ABSTRACT
Ordinary cities – distinctive, diverse, contested – pose the question of urban development in new ways. Ambitions to improve life in ordinary cities require strategies to enhance a wide variety of urban environments; encouraging the expansion of urban economies will mean paying attention to the diversity of economic activities that cities bring together. The previous chapter explored how city-visioning processes can help to bring into focus both globalising economies and poor neighbourhoods, overcoming the division in urban studies between accounts of globalisation and development. This chapter builds on this by considering how interventions to shape city futures can respond to the distinctive features of each city context. In particular, it is the specificity of the local social and political context and the economic diversity of cities that can form the basis for imagining new urban futures.
