States of the Metropolis : Assessing Change in Global Cities
How have major metropolises changed in the last 20 years ? Have their populations and economies gained, lost or remained stable ? Have theses societies centralized or decentralized ? Have metropolises gained status as governing entities or do they continue to remain as politically inchoate entities ? In answering these questions we survey over 120 metropolises in and lay out basic trends. The metropolises cover North America, Western and Eastern Europe, Japan and Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa. We also examine the “global pecking order” of metropolises ; we do this by assessing change in the nominal Global-and-World-Cities ranking schema ; these changes are also compared to national level of human development. In some ways a study of this kind probes possible linkages between the onset of globalization and its consequences for the development of global and world cities. As we see it, metropolises around the advanced world have moved from various politico-socio-economic states to another — hence, our title.