steadily globalizing world by focusing on urban megaproject development. Contributions focus on the principal actors, institutions, and innovations that drive capitalist globalization, socio-economic and territorial restructuring, and global city formation by exploring the architectural design, planning, management, financing and impacts of urban megaprojects as well as their various socio-economic, political and cultural contexts. This is the first work on urban megaprojects to be global in scope, with chapters about Korea, Bilbao, Kuala Lumpur, Budapest, Milan, Abu Dhabi, New York, Paris, Sao Paulo, Beijing, Shanghai, Hamburg, Vienna, Detroit, Philadelphia, Stuttgart, Afghanistan and Mexico City. It is also the first work on the subject to include contributions from sociologists, planners, geographers and architects from top universities around the world, thus making it a truly multidisciplinary project.

The gleaming Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has put the Basque capital on the map of world cities and has exacerbated optimism among public officials worldwide about the role of spectacular architecture in urban renewal. This book -- a theoretically-informed case study and a major synthesis of Bilbaos developments through the lens of globalization analyzes the Guggenheim project as the latest of Bilbaos globalization efforts, puts the project in the context of Bilbaos decades-long transformation and contends that Bilbaos positive economic performance since 1994 is not fundamentally due to the success of Frank Gehrys building, but rather to a complex array of causal processes that must be understood in the context of Bilbaos connections with the world economy and a changing world-system. The author argues that globalization processes in Bilbao are as old as the city itself and that the role of the State must be taken into account in order to explain the citys changing fortunes throughout the years. Globalization itself ought to be understood as a complex and variable network-like process with multiscalar nodes, an approach which is carefully theorized and empirically developed in this book.
A Volume in the Current Research in Urban and Regional Studies Series.
*Takes into consideration Bilbao's social history and the complex relationships between local and global entities (regionalism v. state)
*Provides a socioeconomic analysis of the "Bilbao Effect"