ABSTRACT

The cities that lie at the centre of this book reinforce Khanna’s (2010: 128) claim that cities are indeed ‘the world’s experimental laboratories and a metaphor for an uncertain age’. When the 15 research teams across the Asian and Pacific region embarked on this ambitious research programme in 2008 the collapse of the global finance sector was under way and the eyes of the world were focused on the failure of finance houses such as Lehman Brothers and the gross negligence of auditing agencies and sovereign governments in the industrialised world as they sought to avert a global recession. The ‘global city’ of New York was the laboratory for an experiment in corporate power and greed, a speculative infection that quickly spread to other cities in Europe and North America.