ABSTRACT
Cities are inherently complex and diverse. Their multifaceted nature means that there are very many routes to investigating their importance for understanding social change. All this is as true for their contemporary manifestation as ‘world’ or ‘global’ cities as at any time in the past. In fact, it can be argued that, given the growth in the scale of ‘city operations’, cities today are moving towards an apogee of complexity and diversity. Be that as it may, contemporary cities have certainly thrown up many challenges to urban studies, both old (e.g. gross material inequalities) and new (e.g. sustainability of ‘third world mega-cities’). The facet of cities that we focus upon here is a mixture of old and new: inter-city relations. Cities have always existed in relation to one another and contemporary cities are by no means an exception. Quite the opposite: since the 1970s, transport and communication/computing technologies have been fostering an intensification, expansion and extension of inter-city relations. In this way cities have become central to how many people understand contemporary globalization. This is our subject matter here.
