Uneven development, city governance, and urban change-unpacking the global-local nexus in Dublin’s inner city

Abstract

The city can be read as the nexus of global change and daily life-a site of contestation in the flux of economic imperatives, urban policymaking, and local needs and values. Just as importantly, the key general processes at work-economic restructuring, flows of capital through the built environment, and the like-have proceeded most unevenly, as reflected in local problems of job loss, displacement, poverty, and a whole range of attendant urban struggles and social tensions. In particular, the processes of uneven development and globalization in the city have generated new and complex patterns of growth and inequality, raising important analytical and policy challenges. For example, recent years have seen the realignment of the state and the evolution of new forms of urban governance under conditions of flexible production, international competition, mobile investment, the restructuring of global commodity chains, and emergent consumption trends and lifestyle changes. All of these issues are relevant across different regions worldwide and at different points on the global urban hierarchy (from so-called world cities to “ordinary” cities), and thus remain the subject of important theoretical and political debates. Specifically, we are faced with conceptual and empirical questions about the processes and contradictions of this current period of flux, as well as practical questions about how societies and states should most effectively deal with the resultant social tensions and economic challenges.