This book seeks to redress what its editor regards as an imbalance in the social science discourse on globalization and cities by providing a collection of research on cities in the global South, in the lower income countries of the world. In his introduction to the book, much of which could stand on its own as a valuable contribution, Gugler demonstrates that many cities “beyond the core” are involved in articulations that span broad regions of the world, if not always the whole world. Gugler also warns of the tendency to over-generalize across these “second tier” cities, insisting that scholarship needs to attend to the unique history, context and culture (especially political culture) of each city.

On many levels the book is quite successful. The scholarship represented in each of the contributions is of high quality, and the coverage of non-core cities is broad, with chapters on twelve different cities, including Bangkok, Cairo, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Mexico City, Mumbai, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai and Singapore. One could perhaps argue that other cities, such as Buenos Aires, Beijing, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur or Taipei, and another large city in the former socialist bloc, such as Budapest, should have been included. Also, considering that the editor is a scholar of African urbanization, one wonders about the omission of a “true” sub-Saharan African city.

Each chapter is well crafted and begins by following a similar general template. The city is introduced in general and the author presents the main thesis and plan of exposition, often a brief theoretical exposition on world cities and globalization. Each of the chapters emphasizes changing patterns of social inequality within the city. This, of course, is a key point in the world cities literature: to the extent cities articulate on a global basis, social polarization becomes heightened. The editor organizes chapters into three broad areas, purporting to represent the authors' emphases on of three themes: global connections, the national state, and the importance of social movements to a city's social structure and dynamic. In Forbes' contribution on Jakarta, for example, we learn how Suharto's unique political vision shaped the city's profile. In Alves'contribution on Sao Paulo, the reader learns that working-class labour movements in Brazil forged alliances with the intelligentsia, allowing it to have its interests institutionalized within the national state to a significant degree, and tempering the polarizing effects of globalization through state policy.

For me, the most satisfying chapters in the book were those which took the title of the book seriously by engaging the literature on world cities and describing the nature of global relations for the city in question. Obviously the contributions do this in part 1, The Impact of the Global Political Economy. Outstanding is Abu-Lughod's contribution on Cairo, which details that city's changing socio-spatial patterns in light of Egypt's changing global relations and, at the same time, in light of “domestic” and local factors. At several points in this contribution, the author suggests that we might find useful the old notion of “dependent urbanization,” harkening back to the research that first made connections between local urban patterns and extra-national processes and relationships. Her chapter belies the notion, given voice by Gugler in his introduction, that the local and the global are somehow analytically distinct agents of change and require separate strategies. Abu-Lughod's approach recognizes that the global is sometimes contained within the local. Is the Shiv Sena movement described by Patel in her chapter on Mumbai an anti-globalization movement? It would seem to be, given that it mobilizes support on the basis of opposing the in-migration of other ethnic groups—a likely concomitant of globalization. Yet Gugler, in his introduction and through his organization of the book, presents it as evidence of the primacy of local factors, as if the global is never embedded in the local.

In the end, the book provides a fine collection of scholarly work on a group of major world cities that are often neglected (with the exception of Shanghai, which is now a growth industry in social science research). However, the book remains a collection of chapters related only loosely theoretically. In the volume's “afterword,” Saskia Sassen does make a valiant, if intellectually acrobatic, effort to provide an overarching intellectual framework uniting these contributions—an impossible task considering the editor of the book seems to regard the global, the state, and resistance to globalization and states as mutually exclusive analytic frames, rather than as involving processes and institutions that are related nearly constantly if often dialectically. In spite of its faults, I would recommend this book for those who study world urbanization and world cities.