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2002.¹ Then I managed to get some funding (from two now-defunct Swedish public research funds, FRN and HSFR, and from the INTAS of the EU, also passed away) and to link up with urbanist colleagues of various disciplines from all over the world, resulting in a series of joint regional publications.† As always, my research is the product of an individual craftsman, not an industrial output by a factory of research assistants.

      Without original intention, this book has become part of a tetralogy of global studies, which started with Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900–2000 (2004). It was followed in 2011 by The World: A Beginner’s Guide and in 2013 by The Killing Fields of Inequality.

      For me this book has been an immensely stimulating and enriching learning experience, one which included, of course, the opportunity to visit the cities treated here. Critical analyses of power more often make one angry than happy. But I do hope that I will be able to convey also something of the excitement at learning about cities and their diversity in time and space.

      During this long process, I have piled up an enormous debt of gratitude. My wife, Sonia Therborn, has accompanied me on most of my often strenuous urban explorations since she retired from clinical psychology (and often before) and has transferred her sharp psychological eye onto urban anthropology, enlightening a myopic macro-sociologist.

      Perry Anderson’s characteristically kind and generous encouragement of my first venture into urban studies gave me both courage and motivation to continue. Anne Haila brought me into a most inspiring network of urban scholars working on ‘urban science’ for the European Science Foundation. Markku Kivinen, director of the Helsinki Alexander Institute, was crucially supportive, both of my first regional workshop and in providing me with an interpreter and companion to Astana. At the end of my stint as co-director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, my colleague Björn Wittrock granted me the opportunity to bring together a set of eminent urban scholars as fellows for a year or a semester. This was an enormously stimulating time together with Simon Bekker, Swati Chattopadhyay, Kumiko Fujita, K.C. Ho, Laura Kolbe, Abidin Kusno, Fernando Pérez Oyarzún and Karl Schlögel and the start of lasting personal friendships as well as of the cooperation mentioned above.

      The various joint regional projects involved working together with effective, generous and interesting co-organizers: Simon Bekker, K. C. Ho, Fernando Pérez Oyarzún, Larisa Titarenko and an impressive array of scholars.

      A long list of informants have helped me by sharing their knowledge of their city. After all these years, I have to apologize that any list would have been incomplete. Several informants are footnoted below and are here publicly thanked for their kindness. Several people even organized guides or brief research assistance for me: Judith Bodnar in Budapest informed me of many things and connected me with Judit Veres, Chang Kyung-Sup, who also personally accompanied me several times in Seoul, Anand Kumar in Delhi, Alan Mabin in Pretoria, Enzo Mingione put me into contact with Alberto Violante in Rome, Jo Santoso in Jakarta, Alicia Zicardi in Mexico. Swedish embassies in Cairo, Harare, Ljubljana and Singapore have been very helpful, as have the Norwegian legations of Lilongwe and Maputo. Special Russian-language help in Astana as well as collegial companionship was provided by Tapani Kaakkuriniemi and, on a second trip, by Larisa Titarenko. In Paris, Edmond Prétceille has been both a helpful colleague and has taken me around the banlieue. Patrick Le Galès, with whom I once wrote an article on European cities,² has been a very inspiring paragon of rigorous urban scholarship.

       Ljungbyholm, SwedenMidsummer’s Eve 2016Göran Therborn

       1

       Cities, Power and Modernity

      Cities and Power

      Cities emerged as concentrations of power, and of wealth, some five thousand years ago. Lewis Mumford once defined a city as a ‘point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community’,¹ and later began his list of ‘chief functions of the city’ with ‘to convert power into form’.² Cities now contain more than half of humankind; power and wealth are reaching unprecedented degrees of planetary concentration. At the dawn of planetary urbanization, understanding the inscriptions of power in our built urban environment is not only a scholarly, but, even more, a civic imperative.

      Despite Mumford’s declarations, power has slipped out of the grasp of mainstream urban history and social science more often than not, or it has been relegated to the past. After the Baroque, Mumford’s own interests veered to technological and economic change. A recent (and good) collective work with the seductive title Embodiments of Power both starts and stops with the Baroque.³ Leonardo Benevolo’s monumental History of the City makes the European revolutions of 1848 a divide between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘post-liberal’ city, but Benevolo loses most of his interest in power after 1848.⁴ The late Sir Peter Hall presents a cultural axis in Cities in Civilization, but his Book Four on the ‘urban order’ is not very concerned with the political order.⁵

      The great historian-cum-sociologist Charles Tilly was a sharp critical analyst of power, but a resolutely materialist network structuralist with little interest in meaningful forms, whether of cities – which he mainly saw as sites of capital concentration – or of states. He never grasped, or thought important, the difference between Baroque, absolutist, dynastic states and states of nations, with their national capitals.⁶ In his view, after Charles V’s imperial abdication in 1557, ‘nation-states began to get priority’, particularly after 1700.⁷

      Synergetic encounters of political theory/history and urbanism have been few and fragile enough to allow the great urbanist, Peter Hall, to get away – twice or thrice, first in 1993, then in 2006, with a paperback repetition in 2010⁸ – with the following typology of capital cities:

      1. Multi-function capitals

      2. Global capitals

      3. Political capitals

      4. Former capitals

      5. Ex-imperial capitals

      6. Provincial capitals

      7. Super capitals

      With all due respect, this list reminds me of a list of animals which Michel Foucault, without citation, claimed Jorge Luis Borges had excavated from an ancient Chinese encyclopaedia, according to which the animal kingdom comprised the following types:

      a. belonging to the Emperor

      b. embalmed

      c. tamed …

      e. sirens

      f. fabulous …

      j. innumerable …

      n. which from afar resemble flies⁹

      In the currently prevailing urban discourse, power is submerged in conceptions of economic nodality, certainly a legitimate and important research topic in itself – but with city power measured by the zip codes of major corporations and/or business services firms.¹⁰ For all its other merits, which are many and have been deservedly applauded, this approach has two limitations in a context of cities and power. Its economism leaves out the power manifestations of the urban built environment itself. Even the most imaginable capitalist city is not only business offices and their connections to business offices elsewhere. Second, the political economy conception of world/global cities seriously underestimates the power of states in the current world.* After all, this is a world where the latest US president (Barack Obama) has been at war for the whole of his two terms of office, longer than any president in US history, making war in seven different countries of the world.†

      The analytical framework deployed here – forms of state formation and their consequences, combining structural and symbolic perspectives on the city, identifying and exploring moments of major historical urban change worldwide – does not seem to have been used before. But no claim

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