Urban and Regional Studies

2. COMPANION TO URBAN AND REGIONAL STUDIES

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4. COMPANION TO
Urban and
Regional
Studies
EDITED BY
ANTHONY M. ORUM
JAVIER RUIZ-TAGLE
SERENA VICARI HADDOCK

5. This edition first published 2021
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6. Contents
Notes on Contributorsviii
Prefacexxi
Introduction: A World of Cities and Urban Problems in the
Twenty-First Century xxiv
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, Anthony Orum, and Serena Vicari Haddock
PART I CITIES ACROSS WORLD REGIONS 1
1 Cities and Regions in South Asia 3
Tanvi Bhatikar and Neha Sami
2 Making Cities and Regions in Globalising East Asia 21
Junxi Qian, Jia Ling, and Shenjing He
3 Latin American Cities and Regions 43
Guillermo Jajamovich, Oscar Sosa López, and
Gabriel Silvestre
4 Cities and Regions in Sub-Saharan Africa 64
Warren Smit
5 Australasian Cities: Urban Change Across Australia
and New Zealand 85
Kristian Ruming and Tom Baker
6 European Cities Between Continuity and Change 109
Yuri Kazepov, Roberta Cucca, Byeongsun Ahn,
and Christophe Verrier
7 The North American City 135
Jon Teaford

7. vi Contents
PART II
LEADING THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
AND APPROACHES 153
8 New Directions in Frankfurt Critical Theory for
Critical Urban Theory 155
Tino Buchholz
9 Legacies and Remnants of the Chicago School:
Lineage-Making and Interdisciplinary Urban
Research at the University of Chicago 176
Pranathi Diwakar and Joshua Babcock
10 Environmental Perspectives on Cities 196
Maria Christina Fragkou and Anahí Urquiza
11 Feminist Urban Research: Praxis and Possibility
Across Time and Space 218
Brenda Parker
PART III METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES 237
12 A Critical-Empirical Approach to the Use of Demographic
Methods and Sources in Urban Studies 239
Ricardo Truffello, Fernanda Rojas Marchini, and
Monica Flores
13 GIS in Urban Studies: A Tool of Expert Analysis, Practical
Application, and Citizens’ Participation 265
Inga Gryl, Ana Parraguez Sanchez, and Thomas Jekel
14 Urban Ethnography 282
Margarethe Kusenbach and Japonica Brown-Saracino
15 Cities and Networks 311
Kathryn Freeman Anderson and Zachary P. Neal
16 Policy Mobilities: How Localities Assemble, Mobilise,
and Adopt Circulated Forms of Knowledge 329
Astrid Wood
PART IV
SOCIAL PROBLEMS IN TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY
CITIES349
17 Social Heterogeneity and Diversity 351
Ayda Eraydin
18 Inequalities and the City: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class 373
David Benassi, Andrea Ciarini, and Enzo Mingione

8. Contents vii
19 The Role of Residential Context and Public Policies in the
Production of Urban Inequalities 398
María Mercedes Di Virgilio
20 Immigration and Immigrants in European Countries 420
Moshe Semyonov and Rebeca Raijman
21 Migration and Migrants in Post-reform Chinese Cities 450
Da Liu and Zhigang Li
22 Migration and Migrants in the United States:
The Case for a Fifth Immigration Phase 475
Christopher Levesque and Jack DeWaard
23 Segregation, Social Mix, and Gentrification: Nexuses 497
Sandra Annunziata, Loretta Lees, and Clara Rivas Alonso
PART V
POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC PROBLEMS IN
TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CITIES 517
24 Urban Citizenship and Governance 519
Annika Hinze
25 Policies and Policy Approaches in Cities 539
Marc Pradel-Miquel and Marisol García Cabeza
26 Financialisation and Real Estate 562
Anne Haila
27 Housing in the Global North and the Global South 579
Darinka Czischke and Alonso Ayala
PART VI CLOSURE 605
28 Conclusions 607
Anthony Orum, Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena
Vicari Haddock
Index613

9. Byeongsun Ahn MSc. is a project staff member at the Department of Sociology at
the University of Vienna. He is currently involved in a four-year research project that
examines the institutional transformation of urban governance in post-industrial Vi-
enna. Additionally, his doctoral thesis examines the role of institutional contexts in
everyday encounter with urban diversity in Vienna’s multi-ethnic neighbourhoods.
He received his BA in political science from the same university in 2014 and his MA
in sociology from the University of Amsterdam in 2015.
Kathryn Freeman Anderson is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology
at the University of Houston. Her research lies at the intersection of urban sociology,
the sociology of health and illness, race/ethnicity, and organisations. Specifically, she
is focused on understanding neighbourhood disparities in health, particularly for
racial/ethnic minorities in the United States. Her recent work has been published in
Social Problems, City Community, and the Journal of Urban Affairs.
Sandra Annunziata passed away suddenly on 4 January 2019, she had just started a
permanent position as a lecturer in critical urbanism at Roma Tre University, Rome,
Italy. She was awarded an MA in architecture and urbanism from IUAV Venice in
2004 and a PhD titled “A Neighbourhood Called Desire: Neighbourhood Transition
in Two Case Studies in Rome and Brooklyn” from Roma Tre University in 2008.
She won the Giovanni Ferraro National Award in 2010 for her PhD dissertation.
The award is a nationally recognised prize in Italy for urban and planning research
that reaches beyond the frontiers of current planning knowledge and transcends
established disciplinary boundaries. She also received the Clarence Stein Award
from Cornell University College of Art, Architecture, and Planning in 2011. She
was awarded an EU Marie Curie Fellowship 2014–2016 for “AGAPE: Exploring
Anti-gentrification Practices and Policies in Southern European Cities” at the
University of Leicester. The major outcome of this project was/is Staying Put! An
anti-gentrification toolkit for Southern Europe which will be launched in Rome in
October 2020. Sandra was a scholar and an activist par excellence, a campaigner to
anti-eviction and anti-gentrification movements in Rome and beyond. She is sadly
missed. RIP Sandra.
Notes on Contributors

10. Notes on contributors ix
Alonso Ayala, PhD, is an architect and spatial planner specialising in the fields of
affordable housing and human settlement planning in the Global South. He is part
of the senior academic staff at the Institute for Housing and Urban Development
Studies (IHS) and assistant professor at the Erasmus University School of Social and
Behavioural Sciences. With more than 25 years of work experience in Latin America,
Asia, Africa, and Europe, he has conducted training, research, and advisory work for
(local) governments and has provided higher education to professionals on housing
policies, slum upgrading, social housing, sustainable housing, and human settlement
planning in the Global South.
Joshua Babcock is a PhD candidate in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology
at the University of Chicago. His research examines the contemporary and histor-
ical co-construction of race, language, and identity in urban Singapore. He was a
visiting researcher at the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities at the Singapore
University of Technology and Design (2018–2020) and a member of the interdisci-
plinary, Chicago-based 2016–2017 Arts, Science + Culture Graduate Consortium
Fellows programme organised around the theme Contested Spaces. Together with
Pranathi Diwakar, he was also the 2016–2017 coordinator of the University of Chi-
cago Urban Workshop.
Tom Baker is a senior lecturer in human geography at the University of Auckland,
Aotearoa, New Zealand. His research centres on understanding processes and prac-
tices of policy innovation, with a particular focus on the roles of local and global
knowledges in policymaking. Empirically, his work examines social and urban policy
domains, including homelessness, social security, and urban planning. He is co-editor
of Public Policy Circulation: Arenas, Agents and Actions (Edward Elgar, 2019) and
has been published in journals such as Antipode, Progress in Human Geography,
and Urban Studies.
David Benassi is an associate professor of economic sociology at the University of
Milan-Bicocca (Italy), where he is director of the master programme in management
of social policies. His main research interests concern the study of inequality and
poverty, the welfare state and social policies, and the social foundations of health
inequalities. He favours an approach based on microdata, both qualitative and
quantitative, and constantly refers to the spatial foundations of social phenomena.
He was involved in several European and Italian research projects on those issues.
Among his last publications are Western Capitalism in Transition: Global Chal-
lenges, Local Processes (co-edited with A. Andreotti and Y. Kazepov) (Manchester
University Press, 2018); and Poverty in Italy: Features and Drivers in a European
Perspective (with C. Saraceno and E. Morlicchio) (Policy Press, 2020).
Tanvi Bhatikar is a research manager at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements
(IIHS), Bengaluru. She has previously been associated with organisations working
in areas of urban governance, anti-corruption, electoral and political reforms, and
public policy. She was part of a team that studied fiscal decentralisation at the local
government level in Kolar district in Karnataka. The focus of her research was
on understanding the fund flow at the local level and the political processes and

