Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

One of the great challenges facing large, diverse metropolitan economies is how to build and maintain sustainable and resilient cities. For several years now, people have recognized the critical and expanding role of “global cities.” Although Saskia Sassen’s initial conceptualization focused on leading financial centers---London, New York, and Tokyo---the notion has developed to encompass broader ideas about how diverse metropolitan economies serve as regional nodes in a global network (Sassen 2001) . These global cities serve as the engines behind national and regional economic growth. Increasingly, academics and policy advocates have argued that global cities constitute the most important interconnected …

Manufacturing has long been the focus for progressive reforms. But these reforms, pushed by labor in the 1930s and 1940s, did not particularly involve city planners, and the idea of “progressive planning” that emerged in the 1960s focused on community and neighborhood struggles over urban renewal, highway clearances and the depredations of real estate developers—not necessarily manufacturing. The question now is whether, with changes in manufacturing, and new initiatives from the Obama administration, progressives can make a contribution through the manufacturing sector, and whether professional planners can play a role at all.We asked a group of geographers and planners—academics and …