Introducing urban politics and urban cultures

Across the world the rates of growth, global interconnectedness and environmental impacts of cities raise serious questions about the relevance and effectiveness of urban government and planning in any one city-region. Indeed, these trends do present enormous challenges that cannot be tackled by city governments and planning departments acting independently or in isolation. However, urban processes operate at a range of scales and the "urban" itself still represents a critical arena of politics and planning, a nexus of multiscalar processes. These, for example, link local government policies of recycling or infrastructure maintenance with wider questions of social and environmental sustainability at the transnational scale. In all this the question of who, or what influences, govern the city is still an important one