11. x Notes on contributors
institutions associated with it. She is currently part of the PEAK-Urban international
project where her research focuses on the governance arrangements of mega infra-
structure projects in and around Bengaluru.
Japonica Brown-Saracino is Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender and Sexu-
alities Studies at Boston University. She is the author of two monographs that draw
on comparative ethnographies: A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrifi-
cation, Social Preservation and the Search for Authenticity (University of Chicago
Press, 2010) and How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities
(University of Chicago Press, 2018). She is the editor of The Gentrification Debates
(Routledge, 2010) and the author of numerous articles on gentrification, qualitative
methods, place, culture, and sexualities, including recent pieces in the Annual Review
of Sociology, City Community, Sexualities, and the American Journal of Sociol-
ogy. She directs the Urban Inequalities Workshop at Boston University.
Tino Buchholz holds a master’s degree in urban planning from the University of
Dortmund (Germany) and a PhD from the University of Groningen (The Nether-
lands). Focused on the sociology of urban conflict and urban movements, he looks
at forms of life as forms of housing: with respect to property-led urbanisation,
normative justice, community formation, and migration. His publications target
the legitimacy of legal housing standards in western and eastern Europe, squatting,
property guardianship, and critical urban theory. Expanding the scope of urban
sociology, he works as producer and director at TUNi productions, producing doc-
umentary film.
Andrea Ciarini is an associate professor at the Department of Social and Economic
Sciences of the Sapienza University of Rome where he teaches economic sociol-
ogy and sociology of welfare. He is the scientific coordinator of the Laboratory
SemPer and member of the research unit Lavoro e Organizzazioni. He was visiting
researcher at London School of Economics and Political Sciences (United King-
dom) and KU Leuven University (Belgium). He was a member of the high-level
task force for social infrastructures promoted by the European Commission and
the European Long-Term Investors Association (ELTI). As an economic sociologist,
his main research interests are in the fields of comparative welfare studies, both at
national and regional level, labour market policies, and industrial relations. He is
currently researching the relationships between welfare state and social finance in a
comparative perspective. Andrea is author of numerous publications. These include
books and articles such as: ‘Trajectories of Welfare Financialisation in Europe: A
Comparison Between France, Italy and the United Kingdom’ (2019) and ‘Policies to
Boost Services and Regular Employment in the Long-term Care Sector: More and
worse Jobs?’ (2016).
Roberta Cucca is an associate professor in the Department of Urban and Regional
Planning at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, where she leads (with Jin Xue)
the Urban Sustainability Research Group. Her main research interests are: environ-
mental policies and social vulnerability; social inequalities in contemporary cities;
and participation in local policy decision making. Among her recent publications

12. Notes on contributors xi
are ‘Quality of urban environment and spatial segregation in contemporary cities’,
in S. Musterd (ed.), Handbook of Urban Segregation (Edward Elgar, 2020); with
Y. Kazepov ‘European Cities’, in A. Orum (ed.) The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia
of Urban and Regional Studies (Wiley Blackwell, 2019); and with C. Ranci (eds),
Unequal Cities: The Challenge of Post-industrial Transition in Times of Austerity
(Routledge, 2017).
Darinka Czischke, PhD, is an associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture and
the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology. In 2014 she was awarded
the Delft Technology Fellowship to develop her research on collaborative housing.
She is the founder of the Co-Lab Research Group at the TU Delft and co-found-
er of the working group ‘Collaborative Housing’ at the European Network for
Housing Research (ENHR). Previously, she worked as the director of World Habitat
(formerly Building and Social Housing Foundation, BSHF); research director of the
European Social Housing Observatory at CECODHAS Housing Europe; and as
research associate at the LSE Cities Programme, London School of Economics and
Political Science. She has published extensively on social, affordable, and collabora-
tive housing in comparative international perspective.
Jack DeWaard is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Graduate
Faculty of Population Studies in the Minnesota Population Center at the University
of Minnesota, where he is also a faculty affiliate in the Hubert H. Humphrey School
of Public Affairs, the Institute on the Environment, and the Life Course Center. A
highly interdisciplinary and collaborative scholar, his research is broadly focused on
the causes, characteristics, and consequences of international and internal migra-
tion. He is particularly interested in the spatial patterning of migration flows among
places, and he has spent the past several years connecting his work on migration to
climate and environmental change.
María Mercedes Di Virgilio is a full associate professor in research methodology
and a CONICET (Argentinean National Research Council) researcher affiliated
at the Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales,
Universidad de Buenos Aires. Her research focuses on the residential mobility
processes of lower- and middle-class households, in particular, their housing strat-
egies and residential careers. She is also interested in public policies and social
policies in the city and their relations with urban mobility. The study of urban
mobilities allowed her to move forward in other directions of research such as
social mobility processes and relations between inequalities and space. She is
author/co-author/co-editor of numerous publications. This includes books such
as Disputas por el espacio urbano: Desigualdades persistentes y territorialidades
emergentes (Editorial Biblos, 2018) and Housing Policy in Latin American Cities:
A New Generation of Strategies and Approaches for 2016 UN-HABITAT III
(Routledge, 2014). Major papers include ‘Gentrification Processes in the City
of Buenos Aires: New Features and Old Tendencies’ (2020), ‘Housing Policy in
Argentina: Reflections on a Decade of Progressive Social Policy’ (2017), and ‘A
City for All? Public Policy and Resistance to Gentrification in the Southern Neigh-
borhoods of Buenos Aires’ (2016).

13. xii Notes on contributors
Pranathi Diwakar is a PhD candidate in sociology with a specialisation in sociol-
ogy of inequality and urban and cultural sociology. Her research investigates the
processes of caste-boundary maintenance, assertion, and resistance through musical
and spatial practices in contemporary urban India. In 2019, she was awarded SSRC’s
International Dissertation Research Fellowship and the Susanne and Lloyd Field
Research Grant from the University of Chicago’s CISSR. She held the Urban Doc-
toral Fellowship as part of the University of Chicago’s Urban Network (2017–2018)
and, together with Josh Babcock, she was also the 2016–2017 coordinator of the
University of Chicago Urban Workshop.
Ayda Eraydin is professor emeritus of urban and regional planning at the Department
of Urban and Regional Planning, Middle East Technical University at Ankara. Her
research interests are local economic development, socio-spatial dynamics of cities,
resilience thinking in urban planning, and governing urban diversity. She has been
involved and coordinated several national and international research projects and
published on various urban and regional issues, such as Politics and Conflict in Gov-
ernance and Planning (Routledge, 2019) and Resilience Thinking in Urban Planning
(Springer, 2013). Recent papers include ‘Governing Urban Diversity in Istanbul:
Pragmatic and Non-discriminatory Solutions of Governance Initiatives in Response
to Politicisation of Diversity’ (2019) and ‘Fragmentation in Urban Movements: The
Role of Urban Planning Processes’ (2017).
Monica Flores is an urban planner specialising in data analytics for public policy
and urban development. She is based in Santiago de Chile and co-leads her research
team as deputy director at Observatorio de Ciudades UC. Her research interests
focus on housing policy, urban economics, land use law, and real estate development
as factors that have historically shaped cities. Before joining the Observatorio, she
worked as a research assistant at the NYU Furman Center focusing on urban policy,
housing studies, and real estate market analysis. She previously worked as an
instructor professor in history and theory of architecture courses at the School of
Architecture of Universidad Catolica de Chile. She holds a master’s degree in urban
planning from New York University and a bachelor’s and professional degree in
architecture from Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile.
Maria Christina Fragkou is Associate Professor at the Geography Department at the
University of Chile. She is one of the professors in charge of the political ecology
and socio-environmental conflicts laboratory of her department, and one of the
founding members of the Latin American Conference on Political Ecology. Her
research focuses on the construction of water scarcity through a multiscale analysis
of national water policies, local and regional development dynamics, and domestic
water uses and habits. She studies cities and urban phenomena through an urban
metabolic perspective, combining quantitative and qualitative takes on urban socio-
environmental problems. She is interested in issues of urban sustainability, water
management, energy policies, and water and environmental justice.
Marisol García Cabeza is a full professor of sociology at the University of Barce-
lona and coordinator of the Research Group on Creativity, Innovation and Urban

14. Notes on contributors xiii
Transformation. She was president of the Research Committee 21 (RC21) on Urban
and Regional Development of the ISA from 1998 to 2002. For many years she has
been involved in European comparative research. She has over 100 publications:
books, book chapters, and peer-reviewed articles in journals such as the International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Studies, Antipode, and Citizenship
Studies. Her publications range from urban sociology to questions of social justice,
social innovation, and citizenship. She is one of the four associate editors of the
Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies (2019).
Inga Gryl is a professor at the Institute of Geography at University Duisburg-Essen,
Germany, and head of the Institute for Social and Science Education. Her research
focuses on geography/sustainability education,participation,digitalisation and space,
and innovativeness. In addition to other projects, she also runs the major project DI-
GEO on the empirical analysis of the production of Open Educational Resources for
geography education. One of her most-cited papers is ‘Re-centering Geoinformation
in Secondary Education: Toward a Spatial Citizenship Approach’ in Cartographica
(2012). Recently, she contributed‘Educational Resources: Geographical Information,
Geomedia and Learning’ to the Encyclopedia of Education and Information Tech-
nologies () (Springer, 2019; both with T. Jekel).
Anne Haila (1953–2019) was the first professor of urban studies in Finland, ap-
pointed in 1998 at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. From 1994
to 1996 she was a senior fellow at the Faculty of Architecture and Building, National
University of Singapore. An internationally esteemed scholar and a highly respected
teacher and colleague, her work concentrated on real estate and property rights.
Her major papers include ‘The Market as the New Emperor’ (2007), ‘Real Estate
in Global Cities: Singapore and Hong Kong as Property States’ (2000), and ‘Four
Types of Investment in Land and Property’ (1991). Over multiple decades she devel-
oped a theory of urban land rent, culminating in her magnum opus ‘Urban Land
Rent: Singapore as a Property State’ (2016). In her final project, she was focusing on
non-private forms of urban land tenure in China, Finland, Hong Kong, Indonesia
and Thailand.
Shenjing He is professor of urban studies in the Department of Urban Planning and
Design, and director of the Social Infrastructure for Equity and Wellbeing (SIEW) Lab
at The University of Hong Kong. Her research interests focus on urban redevelop-
ment/gentrification, urban governance, low-income housing, rural–urban interface,
and health geography. She has published more than 110 journal articles and book
chapters in both Chinese and English and is the co-author/co-editor of five books.
Shenjing has been the editor for Urban Studies since 2012. She has been ranked by
Clarivate Analytics in the top 1% worldwide by citations from 2016 to 2019.
Annika Marlen Hinze is associate professor of political science and the director of
the Urban Studies Programme at Fordham University. Her research focuses on immi-
grant minorities in cities, citizenship policy, nationalism, immigrant and minority
identity, race and ethnicity, the politics of gender, and urban development in the
United States, Germany, Canada, and Turkey, where she has conducted extensive

