Cities in Relations: Trajectories of Urban Development in Hanoi and Ouagadougou

For many years, globalization has been considered insignificant in the least developed countries. Remedying this error, Cities in Relations advances a novel way of thinking about urban transformation by focusing on transnational relations in these places. By examining urban change in Hanoi, Vietnam, and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, over the last 20 years, this volume considers the ways in which a city’s relationships with other places influence its urban development. It shows how pervasive and variegated transnational relations are today in places that were ‘relation–poor’ only two decades ago. The author provides new ideas for comparative urban studies and moves the discussion beyond reductive examinations of economic and policy factors. Uniting disparate approaches—from urban ethnography to urban policy mobility to the geography of architecture—and focusing on ‘ordinary’ cities that are often overlooked, this study conceives of urban change in a fresh and exciting way.

Ola Söderström is Professor of Social and Cultural Geography at the Institute of Geography, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He has published extensively on urban material culture, visual thinking in urban planning, and urban globalization. His current research focuses on a comparative ethnography of contemporary urban ways of life. He is the co–author of Urban Cosmographies (2009) and the co–editor of Critical Mobilities (2013) and Re–shaping Cities: How Global Mobility Transforms Architecture and Urban Form (2010).