Drawing from scholars with extensive, and very recent, fieldwork experience, this volume covers seventeen cities in thirteen countries across a belt stretching east from Latin America, to Africa and the Middle East, and into Asia. The volume advances our understanding of this process by drawing attention to three defining aspects of the city, according to which its chapters are organized: first, the increasing social polarization and spatial division of the city, and the local expressions of transnational governance driving these developments; second, the refashioning of certain city quarters of the divided city into cosmopolitan landscapes; and, third, the distinctive struggles emerging in response to these changes and the competing visions of the urban future which animate them.