15. xiv Notes on contributors
fieldwork in a number of her research areas. Hinze has authored various publica-
tions, among them Turkish Berlin: Integration Policy and Urban Space (University of
Minnesota Press, 2013) and the 10th edition of City Politics: The Political Economy
of Urban America (Routledge, 2018; with Dennis Judd).
Guillermo Jajamovich is an adjunct researcher at the CONICET and the Latin
American and the Caribbean Studies Institute – University of Buenos Aires. He coor-
dinates a CLACSO working group and a project of the Union Iberoamericana de
Universidades. His research focuses on urban policy circulation, large urban pro-
jects and just cities. He is the author of the book Puerto Madero en movimiento:
Un abordaje a partir de la circulación de la Corporación Antiguo Puerto Madero
(1989–2017) (IEALC, 2018) and co-authored ‘The Role of Mobile Policies in Coa-
lition Building: The Barcelona Model as Coalition Magnet in Buenos Aires and Rio
de Janeiro (1989-1996)’, published in Urban Studies.
Thomas Jekel studied geography and communication science at the University
of Salzburg specialising in GIS and social geography. He did his MSc in regional
management and regional marketing and a PhD on conceptualisations of space in
geography education. He later worked as an assistant professor of geography and
economics education at the University of Salzburg. He is currently doing teaching
and research in co-operation with the Centre for Geography and Economics Educa-
tion at the University of Vienna, Austria.
Yuri Kazepov is professor of urban sociology and comparative social policies and
the head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna. His research
examines social inequalities, social policies, and the territorial dimension of
social phenomena predominantly through a multilevel governance lens. He is
involved in several national and international (EU H2020) projects. He is author/
co-author/co-editor of numerous publications. This includes books such as Cities
of Europe (Blackwell, 2005), Rescaling Social Policies Towards Multilevel Gov-
ernance in Europe (Routledge, 2010), and more recently The Future of Western
Capitalism: Global Forces and Local Challenges (Manchester University Press,
2018; with A. Andreotti and D. Benassi) and Local Social Innovation to Combat
Poverty: A Critical Appraisal (Policy Press, 2020; with S. Oosterlynck and A.
Novy). He is currently editing The Handbook on Urban Social Policy for Ed-
ward Elgar.
Margarethe Kusenbach is associate professor and associate chair in the
Department of Sociology at the University of South Florida, Tampa. Her research
interests include cities and communities, space and place, social psychology
(identity and emotions), disasters and environment, and qualitative research
methods. She has published widely in the United States and internationally,
including Home: International Perspectives on Culture, Identity, and Belonging
(Peter Lang, 2013; co-edited with Krista Paulsen). For the past several years, her
work has focused on issues of home and belonging in marginalised communities,
while her new research comparatively investigates the intersection of street art
and urban development.

16. Notes on contributors xv
Loretta Lees is professor of human geography at the University of Leicester, UK. She is
an urban geographer who is internationally known for her research on gentrification/
urban regeneration, global urbanism, urban policy, urban public space, architecture,
and urban social theory. She has been identified as the 17th most referenced author in
urban geography worldwide and the only woman in the top 20 (Urban Studies,2017).
Since 2009 she has co-organised The Urban Salon, a London forum for architecture,
cities and international urbanism (see http://www.theurbansalon.org) and since
2016 the Leicester Urban Observatory. She is author/coauthor/co-editor of 14
books, some examples include: Handbook of Gentrification Studies (Edward Elgar,
2018); Planetary Gentrification (Polity Press, 2016); Global Gentrifications: Uneven
Development and Displacement (Policy Press, 2015); Sustainable London? The
Future of a Global City (Policy Press, 2014); Mixed Communities: Gentrification by
Stealth? (Policy Press, 2011); Gentrification (Routledge, 2008); and The Emancipa-
tory City: Paradoxes and Possibilities? (Sage, 2004). She is a scholar-activist who
has been involved in numerous anti-gentrification campaigns in London, where she
lives, and beyond.
Christopher Levesque is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Minneso-
ta. His research interests include US immigration court, demography, and the impact
of immigration policy on non-citizens’ well-being. He is currently an interdisciplin-
ary doctoral fellow at the UMN Law School’s Binger Center for New Americans,
and is affiliated with the Minnesota Population Center (MPC) as a graduate trainee.
Zhigang Li is a professor of urban studies and planning at the School of Urban
Design, Wuhan University, China. As an urban scholar, geographer, and planner,
Professor Li works on the urban transformation of China, with a focus on such
topics as neighbourhoods, migration, health, and related planning issues. His recent
work concentrates on the migrant communities, emotional attachment, and related
community planning.
Jia Ling is a research assistant in the Department of Building and Real Estate at The
Hong Kong Polycentric University. She obtained her MA in urban management from
City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include China’s urban politics,
political economy of space, and state–society relations. She has done research on
politics of urban aesthetics and urban village redevelopment in Shenzhen, China,
and is currently focusing on the liveability governance at Guang Dong-Hong Kong-
Macau Grater Bay Area and land politics in Qianhai Pilot Development Zone in
Shenzhen, China.
Da Liu is a PhD candidate at the School of Urban Design, Wuhan University. She
works on the urban transformation of China, with a focus on such topics as neigh-
bourhoods, migration, urbanisation, and related planning issues. She is involved
in several NFC projects, including Return Migrants in China in the Earlier 21st
Century and Socio-spatial Transformation in Chinese Cities.
Enzo Mingione is professor emeritus at the University of Milano-Bicocca. He has
also been professor of sociology until November 2017 and dean of the Faculty

17. xvi Notes on contributors
of Sociology (2004–2010). He has been president of the Research Committee on
Urban and Regional Development, one of the founders of the International Journal
of Urban and Regional Research and a trustee of the Foundation of Urban and
Regional Studies. Fields of interest are urban sociology, poverty, welfare, labour mar-
kets, and economic sociology. Among his books are Social Conflict and the City
(Blackwell, 1981); Beyond Employment, with Nanneke Redclift (Blackwell, 1985);
Fragmented Societies (Blackwell, 1991); and Urban Poverty and the Underclass
(Blackwell, 1996).
Zachary P. Neal is an associate professor of psychology and global urban studies at
Michigan State University. His research examines the role of networks at multiple
scales of urban processes, ranging for the formation of social relationships among
neighbours at the local scale, to the formation of economic exchanges between cities
at the global scale. He is the author of over 75 peer-reviewed articles and four books,
including The Connected City (Routledge, 2013). More details about his past and
current research is available at https://www.zacharyneal.com.
Anthony Orum is emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Illinois –
Chicago from which he retired a decade ago. His early research was focused on
topics in the area of political sociology, including research on Black politics in the
United States. He published the leading textbook on political sociology which is now
in its fifth edition and has been translated into multiple Chinese versions. Much of
his writing and research in recent decades explores various topics in urban studies,
including urban history and urban sociology. He is currently completing a new book
entitled Essays on Cities: Power, Space and Ethnic Habitats.
Brenda Parker is an associate professor of urban planning and policy at the Univer-
sity of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on gender, race, class, disability and
other inequalities in cities and governance, as well as social movements and pol-
icies that address these inequalities. She is the author of Masculinities and Markets:
Gender, Race, and Urban Politics in Milwaukee (University of Georgia Press, 2017)
and research articles in journals such as Urban Geography, Antipode, and Gender
Place and Culture. She serves on boards of several academic and community organi-
sations, including Cabrini Green Legal Aid in Chicago.
Ana Parraguez Sanchez teaches and researches urban youth, social movements,
formation of critical consciousness, space/micro politics, and geography education.
Her postdoctoral research explored the socio-spatial production of the 2011 student
movement in Santiago. She also led an interdisciplinary team to develop a digital
educational platform to promote critical spatial consciousness among secondary
students in Santiago. She worked as subdirector of the Observatory of Cities-UC.
She also worked as a visiting scholar in the Department of Geography/Didactics
of General Studies, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. She currently works as
professor in the Social Work School at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.
Marc Pradel-Miquel is professor of urban sociology in the department of soci-
ology of Universitat de Barcelona and founding member of the research group

