Global Urban Politics: Informalization of the State

In what ways has global urbanization affected the political process? This book offers a reflection on the transformations of urban politics worldwide in the past four decades, from interpersonal street-level politics to transnational governing institutions.

Organized thematically, the book examines urban social movements, diversity politics, environmental politics and security politics at a global level and argues that living in an urban world calls for a profound rethinking of how we act politically. Through ethnographic incursions into the worlds of youth activists, domestic workers, rioters, barrio bandits and peripheral villagers, among others, from Mexico City and Hanoi to Montreal and New York, the book makes a number of theoretical propositions to redefine the field of urban political studies.

Extending the view of urban politics beyond municipal and metropolitan institutions to the broader political process in cities, this book will be invaluable to advanced students and scholars interested in our urban future. For, as Boudreau convincingly suggests, global urban life is political life.

"This is a major book: one that is set to change the field in important ways. It is brief, challenging, informative, and accessible. There is hardly anyone who has the breadth of knowledge and experience that Julie-Anne Boudreau has, and few indeed who can bring such acute analytical insights to the work at hand. This book is a very important contribution to the literature. I would use it as a principal text for any course on urban politics."
—Warren Magnusson, University of Victoria

"In Global Urban Politics, Julie-Anne Boudreau has produced a synthesis of theory and observation to provide a strikingly original understanding of the urban. Seeing the urban as demarcated by practices rather than boundaries, she provides important insights into the nature of politics in the present era."
—Susan S. Fainstein, Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Julie-Anne Boudreau is Associate Professor in the Urbanisation Culture Société Research Centre at the National Institute for Scientific Research (INRS), Montreal.