A Tale of Three Cities

Wihuri International Prize, Board of the Wihuri Foundation in Helsinki, Finland

This title examines the effects of globalization at the local level within our everyday lives. Rather than seeing the city as a conurbation, a location of economic activity, or in terms of governance and administration, it treats the city as an "action net".Cities are complex, sprawling, diverse places. They are organized, but disorganized; managed, but unmanaged; orderly, but disorderly. Modern metropolitan cities reproduce themselves and we are familiar with the common icons that are replicated in every part of the globe, but how should we understand cities? For the past five years, Professor Czarniawska has been leading a research project on globalization and the management of cities.;Rather than seeing the city as a conurbation, or a location of economic activity, or in terms of governance and administration, Czarniawska explores the city as an action net. An action net of this sort includes various organizations - municipal, state, private, and voluntary-and non-organized individuals. Such an approach was designed to avoid the fallacy of viewing the big city as one big organization. The city is thus conceived as a particularly complex and disorderly action net; a seamless web of interorganizational networks, where the city administration proper constitutes just one point of entry and by no means provides a map of the entire terrain. The research focuses on three European capitals: Warsaw, Stockholm, and Rome.; This book is intende