18. Notes on contributors xvii
Creativity, Innovation and Urban Transformation (CRIT). His research analyses
urban governance, citizenship rights, and social inequalities, focusing on the role
of citizens and civil society actors in governance. He has been involved in European
and national research projects in these fields. He has a large number of publica-
tions. The latest is Social Innovation and Urban Governance: Citizenship, Civil
Society and Social Movements (Edward Elgar, 2020) together with Ana Cano-Hila
and Marisol García.
Junxi Qian is an assistant professor at the Department of Geography at the Uni-
versity of Hong Kong. He is a social and cultural geographer who works at the
intersection of geography, urban studies, and cultural studies. His research interests
include place politics, urban public space, religion, China’s ethnic minorities and
frontiers, and China’s recent urban transformation. Most of his published works
partake in one or several of these themes. His recent projects investigate entre-
preneurial religion in urban China and technological innovation from a cultural
economy perspective.
Rebeca Raijman is associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the Uni-
versity of Haifa, Israel. She has published extensively on the topic of ethnic entre-
preneurship, socioeconomic integration of Jewish immigrants to Israel, non-Jewish
and non-Palestinian labour migration in Israel, and public attitudes to migrants
and minorities in Israel and Europe. She has published a book (co-authored with
Adriana Kemp) entitled ‘Workers’ and ‘Foreigners’: The Political Economy of
Labor Migration in Israel (Van Leer Institute and Kibbutz Hamehuhad, 2008; in
Hebrew). Her book South African Jews in Israel: Assimilation in a Multigenera-
tional Perspective has been published in 2016 by the University of Nebraska Press.
Personal website: https://sites.hevra.haifa.ac.il/raijman/, https://www.linkedin.com/
in/rebeca-raijman-680b8332.
Clara Rivas Alonso is a PhD candidate in human geography at the University of
Leicester. She holds a master’s degree from Goldsmith’s College London, where she
specialised in post-colonial theory and the urban. Her PhD is an investigation into
the everyday practices and perceptions of resistance to the threat of state-led gen-
trification in Okmeydani, Istanbul, Turkey. She is interested in the invisible solidar-
ities that escape institutional attempts at rent extraction and argues that the current
global urban condition calls for more innovative forms of resistance.
Fernanda Rojas Marchini is a PhD candidate in human geography at the Univer-
sity of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her current research focuses on
the Chilean state’s turn towards market-based biodiversity conservation. Fernanda
is also a researcher in the SSHRC project Tracing Biodiversity Capital alongside
researches at UBC, Duke University, and Lancaster. She is also a teacher assistant
in the course ‘Urbanization in the Global South’, led by Dr. Priti Narayan at UBC.
Before commencing her PhD, Fernanda conducted research in projects led by the
Chilean Forestry Institute and worked as sessional lecturer in the School of Geog-
raphy of Universidad Austral de Chile, where she taught a course on the geography
of population.

19. xviii Notes on contributors
Javier Ruiz-Tagle is assistant professor at the Institute of Urban and Territorial
Studies (IEUT),associate researcher at the Center for Sustainable Urban Development
(CEDEUS), adjunct researcher at the Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion
Studies (COES), and principal investigator at the Research Group in Urban Margin-
ality (NIMU), all at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He has specialised
in topics of residential segregation, housing policies, neighbourhood effects, urban
marginality, self-organised housing, urban sociology, and comparative studies. He
has published, presented, and won honours and awards with his work in Chile, the
United States, and in Europe. He was section editor for the Encyclopedia of Urban
and Regional Studies (Wiley Blackwell, 2019), and is currently editing Marginalidad
urbana y efectos institucionales: Sociedad, estado y territorio en Latinoamérica a
comienzos del siglo XXI (RIL, 2020).
Kristian Ruming is associate professor and discipline chair for geography and
planning in the Macquarie School of Social Sciences, Macquarie University. His
research explores urban governance and regeneration, social and affordable housing,
strategic planning and planning system reform in Australia. He is editor of Urban
Regeneration in Australia (Routledge, 2018).
Neha Sami studies infrastructure and environmental planning and governance in
post-liberalisation urban India. She is currently on the faculty at the Indian Institute
for Human Settlements in Bangalore, India where she teaches on questions of gover-
nance and sustainability and anchors the research programme. She serves on the edi-
torial collective of Urbanization and is a corresponding editor for the International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research. She holds a PhD in urban planning from
the University of Michigan, a master’s degree in environmental management from
the Yale School of the Environment and a BA in economics from the University
of Mumbai.
Moshe Semyonov is professor emeritus of sociology and labor studies at Tel Aviv
University and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chi-
cago. Semyonov’s research interests lie in the areas of comparative stratification and
inequality and causes and consequences of global migration. His research was pub-
lished in the form of books, journal articles, and book chapters. Most recent publi-
cations deal with inequality in a comparative perspective, integration of immigrants
in the labour market of the host society, and attitudes towards immigrants across
space and time.
Gabriel Silvestre is an urban scholar having received his PhD in planning studies
from University College London. He is currently a lecturer based at the Department
of Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield, where he is the director of
the MSc Cities and Global Development. His research interests include the themes
of urban governance and policy knowledge with an empirical focus on Latin
American cities, especially in Brazil. Recent published work examined the role of
circulating global ideas in local policy making. He is a member of the working
group Circulating Knowledge and Urban Policies of the Latin American Council of
Social Sciences.

20. Notes on contributors xix
Warren Smit is senior researcher and manager of research at the African Centre
for Cities at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He has a PhD in urban
planning and has been a researcher on urban issues for more than 25 years. His main
areas of research are urban governance, urban planning, housing policy, and urban
health, with a particular focus on cities in Africa. Key papers include “Decentralisa-
tion and Institutional Reconfiguration in Urban Africa” (2014),“Urban Governance
and Urban Food Systems in Africa” (2016), “Urban Governance in Africa: An Over-
view” (2018) and “The Challenge of COVID-19 in African Cities” (2020).
Oscar Sosa López is visiting faculty at The New School’s Milano School of Pol-
icy, Management and Environment. His work examines the politics of urban and
regional governance and asks how planning can contribute more sustainable and
democratic cities and regions. His research extends across sites and scales, includ-
ing climate change governance in Mexico City, immigrant social movements in
California suburbs, and regional governance and economic development in Latin
America, and the US-Mexico Border. His current book project examines how
sustainable transportation planning reforms impact existing regimes of infra-
structure inequality and democratic exclusion in Mexico City. His most recent
publication is “Bicycle Policy in Mexico City: Urban Experiments and Differ-
entiated Citizenship”, forthcoming in the International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research.
Jon C. Teaford is professor emeritus of history at Purdue University, West Lafayette,
Indiana. He is past president of the Urban History Association. His research and
teaching have focused on the history of cities in the United States with a special inter-
est in governance. He is the author of numerous books, including The Twentieth-
Century American City: Problem, Promise, and Reality (Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2016; 3rd rev. edn), The American Suburb: The Basics (Routledge, 2008), and
The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America (Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 2006).
Ricardo Truffello is geographer and has an MSc in geography and geomatics from
the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile PUC, and PhD in complex systems engi-
neering from Universidad Adolfo Ibanez. He currently serves as director of the Cities
Observatory (Observatorio de Ciudades UC), researcher at CEDEUS, and professor
at the Institute of Urban and Territorial Studies at the School of Architecture, Design
and Urban Studies of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. His areas of spe-
cialisation are geographic information systems, the generation of urban indicators,
spatial analyst, geostatistics, and spatial statistics.
Anahí Urquiza is associate professor at the University of Chile, with an experience in
teaching and doing research of over fifteen years. She has an MA in anthropology and
development from the University of Chile and a PhD in sociology from the Univer-
sity of Munich, Germany (Ludwig Maximilian Universität München). Anahí teaches
methodology, research processes, theory of social systems, and socio-environmental
issues. Her field of research focuses on the environment and society relationship,
particularly in water vulnerability, poverty and energy transitions, participation,

21. xx Notes on contributors
governance, and resilience when facing climate change. She has extensive experience
in academic management, the coordination of working teams, as well as the design
of methodological-analytical frames to discuss complex issues.
Christophe Verrier, MSc., is a former research assistant at the University of Vienna
where he specialised in housing policies and local governance. During a brief return
to Canada he acted as a team leader at the Montreal Science Centre where he devel-
oped a newfound interest in the popularisation of science. He is currently spending
his time between Warsaw and Amsterdam, working with his life partner on gamifica-
tion systems that can foster alternative conceptions of urban heritage for locals and
tourists alike through in-situ narrative experiences.
Serena Vicari Haddock is senior associate professor of sociology at the University of
Milan-Bicocca where from 2010 to 2016 she supervised the doctoral programme in
urban studies (URBEUR). She has also taught at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, and in Leuven (Belgium) and Pavia (Italy). Research interests range from
urban regeneration in Italian cities and a comparative perspective to issues of partic-
ipation, inclusion, and social innovation. She is author of the critical study La città
contemporanea (Il Poligrafo, 2004) along with numerous papers, she has edited and
contributed to key essay collections including: Teoria ed esperienza (Il Mulino, 2006;
with Simon Parker); Rigenerare la città: Pratiche di innovazione sociale nelle città
europee (Il Mulino, 2009; with F. Moulaert); Brand-building: The Creative City: A
Critical Look at Current Concepts and Practices (Firenze University Press, 2010);
Questioni urbane: Caratteri e problemi della città contemporanea (Il Mulino, 2013);
and Sei lezioni sulla città (Feltrinelli, 2017; with Guido Martinotti).
Astrid Wood is an assistant professor in the School of Geography, Politics and Soci-
ology at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. Astrid is an urban geographer
concentrating on governance and the built environment in cities of the Global South.
Her research on critical urban studies and policy mobilities considers the range of
political engagements and exchanges occurring through the localisation of global
urban policy. Aspects of this research are published in Antipode, Environment and
Planning A, IJURR, Public Culture, and Urban Geography. Her academic work
draws on nearly two decades shaping the urban form in over 30 countries.

