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In the past decade, urbanization has attracted a great deal of attention in research and policy debates. One key reason for this is demographic: the majority of the world’s population now lives in places classed as urban, a category that includes a wide variety of settlements that reflect the diversity of national definitions of what constitutes an urban center. A second reason is that whereas until recently urbanization and urban centers, especially in the Global South, were generally viewed as negative phenomena–best illustrated by the seemingly uncontrollable growth of informal settlements providing hugely inadequate housing to large numbers of urban poor working in the informal sector–this view has now changed dramatically. Cities are now predominantly seen as dynamic centers of economic growth and engines of prosperity, led by “world cities” that are an essential element of global communications and …