ABSTRACT
Global Reach was one of the first popular books on the growing significance of transnational corporations as global economic actors. Anthropologist James Holston eloquently observes: Cities are plugged into the globe of history like capacitors; they condense and conduct the currents of social time'. Urbanisation is an almost universal demographic trend, with some of the poorest regions of the world urbanising the fastest. Urban health as a subfield of research and practice supports at least one major journal and an international scientific society, and in 2009-2010 was the topic of an international research network funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, but researchers who identify themselves with this subfield generally neglect such connections. Governments have responded to external pressures for policy convergence on a model that has been described as the competition state, prioritising promotion of economic activities, whether at home or abroad, which will make firms and sectors located within the territory of the state competitive in international markets'.