22. I am taking this opportunity to offer a few thoughts and tributes to some of our
colleagues in urban studies as well as a few additional remarks. As a Companion
volume to the Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies the collection of essays
here highlights some key topics that we believe should be covered in much greater
depth. Javier, Serena, and I began to collaborate on this effort almost three years
ago. I invited them to join me as co-editors and each kindly accepted my invitation.
I have known Javier for several years, dating back to the time he was a graduate stu-
dent at the University of Illinois – Chicago. He took a course in social theory with
me and proved to be one of the best students that I have ever taught. I later served
on his dissertation committee along with several other people in the Urban Planning
Program at UIC. Once again, he proved to be incredibly smart and dedicated in this
project, and his dissertation eventually won a major award: the Barclay Gibbs Jones
award for best dissertation in planning in North America, given by the Association
of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP).
I have known Serena as a result of her work on the Encyclopedia. She served
as an advisory editor on that project, and always furnished important insights
and information regarding particular entries. She was strongly recommended
to me by several people for the position of co-editor of this Companion. Now
a senior associate professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca, she teaches
undergraduate and graduate courses, while her research focuses on issues of
urban regeneration. Since 2015, as delegate of the rector she is engaged in the
work of the National Center for Studies in Urban Policies. Sadly, Serena is also
facing a major health issue. This, coupled with the spread of COVID-19 in Mi-
lan, have made the last year a considerable challenge for her and her husband,
Phil Haddock. All of us wish her the very best and pray that she is able to regain
her health soon.
* * * * * * *
I also want to acknowledge the efforts of two people who worked on entries in
this Companion. Both of them passed away during the course of the last year. One
is Anne Haila. She wrote the entry ‘Financialisation and Real Estate’. There are
Preface

23. xxii preface
extensive obituaries to Professor Haila online, including remembrances and tributes
from many colleagues and friends. I quote here only one brief passage among many
regarding her importance:
Like the great political economists of all time, she understood that research is not simply
to understand the world, scholarship must also be able to transform the world. Thus,
when Academy Professor Haila was invited to serve on the powerful Economic Policy
Council of Finland whose ‘political economy’ was in the policy sphere, she embraced
the opportunity, becoming the only woman and also the only political economist on the
Council whose task is to evaluate targets set for economic policy and how they link with
social and public policy. Asked what her initial impressions were about contributing to
the Council, she stated what had to be said, the truth, not what people wished to hear:
Finnish land policy is a mess, explaining much of the worsening political-economic and
social problems in a country which, according to UN reports, is supposed to be an El
Dorado. (Online obituary. Franklin Obeng-Odoom, on behalf of Anne Haila’s Research
Group, the ‘Helsinki School of Critical Urban Studies’, University of Helsinki, Finland)
Given the sweep and quality of her research and political influence, I very much
regret that I did not get to know her.
The second author to have passed away in 2019 is Sandra Annunziata. Dr An-
nunziata died suddenly in January 2019. She is one of the co-authors of the chapter
‘Segregation, Gentrification, and Social Mix’. Her colleague, Loretta Lees, wrote
a wonderful tribute to her that is also posted online. Besides the loss to her young
family and colleagues, Lees notes a number of Annunziata’s accomplishments. I
quote here:
In 2009 she won the Best Paper Award for the dissertation results she presented to the
International Forum of Urbanism in Delft, Holland. Sandra won the Giovanni Ferraro
National Award in 2010 for her PhD dissertation. The award is a nationally recognized
prize in Italy for urban and planning research that reaches beyond the frontiers of
current planning knowledge and transcends established disciplinary boundaries. Then
in 2011 she received the Clarence Stein Award by Cornell University College of Art,
Architecture and Planning.
Again, I regret that I never got to know her, someone who was only at the beginning
of what promised to be a very important career.
* * * * * *
It has been my great pleasure to work with the authors on the entries in this
Companion. They were chosen from among many we could have selected because
of the fields of their research and their expertise. The entries that we have included,
among them the fine set of essays on the cities and regions in different parts of the
world, were selected to highlight matters that we regard as the most significant in
urban studies. As you will note later in the ‘Conclusions’, we regard these particular
entries as a vital and significant feature of this volume. Although all three of us par-
ticipated in their identification and the selection of the authors, Javier did a great
deal of this work and he deserves the credit for it. At the time I failed to realise how

24. preface xxiii
important, indeed rich and informative, these essays would be. Their authors have
gone well beyond the call of duty to make them significant contributions.
We have included many other contributions: on the legacy of the Chicago School,
on social networks, on gentrification, and on significant other elements in the field
of urban studies. Again, their authors took our invitation seriously and did an out-
standing job of putting together first-rate summaries and analyses. There are essays
on ethnographic methods, one of my favourite methods of choice, but also on the
continuing issues of social and economic inequalities. Inequalities seem to have been
written into the texts of so many different places and at so many different times that
it seems that the social sciences could simply focus on them. And parts of the social
sciences have done precisely that. I hope that the entry here plus the many associated
entries in the Encyclopedia will not only tie together loose ends but furnish the foun-
dations for new students who are only beginning their work in urban studies. Indeed,
I think there are other specialties in the social sciences whose practitioners will profit
from the insights provided by the entries here.
My colleagues and I want to extend our good wishes to all the many people who
practice urban work in one way or another – to the urban planners as well as to the
urban anthropologists, to the urban geographers as well as to the urban sociologists
and political scientists. The field of urban studies has grown enormously over the
past several decades and expanded well beyond the bounds of the field first identi-
fied and mined by that small band of sociologists, including Robert Park and Louis
Wirth, in Chicago. I happened to attend the University of Chicago in Sociology, and
only years after obtaining my degree there did I learn of the significance of this early
work. But in a sense that work has furnished the foundations, replaced by important
research in ethnographies as well as a deepened and richer school of demographic
studies. Many people contributed to this effort at Chicago, including Harvey Mo-
lotch, Nancy Denton, and Douglas Massey. They helped to move the field of urban
studies further than many people might have thought possible.
I want to note too that the field of urban studies has expanded far beyond the
boundaries of the United States and American cities. There are many urban scholars
doing work in the United States today but there are countless scholars elsewhere in
the world, like the members of RC21 at the International Sociological Association. A
number of those members are represented in the works in this volume, and I am glad
we can in one way help to bridge the differences between work in the United States
and that in Europe as well as in Asia and Latin America. It is important that we seek
to cultivate our common interests and our common goal in making urban studies a
rich and powerful way not only to explore the world but, I hope, to make it a better
place for our sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters in the future.
Thanks to all of you who have worked not only on the Companion but also on
the Encyclopedia. We owe you a great debt of gratitude.
Anthony M. Orum

25. Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley Sons Ltd.
A Crucial Year for Writing about Cities and Human
Lives in Them
Twenty years have passed since the turn of the millennium, and several key events
have transformed the world of cities. Events related to war and terrorism changed
the whole realm of migration, from international travel, to metropolitan demo-
graphic shifts, and to neighbourhood policies. Here we can name the attacks on the
twin towers in New York (2001), the beginning of the war in Afghanistan (2001),
the end of the second Congo War (2002), the invasion of Iraq (2003), the attacks in
Madrid and London (2005), the Boko Haram insurgency in Africa (2009), and the
prominence of ISIS in Iraq (2014). Events related to the environment have shaped
international regulations, urban development policies, and political movements.
Here we can mention the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami (2004), the com-
ing into force of the Kyoto Protocol (for reduction of greenhouse emissions, 2005),
the coming into force of the Paris Agreement (for limiting global warming, 2016),
and the beginning of the Youth Strike for Climate international movement (2018).
Events related to economics have changed the pace and the geographical epicentres
of the world’s development. Here we can name at least the global financial crisis
(2008–2009) and the ascendancy of China as the world’s second largest economy
(2010). Events related to politics have been either the result of long-term processes
or the marker for future developments at the global, national, metropolitan, and
neighbourhood level. And here we can mention the beginning of the post-neoliberal
experiments in Latin America (2002), the Arab Spring (including the Syrian civil
war) and the student movements in Quebec, London, Mexico City, and Santiago de
Chile (2011), the beginning of the refugee crisis in Europe (2015), the ascendancy
Introduction
A World of Cities and Urban Problems in the
Twenty-First Century
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, Anthony Orum, and Serena Vicari
Haddock

