At the dawn of the new millennium, humanity is rapidly approaching a significant but insufficiently acknowledged milestone: by 2007, UN demographers say, more than half the world’s population will live in cities.1 On a scale that dwarfs previous experience, urban spaces have become cosmopolitan entrepôts through which vast quantities of capital, goods, information, and people fl ow daily. Contemporary cities, it should be noted, are also the primary sites for natural resource consumption and environmental pollution. The cradles of civilization, cities now lie at the core of a potential ecological crisis. In her scholarship on the “global city” (initially focused on New York, London, and Tokyo), Saskia Sassen has noted the destabilizing impact of the city’s increasing centrality on older spaces of governance such as the nation-state.2 Over the past fi fteen years, the global cities model has influenced much social science research on the global economy as a network of overlapping flows between urban spaces. But the global cities of the developed world are an increasingly anomalous embodiment of the urban realm and public space. In fact, 95 percent of urban population growth during the next generation will occur in cities of the developing world. By 2010, for example, Lagos is projected to become the planet’s third-largest city, after Tokyo and Mumbai. By 2025 it is predicted that Asia will contain nearly a dozen “hypercities” (with populations of 25 million or more), including Mumbai, Jakarta, Dhaka, and Karachi.3 Such predictions suggest the inadequacy of recent attempts to theorize globalization by focusing on cities in the developed world. Many of the twenty-first century’s gravest ecological, political, and social issues will gestate and mature in the urban spaces of the developing world.
