The amount of social science literature produced over the past several decades on city regions of the south has indeed been rather sparse in comparison to the scholarship concerning the global cities of the north, as the editors of this recent collection suggest. The Making of Global City Regions, edited by Klaus Segbers, with the assistance of Simon Raiser and Krister Volkmann, seeks to fill this scholarly void and also place the recent developments and challenges of Johannesburg, Mumbai/Bombay, São Paulo and Shanghai within the new context of global politics. According to Segbers’ introductory essay in the first chapter, the primary focus of this study is to determine how relevant actors in the four city regions continue to construct development policies that will both meet the demands and challenges of globalization and elevate its status to a global city region. Another overarching goal of this project is to comprehend how the leaders and city region elites have coped with globalization and the devolution of the state. Moreover, the regional elite in each city region have needed to cultivate and promote policies that will make their city's identity competitive and distinguishable in the new global network. This valuable introduction by Segbers is a finely crafted and succinct synopsis of the recent scholarly work done on concepts such as global cities and global city regions which should be of interest to numerous scholars including urban historians.

While Segbers clearly acknowledges that each city region under consideration in this co-ordinated study has its own unique historical experiences at the regional or national level – such as apartheid in South Africa or communism in China – there are indeed many similarities to justify why Johannesburg, Mumbai/Bombay, São Paulo and Shanghai were chosen for this project. These similarities stem from the gravitation to economic liberalization policies beginning in the 1990s, the prevalence of powerful stock markets, intense urbanization and population growth in the post-war period, recent experiences with political decentralization and immense social and distribution of wealth disparities. None of the cities serves as the political capital of the country in which it is located, and none of the four countries of South Africa, India, Brazil and China is currently a member of the OECD. The central chapters in the book are organized around thematic issues specifically related to these four individual global city regions. The authors of these chapters focus on matters related to historical overviews of recent urban development policies and the way in which power structures have interacted, coexisted and clashed in these four regions. The most interesting chapters include discussions of the way in which formal and informal players shape the city's and region's profile on a global scale. Building upon recent scholarship related to place marketing and identity, the case studies in this collection provide new perspectives on the ways that cities such as São Paulo or Johannesburg have tried to compete in the new global system while simultaneously attempting to reinvent their own identity. An interesting facet to this collection of essays are the contributions from previous or current planning professionals and administrators of these four global city regions as these brief accounts help the reader gain supplemental perspectives on the research and topics covered by the scholarly contributions in this volume.

The final chapter, written by Simon Raiser and Krister Volkmann, attempts to conclude some of the findings of this study, which had its origins as a research project at the Freie Universität Berlin. Aside from summarizing the findings of the four case studies included in this project, the authors pose a very important question that has already stimulated and should continue to foster more intellectual investigation: ‘How can dual cities be converted into one – particularly with the duality of a globally connected élite on the one hand and great parts of the population living on the margins and engaged in daily struggle for survival on the other hand . . . particularly pronounced in the cities of the global (semi)periphery?’ (pp. 344–5). This critical question is undeniably the major challenge facing not only the leaders and citizens of Johannesburg, Mumbai/Bombay, São Paulo and Shanghai, but almost all cities across the globe. With an increasing percentage of the world's total current and future population becoming urban, these challenges will certainly continue to dominate the discourse of urban and international development over the next few decades. The Making of Global City Regions should nonetheless inspire continued interdisciplinary research on additional cities and regions and investigate how they continue to develop strategies to connect and market themselves within the new arena of global politics.