26. Introduction xxv
of far right authorities such as Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, and Jair
Bolsonaro (2016–2019), and the beginning of grassroot social outbursts in countries
such as France, Hong Kong, Chile, Algeria, Colombia, and so on (2018–2019).
To every generation of scholars the years under study appear to be the epitome of
change but it is indisputable that the events of these last two decades – diverse, unex-
pected, and of global impact as they are – give an immediate and powerful idea of
processes of change of growing intensity and complexity. A combination of political-
economic and sociocultural processes has produced explosive urbanisation, growing
inequalities, environmental degradation, and humanitarian crises all over the world.As
a result of their impact, the world of cities and today’s urban problems look a lot dif-
ferent than in the twentieth century. Beyond these common macro-processes, the world
of cities and regions have to face the different challenges they pose, through different
degrees and levels of intensity, mainly due to their widely diverse historical trajectories.
Sometimes these trajectories are firmly embedded in the local economies. In other cases,
cities and regions are swept away by global economic trends. Not less crucially, there
are also deep cultural and political assets that constrain or facilitate those trajectories.
But beyond these events, a massive crisis hit the globe in 2020: the coronavirus
worldwide pandemic. Of all the global phenomena that social science has described in
the past century, this should be the one that has reached all corners of the world faster
and deeper. As of mid-August 2020, more than 22 million cases have been reported in
188 countries and territories, with almost 800,000 deaths (Center for Systems Science
and Engineering (CSSE), 2020). The preventive and controlling measures have seri-
ously enforced social distancing, lockdowns, travel restrictions, closure of educational
systems, and cancellation of social events. Therefore, millions of people around the
world have been mandated to stay at home, away from social contacts – many of
them losing their jobs or decreasing their income – strictly patrolled by police and
military forces and, on top of that, most are affected by either healthcare problems,
socioeconomic problems, and/or mental health problems. Consequently, the social,
economic, and environmental life of cities has changed drastically in a few months.
Beyond the high rates of contagion, deaths, and the collapse of healthcare systems,
the crisis has impacted different dimensions of human life, leading to the largest
global recession since the Great Depression (Gopinath, 2020). In terms of social rela-
tions, panic buying has led to supply shortages and there are also increasing levels
of prejudice, xenophobia, and racism and a significant increase in domestic violence.
In education and culture, the closure of schools is leaving parents without caregivers
for their children, many people do not have enough computers and appropriate
internet connection at home, and most cultural venues have been forced to close. In
terms of labour, there are little or no protection for millions who are forced to stop
working. There are also little or no protection for those who cannot pay their rent or
their mortgage, homeless people are even more unprotected and displaced, and there
are millions living in dense and precarious housing (with limited access to water
and sanitation), all of this in the middle of an ongoing global housing affordability
crisis. In terms of politics, many governments have not protected their citizens: they
are not controlling the prices of essential goods, not listening to their scientists, not
defending their public services, not stopping people’s debt obligations, and so on. As
many have said, it has not been a sanitary crisis by itself, but the political, social, and
economic management of it that has generated a wide range of problems. And on

27. xxvi Javier Ruiz-Tagle, Anthony Orum, and Serena Vicari Haddock
top of this, there is uncertainty: as of mid-August, there is no clarity about how and/
or when the previous context could be recovered. The near future of cities, then, is
highly insecure, damaging, and even dangerous for millions of people.
One of the most repeated phrases of social scientists, activists, and social com-
mentators, almost to the level of common sense, is that the coronavirus crisis has
exposed all pre-existing inequalities. People from middle and upper class can easily
work at home, they live in low density houses and neighbourhoods with fewer or no
children (who are vectors of contagion), they still have an income, they do not need
social contact for their daily survival, and they have better access to supply facilities
and quality healthcare. Alternatively, people from lower class and racially discrim-
inated groups live in dense and precarious dwellings, they need to work outside
among other people to put food on the table, they have large families, they are
heavily dependent on the help and contact from others for their daily survival, and
they live far from supply and healthcare facilities. Of course, there are enormous
variations from country to country (or from state to state in large countries) due
to the way in which different governments have tackled the sanitary and socioeco-
nomic crises. But a common outcome, however, has been inequality. In fact, far more
people die for other reasons every year (wars, hunger, domestic violence, terrorism,
drug cartels, etc.), but the pandemic has the potential of collapsing entire healthcare
systems, which in turn could affect the elites. During the Industrial Revolution the
cholera, tuberculosis, and other epidemics led the bourgeoisie to take measures to
protect themselves from the possibility of infection. Today, similarly, national and in-
ternational powers and elites are taking measures on behalf of the lives of the poor-
est, but in great part to protect themselves. As a lucid phrase of a poem by Damian
Barr circulating in social networks says (accompanied by an illustration by Barbara
Kelly): ‘We are not all in the same boat. We are all in the same storm. Some are on
super-yachts. Some have just the one oar.’
Thus, the current coronavirus crisis has deeply affected life in cities, which have
lost – at least temporarily – their original sense as spaces of contact, agglomeration,
exchange, scale economies, and collective solution of needs. How can there be a city
if no one is there to occupy and use its public spaces? Does teleconferencing offer a
good substitute for social interaction and exchange in the city? And how might the
pandemic reshape the social and political character of the city in the post-pandem-
ic era? In the middle of these dystopic and uncertain times, several philosophers,
thinkers, and social commentators have quickly raised their voices, including one
initiative that translated several pieces into Spanish and edited them into a book
(Amadeo, 2020).1
The famous phrase of Marxist thinker Frederic Jameson, ‘it is
easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism’ (Fisher, 2009), has
been at the centre of those debates. Several topics have been discussed, from biopoli-
tics and totalitarianism, to solidarity and the limits of capitalism.2
But many others
1
The book contains pieces from Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Jean Luc Nancy, Franco
‘Bifo’ Berardi, Santiago López Petit, Judith Butler, Alain Badiou, David Harvey, Byung-
Chul Han, Raúl Zibechi, María Galindo, Markus Gabriel, Gustavo Yáñez González,
Patricia Manrique, and Paul B. Preciado.
2
Besides the ones compiled in the above-mentioned book, several others have partici-
pated, such as Markus Gabriel, Roberto Esposito, Yuval Harari, and Noam Chomsky.

28. Introduction xxvii
have criticised their efforts for rushing to write something before they have anything
meaningful to say in a context where the flows of news and ideas is overwhelming
and, of course, uncertain.
This intellectual effervescence has shown that desires are somewhat confused
with reality. Sometimes philosophers have the strong aspiration of having their
theories transformed into reality, even if that reality is catastrophic. However,
what plagues and epidemics have indeed produced during human history is a
revival of fear, which could lead to religious readings of reality or to conspiracy,
emergency, prophetic, or opportunistic philosophy. Therefore, as with all these
commentators, do we want to propose a new way of thinking and intervening
in the different cities of the world? Do we really know what will follow after
this crisis? Certainly not, because we are in the eye of the hurricane and that
does not allow us to see the big picture. The only thing we could apparently pre-
dict, which may be obvious given the gravity of the situation, is that any latent
and conflicting inequality will become worse with the coronavirus crisis, espe-
cially when cold temperatures end, strict quarantines finish, and people disre-
gard restrictions and gather together and stand up for their oppressed lives. That
started to happen in July 2020 after George Floyd’s assassination in the United
States, which ignited a series of massive protests not only in that country, but in
several places in which quarantines are being lifted. Again, these are uncertain
times for cities and for human life in them.
Content and Structure of the Book
This Companion to Urban and Regional Studies began with the aim of covering
more deeply and broadly many of the issues identified in the Encyclopedia of
Urban and Regional Studies (Orum, 2019), and it does it in five sections. In the
first section, we present a state-of-the-art review of the situation of cities across all
world regions: South Asia, East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Australasia (Oceania),
Latin America, North America, and Europe. In the second section, we provide a
more thorough discussion of contemporary theoretical perspectives, such as criti-
cal theory, environmental perspectives on cities, feminist theory, and the legacy
of the Chicago School. In the third section, we offer a thorough discussion and
update on the most popular methodological approaches used by urban scholars,
such as demographic methods, advanced spatial analysis, and urban ethnogra-
phies, as well as theoretical-methodological approaches like urban networks and
policy mobilities. In the fourth section, we attempt to cover the most pressing
social problems of twenty-first-century cities, such as diversity, inequalities, the
role of residential contexts, immigration (in Europe, China, and the United States),
and the nexuses between segregation, social mix, and gentrification. And in the
fifth and final section, we try to cover some other political, policy-related, and
economic problems, such as urban governance, policy approaches, financialisa-
tion, and housing.
In all the reviews and discussions of theoretical perspectives, research methods,
research themes, and policy issues, we emphasised that authors extend their geo-
graphic coverage as wide as possible. Thus, we attempted to leave the comfort zone

