ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors introduce each contribution, also paying attention to how they work towards one or more of the three aforementioned goals of contextualizing, pluralizing, and expanding global urban political agency. Urban studies are a highly 'contextual' discipline: it takes the spatial and temporal specificity of the urban processes under analysis very seriously, in part in opposition to the methodological nationalism of large parts of the social sciences. The strongly economy-driven perspective on the need and desirability of 'urban agency' is also apparent in work by scholars who are themselves enrolled in policymaking circuits. Echoing insights from the rescaling literature arguing that rescaling entails more than simply redistributing, he thus shows that there is no simple trade-off between cities and states, but rather a rich and complex array of options that shapes how cities affirm themselves as political actors.
