ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relational and territorial properties of global urban networks. Employing the mobilities approach, this chapter highlights both fixities and mobilities in the global urban network through which policies are borrowed, adapted, and transformed. There is a ‘Barcelona model’ of urban regeneration, for example, which is contingent on the historical-geographical circumstances of that city and its relationship with other regional and national forms of decision-making. The chapter discusses how contemporary scholarship across the social sciences is exhibiting a remarkable convergence around questions of inter-scalar relations and around a conviction that specific cases of regulation, design, or policy-making. It shows that this is an important moment in which to consider global-urban relations since ongoing discussions about the relationships between cities and global processes and about networked, relational, and territorial conceptualizations of social space indicate that cities are important nodes in a ‘globalizing’ world.