29. xxviii
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, Anthony Orum, and Serena Vicari Haddock
and the traditional focus of urban studies in European and North American cities
and set out to build a more cosmopolitan – and hopefully postcolonial – discussion.
In addition, we looked for authors all around the world in an effort to avoid the
practices of requesting authors from the Global North to write about – and on behalf
of – the Global South. We also embraced the inclusion of young scholars, sometimes
working alone and sometimes appearing as first authors (before their consolidated
bosses). And, of course, we promoted the inclusion of women, even in topics where
men use to predominate (like spatial analysis or demographic methods): of our 53
authors, 28 are women and 25 are men, and 15 women are leading authors in their
chapters, versus 12 men. The range and variety of these chapters span across all
possible dimensions of the urban studies field, in an outstanding level of quality.
These chapters are informative not only to urban scholars and practitioners but also
to people in a wide variety of fields, including political science, anthropology, eco-
nomics, and so on.
Cities Across World Regions
As we have mentioned, in the first section we cover the situation of cities across
all world regions. Tanvi Bhatikar and Neha Sami’s chapter is on the South Asian
region,3
where cities are leading the urban transition of the Global South (along
with the African ones). Most of this new urban populations have been established
in informal settlements, generating a deep impact on socioeconomic and environ-
mental problems and increasing the pressure on all types of goods, infrastructure,
investments, and urban policies. Junxi Qian, Jia Ling, and Shenjing He’s chapter is
on the East Asian region,4
where cities are under the challenge of being the emerging
economic engine of the world. Within a context of intense economic and cultural
globalisation, this massive wave of urbanisation has influenced wide transforma-
tions in urban governance and social relations, leading to remarkable societal and
cultural changes.
Guillermo Jajamovich, Oscar Sosa, and Gabriel Silvestre’s chapter is on Latin
American5
cities, where the path of urbanisation was not equalised with industri-
alisation, creating a large sector of informality in labour and housing, with wide
inequalities between the informal poor and the super rich. Strong neoliberal reforms
took place from the 1980s, bringing a decreased role of the state in the provision of
urban services and infrastructure, transference of duties to weak local governments,
3
This includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and
Sri Lanka. The region has a population of almost 1.9 billion, which is nearly one fourth
of the world’s population.
4
This includes China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, South Korea, and North Ko-
rea. The region has a population of 1.6 billion, which is more than one fifth of the world’s
population.
5
This includes South America (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador,
Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela), Central America (Belize, Costa Rica, El Sal-
vador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama), and Mexico. The region has a
population of more than 600 million, which is more than 8% of the world’s population.

30. Introduction xxix
reductions in public spending and social protections, and deregulating planning
tools. Warren Smit’s chapter is on sub-Saharan Africa’s6
cities, where an intense wave
of rapid urbanisation is underway, accompanied by a relatively positive prospect
of social, political, and economic development compared to past decades. This
impressive economic growth, with local real estate development and international
investment in infrastructure projects, has pushed the emergence of a new middle
class, encouraged massive intra-regional migration, and reproduced the persistence
of informal development in housing and labour.
Kristian Ruming and Tom Baker’s chapter is on Australasian7
cities, which show
very high rates of urbanisation and are markedly suburban with a population con-
centrated in a handful of former colonial outposts that attract most economic
activity and population inflows. Current problems include rapidly increasing housing
prices, lack of affordable housing, and cultural and economic inequalities affecting
indigenous and immigrant groups.
Yuri Kazepov, Roberta Cucca, Byeongsun Ahn, and Christophe Verrier’s chapter
is on European8
cities, where there are slower urbanisation processes and growing
trends of social and spatial inequalities within a context of decaying – but still
highly significant – welfare states. Austerity measures since the financial crisis in
2008 have had a deep impact at the urban level which, coupled with growing
neoliberalisation of urban economies, has led to social and occupational polari-
sations and to more residential segregation. Finally, Jon Teaford’s chapter is on
North American9
cities, where most of the population is living in metropolitan
areas and where there have been massive movements to the south and west of the
United States and Canada, which is generally explained by warmer temperatures,
high-tech employment, and the expansion of the leisure industry. In contrast to
gentrifying central cities, suburbs have grown faster and have changed a great deal
in terms of ethno-racial and land use composition, although still being highly seg-
regated places.
7
This includes Australia, New Zealand, and neighbouring islands. The region has a
population of more than 30 million, which is about 0.4% of the world’s population.
8
This includes 50 sovereign states in eastern, northern, southern, and western Europe.
The whole continent has a population of almost 750 million, which is about 9.6% of the
world’s population.
9
For this review, this includes the United States and Canada, with a joined population of
366 million, which is about 4.7% of the world’s population.
6
According to the UN, this includes Western Africa (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde,
Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Ni-
ger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo), Eastern Africa (Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti,
Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, So-
malia, South Sudan, Uganda, United Republic of Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe), Middle
Africa (Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Democratic Repub-
lic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, São Tomé and Príncipe), and Southern
Africa (Botswana, Eswatini (former Swaziland), Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa). The
region has a population of approximately 1 billion, which is about 13% of the world’s
population.

31. xxx Javier Ruiz-Tagle, Anthony Orum, and Serena Vicari Haddock
Leading Theoretical Perspectives and Approaches
In the second section of the book, we try to cover some of the leading theoretical per-
spectives and approaches of the twenty-first century’s urban studies. Tino Buchholz’s
chapter is on new directions in Frankfurt critical theory, establishing nexuses bet-
ween the Frankfurt School in general social theory, neo-Marxism and urban political
economy as a still powerful paradigm in the field, and new currents in critical urban
theory. Recognising the variety of critical approaches in today’s urban studies, Bu-
chholz discusses contemporary Frankfurt critical theory, somewhat continuing the
efforts initiated by Neil Brenner. Conversely, Pranathi Diwakar and Joshua Babcock’s
chapter is on the legacies and remnants of the Chicago School, showing the variety
of concepts that this school has been involved in throughout its history (methods,
theoretical approaches, conceptual activities, topical frameworks, and so on), and
reflecting on what the Chicago School means at present. Although many would say
that Chicago School thinking has been overshadowed for almost 50 years, it is impor-
tant to acknowledge its direct or indirect influence in current mainstream authors
such as Robert Sampson, Edward Glaeser, and Richard Florida, to name a few.
Maria Christina Fragkou and Anahí Urquiza’s chapter is about environmental
perspectives on cities, an approach that has expanded the scope of urban studies
from the exclusively social and economic focus of the twentieth century. The authors
describe urban environmental issues from the perspectives offered by industrial
ecology and political ecology, discuss the key concepts of risk, vulnerability, and
resilience, and highlight the social resignification of sustainability by the environ-
mental justice movement. Brenda Parker’s chapter covers feminist urban research,
highlighting how woman reflections and struggles have transformed life in cities,
even before being labelled as feminist, until they cohered into a body of academic
work in the 1960s and 1970s. The author shows how this approach has grown dra-
matically since then, diversifying in several sub-approaches and addressing a variety
of urban topics, such as housing, public space, poverty, colonialism, and so on.
Methodological Approaches
The third section of the book covers some of the main methodological approaches
used in contemporary urban studies. Ricardo Truffello, Monica Flores, and Fernan-
da Rojas’s chapter is on demographic methods in which they provide a critical per-
spective on the use of information by different types of academic and governmental
institutions. After introducing the different methods and the sources of information,
they discuss issues such as the historical role of censuses in society, the problems of
territorial representativeness in surveys, and the availability of administrative and
vital records in the Global South.
Inga Gryl, Ana Parraguez Sanchez, and Thomas Jekel’s chapter highlights the
growing use of geographic information systems and the emergence of neo-cartogra-
phy in a variety of disciplines and practical tasks. Starting from the Lefebvrian idea
of representations of space, they describe the historical development of geoinforma-
tion and geomedia, from both experts and non-experts, and how they are changing
not only urban studies and urban policies, but also our everyday life. Margarethe
Kusenbach and Japonica Brown-Saracino, in their chapter on urban ethnography,

32. Introduction xxxi
offer a detailed overview of major developments and new directions in ethnograph-
ic-based urban research from the turn of the millennium. They show how the craft
of urban ethnography has crossed the boundaries of different disciplines, epistemo-
logical approaches, and regions, and how its growth from the 2000s onwards has
introduced higher levels of reflexivity and the recognition of the positionality of each
researcher.
In this section, we also considered theoretical-methodological approaches,
which focus on a particular subject matter but are also research instruments by
themselves: social networks and policy mobilities. Kathryn Anderson and Zachary
Neal’s chapter on cities and networks emphasises the challenges and opportunities
of a perspective that sees cities as places for growing social, economic, political,
and creative interactions. Besides describing methodological innovations, like the
sociogram, the authors describe the reciprocal interactions between people’s net-
works and infrastructure networks within a city, and also between cities, thus linking
neighbourhood-level research to global city discussions, both key to urban studies.
Astrid Wood’s chapter is on policy mobilities, an approach that falls within the par-
adigm shift of the so-called ‘mobility turn’ in social sciences, embracing its call for
the emergence of mobile methods, and the social-constructivist debates of critical
urban theory. As an intersection between political science and geography, the author
describes how this approach focuses on policies and practices that are assembled,
mobilised, and adopted in different political contexts, complicated by local and
regional dynamics, thus reproducing the circulation of knowledge around the world.
Social Problems in Twenty-First-Century Cities
In the fourth section of the book, we address some of the most pressing social prob-
lems of contemporary cities around the world. Ayda Eraydin’s chapter on social het-
erogeneity and diversity points not only to the growing change in the demographic
profiles of cities due to contemporary migrations, but also to the social dynamics
that these changes bring. The social, economic, and political issues that emanate
from these new local configurations are analysed in terms of social integration,
exclusion, and discrimination, including fears about separate lives and parallel soci-
eties. David Benassi, Andrea Ciarini, and Enzo Mingione’s chapter on inequalities
and the city presents a comprehensive analysis of both the processes that produce
inequality at global and local levels and the specific expressions of inequality in
cities. The chapter analyses the drivers of urban inequality and their evolution over
time as a background for an in-depth discussion of contemporary inequalities in cit-
ies of the Global North and the Global South.
In her chapter on the role of residential contexts in urban inequality, Mer-
cedes Di Virgilio examines the prominent role of the state and how it structures
the development of socio-territorial inequalities in the urban space, particularly in
neighbourhoods. The ‘neighbourhood effects’ thesis is discussed with particular
emphasis on the problem of the multiple scales involved in the production of urban
inequalities as well as on separate and complementary dimensions that play a role in
the struggle for the appropriation of the urban space.
Since the issue of migrations is so crucial for the social problems of inequality and
diversity, with clear impacts on neighbourhoods, we have added three chapters on

