Global Cities, Local Streets

Super-diversity increasingly characterizes neighborhoods throughout the world. Global Cities, Local Streets provides a systematic comparative examination of the ways growing diversification plays out in the ‘ecosystems’ of shopping districts and everyday experiences of shopkeepers and shoppers. The richly described cases and compelling theoretical insights give us a timely, new understanding of contemporary urban transformations.

- Steven Vertovec, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity

Beyond the apparently banal frame of "shopping streets" lies a dense network of expansive and parochial practices of exchange. Global Cities, Local Streets offers a compelling comparison across six cities, advancing new insights into the substance and methods of transnational research. This book is fine-grained contribution to the field of global urbanisation, and will be an invaluable teaching resource.

-Suzanne Hall, Department of Sociology & LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science

Focusing on local shopping streets in global cities as diverse as Amsterdam to Tokyo, this book examines the way the intimate and the transactional, the neighbourly and the far-flung, the familiar and the strange, as well as identity, belonging, moral ownership and social mobility, come together in constituting the life-worlds of local shopping streets. Offering a richly textured, kerb-side view of the way everyday civility, conviviality, cosmopolitanism and conflict play out, we are reminded that neither gentrification nor ghettoization are inexorable processes. Instead, kaleidoscopic diversity, shifting at every turn, seems to be that which nourishes and sustains the streets of our times.

-Brenda Yeoh, Geography, National University of Singapore

The powerfully evocative chapters in Global Cities, Local Streets got me walking the avenues in distant cities, ducking into stores, and lingering at street corners. […] The chapters on Amsterdam and Tokyo are the most engaging, because they are risky, opinionated, neither purely pedantic nor conceptually repetitive. [But if] the evocative chapters kept me reading, it was the sharp policy recommendation that was politically satisfying. And the research note at the end provided good advice on how to replicate such a project in transnational grounded theory.

-Krishnendu Ray, New York University in Contemporary Sociology (45, 6), 2016