ABSTRACT
The study of cities and development is one of the many aspects of social change that has been influenced by the paradigm shift in comparative sociology that Peter Evans and John Stephens all the rise of the “new international political economy” perspective. During the 1970s, the dominant developmentalist approach came under blistering attack, primarily from proponents of world-system and dependency theories. By the 1970s, the growing inequality and the continued economic stagnation in much of the Third World, especially manifest in cities, led many comparative urbanists to reevaluate the conventional developmentalist assumptions of modernization theory. In the late twentieth century, the dependency/world-system perspective has developed and proven to be a particularly powerful tool for analyzing problems involving macrostructural change. In the late 1970s, a number of pioneering efforts were made to apply the general logic of this international political economy approach to comparative research on cities and urban systems.