33. xxxii Javier Ruiz-Tagle, Anthony Orum, and Serena Vicari Haddock
this topic from three different regions: Europe, China, and the United States. Moshe
Semyonov and Anastasia Gorodzeisky’s chapter on immigration and immigrants in
European countries highlights Europe as a major destination after World War II in a
context of decolonisation and guest-worker programmes. The authors explain how
immigrants are seen in all places as an external social group with a negative impact,
are targets of discrimination, and have partial or unsuccessful economic integration.
Da Liu and Zhigang Li consider the character of migrations and migrants in post-re-
form Chinese cities, focusing on two types of immigrants, rural migrants and interna-
tional residents. They describe, on one side, how rural migrants have been relegated
to marginalised spaces and, on the other side, how international residents can make
a decent living when established in places that are more similar (at least in economic
terms) to the Western notion of the ethnic enclave. Christopher Levesque and Jack
DeWaard’s chapter on migrations and migrants in the United States poses the idea
that the United States has entered a fifth phase of immigration after Trump’s election
in 2016, which is marked by three key developments: reactions against demographic
change in a context of deindustrialization, politics of fear and deservingness discon-
nected from reality and history, and fear of access and preservation of legal residence.
The authors describe the context of polarising interpretations on the meaning of US
citizenship, with growing racialised myths of deservingness and illegality, and resis-
tance and social organisation of many immigrant and native groups.
This fourth section of the book closes with a chapter by Sandra Annunziata, Lo-
retta Lees, and Clara Rivas Alonso on the nexuses between segregation, social mix,
and gentrification, all highly discussed and crucial for contemporary urban studies.
The authors stress how policies targeted at segregated poor areas, in the name of the
progressive ideals that are supposedly behind social mix, end up generating gentrifi-
cation: that is, displacing most (or all) poor residents and opening room for capital
reinvestment in those neighbourhoods.
Political and Economic Problems in Twenty-First-Century Cities
The fifth and final section of the book discusses political and economic problems.
Annika Hinze’s chapter covers urban citizenship and governance. Urban citizenship
is examined from legal, social, economic, identity, and practical perspectives, and
urban governance is described in terms of the variegated institutional capacities, their
vertical coherence and integration, the insertion of the private sector, ad hoc insti-
tutional arrangements established for specific development projects, and emerging
issues of democratic transparency. In their chapter on policies and policy approaches
in cities, Marc Pradel and Marisol Garcia highlight the variety of needs addressed
by urban policies and develop a highly exhaustive review of urban policy trends
in most corners of the world: North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and
Africa. Despite some specific path dependencies of each context, they show several
policy innovations that are being copied and implemented in other contexts (as the
chapter on policy mobilities describes in detail), with some international institutions
providing the context for information exchange and the setting of policy agendas.
Anne Haila’s chapter on financialisation and real estate highlights how the trans-
formation of housing and properties into a financial asset has become a major
research topic for several disciplines. Centring the discussion on the reciprocal

34. Introduction xxxiii
development of financial instruments and of the market for real estate, she describes
consequences, such as the increase of risk in the housing market for both home-
owners and tenants, the competition between cities to attract super-wealthy indi-
viduals for buying luxury homes, the inclusion of micro-investors within the real
estate game, the growth of short-term rentals, and more. Finally, Darinka Czischke
and Alonso Ayala’s chapter on housing in the Global North and the Global South
stresses the global affordability crisis that is suffered in most corners of the world
after the financial crisis of 2008. For the countries of the Global North and Global
South, housing issues are presented with a detailed analysis of five related themes:
land, planning, and infrastructure; tenure and management; finance; environmental
sustainability; and governance and user participation.
Updating and Extending Our Knowledge About Cities and Their
Problems Around the World
This book is a major effort of synthesising and bringing together all dimensions that
compose twenty-first-century urban studies: from a detailed overview of cities in
all corners of the world (our study subject), to leading theoretical perspectives (our
lenses to see that subject), to methodological approaches (the research instruments
to study our subject), and to social, political, and economic problems (the main con-
cerns that the urban studies literature has raised in the past two decades). Together
with the Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies, in which the three of us were
involved, we would like to say that this Companion to Urban and Regional Studies
is the most complete account of the current state of the discipline of urban studies,
although recognising the several other initiatives involved in similar ambitious
tasks.10
In any case, we wanted this book to be as exhaustive, as comprehensive, and
as diverse as possible.
Urban studies, as a subfield in social sciences that also draws from applied sci-
ences (e.g. transportation engineering) and applied arts (e.g. architecture), has been
increasingly institutionalised in the past decades. In 2010, Robert Beauregard said
that urban studies ‘exists as a parallel, and marginalized, institutional and intellec-
tual space’ (Beauregard, 2010: 931), as compared to other formalised fields in social
science within which urban studies stands, such as economics, sociology, political
science, history, geography, and anthropology. However, we think we can update
this statement. Considering the growth of disciplines that are incorporating an urban
10
Just to name a few in the English language: Handbook of Urban Studies (Sage, 2001), A
Companion to the City (Wiley Blackwell, 2008), The Sage Companion to the City (Sage,
2008), The New Blackwell Companion to the City (Wiley Blackwell, 2011), The Oxford
Handbook of Urban Politics (Oxford University Press, 2012), The Sage Handbook of
Housing Studies (Sage, 2012), The Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning (Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2012), A Companion to Urban Anthropology (Wiley, 2014), The Routledge
Handbook on Cities of the Global South (Routledge, 2014), A Companion to Urban
Anthropology (Wiley, 2014), The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City (Sage, 2018),
and The Routledge Companion to Planning in the Global South (Routledge, 2019).

35. xxxiv Javier Ruiz-Tagle, Anthony Orum, and Serena Vicari Haddock
insight, the growth of professional and academic programmes that are increasingly
being taught, the growth of departments and research centres that are being formed,
the growth of national and international networks and research groups that are cre-
ated and join every year, the growth of academic production in regional and global
journals, and even the impact that this field has on a variety of economic, social, and
environmental international organisations and initiatives, we can at least say that
urban studies is not ‘marginal’ anymore. In fact, it does not need to be a formalised
discipline, because its strength actually comes from its multidisciplinary roots, as
long as it maintains a certain degree of expertise over its study subject (i.e. cities and
regions). And we humbly believe that this book could be a contribution in enriching
and expanding that expertise.
References
Amadeo, P. 2020. Sopa de Wuhan: Pensamiento contemporáneo en tiempos de pandemias.
Buenos Aires, Argentina: ASPO (Aislamiento Social Preventivo y Obligatorio).
Beauregard, R. 2010. Urban studies. In Ray Hutchison (ed.), Encyclopedia of Urban Stud-
ies, 930–935. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE). 2020. COVID-19 dashboard. Johns
Hopkins University. https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.
html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6.
Fisher, M. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
Gopinath, G. 2020. The great lockdown: Worst economic downturn since the great depression.
https://blogs.imf.org/2020/04/14/the-great-lockdown-worst-economic-downturn-since-
the-great-depression.
Orum, A. 2019. The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies. Hobo-
ken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.

36. Part I
CITIES ACROSS
WORLD REGIONS

38. Companion to Urban and Regional Studies, First Edition. Edited by Anthony M. Orum,
Javier Ruiz-Tagle, and Serena Vicari Haddock
© 2021 John Wiley Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley Sons Ltd.
Introduction
The ongoing global urban transition, led by cities in the Global South, particularly
in Asian and African countries, presents one of the defining development oppor-
tunities of the twenty-first century. Rapid urbanisation over the next two to three
decades will lead to an explosion in the demand for livelihoods, urban renewal,
infrastructure and real estate development, food, water, energy, housing, and digital
technology. A significant proportion of this transition will be played out in South
Asian cities: between 2001 and 2011, 130 million people were added to South Asian
cities and this number is set to rise by almost 250 million in the next 15 years.1
This
urban transition presents exceptional opportunities for sustainable development, but
also presents difficult challenges. South Asia is home to some of the fastest growing
economies in the world, but also faces critical questions around issues of inequality,
poverty, health and social welfare, and environmental degradation.
South Asia’s ‘messy’ and ‘hidden’ urbanisation (Ellis and Roberts, 2016) is evident
in the large share of the population living in settlements that possess urban charac-
teristics but do not satisfy the criteria required to be officially classified as urban
(Denis et al., 2012). Rapidly growing cities are unable to cope with the increasing
demand for urban services and are vulnerable to growing social and environmen-
tal factors that govern urban fabric. The inability of the cities to effectively address
these obstacles provides the root cause for messy and hidden urbanisation (Ellis and
1
Cities and Regions in South Asia
Tanvi Bhatikar and Neha Sami
1
Data from the World Urbanization Prospects Report, 2018 Revision, United Nations
Population Division.