Cities in the International Marketplace. By H. V. Savitch and
Paul Kantor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. 488p. $65.00
cloth, $19.95 paper.
The growing popularity of comparative research is one of the most
exciting recent developments in the field of urban politics. Comparison
allows urbanists to transcend the local and see cities as part of a
national or global system. It helps urban scholars identify which factors
derive from the workings of democratic capitalist systems, and which grow
from particular national practices and policies. But comparative urbanists
have a difficult task as they try to disentangle cities from their
national contexts. On the one hand, one can hardly understand, say,
education policy in Detroit and Düsseldorf without clarifying local
and national roles. On the other, an urbanist eager to highlight what is
salient about the local does not wish to make national policy analysis
central to his or her research. These special theoretical and
methodological challenges confronting the comparative urbanist can be
daunting.