World Cities Beyond the West: Globalization, Development and
Inequality, Josef Gugler, ed., Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge
University Press, 2004, pp. xv, 396.
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.