The growing popularity of comparative research is one of the most exciting recent developments in the field of urban politics. Comparison allows urbanists to transcend the local and see cities as part of a national or global system. It helps urban scholars identify which factors derive from the workings of democratic capitalist systems, and which grow from particular national practices and policies. But comparative urbanists have a difficult task as they try to disentangle cities from their national contexts. On the one hand, one can hardly understand, say, education policy in Detroit and Düsseldorf without clarifying local and national roles. On the other, an urbanist eager to highlight what is salient about the local does not wish to make national policy analysis central to his or her research. These special theoretical and methodological challenges confronting the comparative urbanist can be daunting.

Researchers have approached these challenges in a number of ways. In many cases, scholars have published collections in which cases from cities in different countries are presented, and editors use an introductory chapter to tease out some comparative nuggets, but no systematic comparative research has taken place (e.g., see John Logan and Todd Swanstrom, eds., Beyond the City Limits, 1990; Chris Pickvance and Edmond Preteceille, eds., State Restructuring and Local Power, 1991). In other cases, researchers have sought to undertake more rigorous comparisons, establishing methods and frameworks that they apply to several cross-national cases (e.g., see Alan DiGaetano and John Klemanski, Urban Governance in Comparative Perspective, 1999; Jeffrey Sellers, Governing from Below, 2002).

Few urbanists have attempted a rigorous, systematic comparison of many cities in several countries. Cities in the International Marketplace is therefore a very welcome addition to the comparative urban politics literature. This study by H.V. Savitch and Paul Kantor follows 10 cities in five nations (New York, Houston, Detroit, Toronto, Glasgow, Liverpool, Paris, Marseilles, Milan, and Naples) over a 35-year period, focusing on their economic development policies and the political institutions that surround them. The authors have gathered a fair amount of economic and demographic data, used primarily to assess the economic health of the cities, as well as qualitative data used to present detailed case studies of policymaking and political change. They have embraced the complexity that such a wide-ranging analysis requires, finding ways to characterize economic variables and political factors on the national and local level, and synthesizing these many variables into a number of “regime types” that are helpful in this study and could facilitate comparisons to other cities.

Saritch and Kantor seek an understanding of how cities with different market positions and political systems have fared as they face the common challenges of global economic transformation. But they want to find an analytical path that recognizes the multiple factors that shape the behaviors of urban officials, making this a complex and nuanced argument. A city's ability to make development policy, and the goals such policies might aspire to, cannot simply be deduced by the economic challenges at hand. Cities have varied market positions, different roles within their intergovernmental systems, and different political histories and cultures within their own polities, and all of these factors come into play when efforts to shape development are at issue.

Working from Charles Lindblom's notion that in capitalist democracies there is a division of labor between state and market, Savitch and Kantor see development policies as the outcome of bargaining between local governments and potential investors. Bargaining is defined as “the ability of a city to garner resources in order to maximize its choices and ultimately realize its objectives in the capital investment process” (p. 43). Economic health, intergovernmental aid, and an activist local political culture all become resources that cities can bring to bear in the bargaining process, allowing resource-rich cities (Paris and Toronto are the prime examples) far more latitude in designing and implementing policies that benefit the city and its residents. Resource-poor cities (Detroit is one example) have little ability to control their environments. In this view, cities are not just mindless “growth machines,” unable to make clear policy choices. But their choices are constrained by economic, institutional, and political factors. In sum, cities are “neither prisoners nor masters” (p. 168).

This massive amount of empirical material and the various analytical categories are all brought together in a very effective chapter entitled “Are Cities Converging?” Much of the comparative literature, among urbanists and others, stresses the convergence of political institutions and policy responses. Convergence theorists assume, according to Savitch and Kantor, that intensified global economic competition forces political systems to adopt more business-friendly policies. The authors admit that they cannot definitively answer the question of whether urban policies are converging, but their research can help shed light on this controversy. Although there is considerable policy diffusion, they note, different political systems still have different ways of handling similar problems. Yes, all governments adopt policies with an eye to remaining economically competitive, but French and Italian cities still believe such policies should include a great deal of national government investment and provide subsidized housing and public amenities. Yes, we see a new generation of “entrepreneurial” mayors, eager to “sell” their cities rather than sit back and wait for investment to flow in—but the mayor of Houston is “selling” low taxes and minimal regulation, while the mayor of Paris is “selling” cultural amenities and good mass transit. Savitch and Kantor aptly note that convergence debates can be complicated by the tendency for similar terms to mean dissimilar things in different national contexts. “Devolution” in France suggests a far less dramatic reduction in national government than it does in the United States; “public–private partnerships” in the United States assume a much larger role for the private sector than they do in France or Italy.

In sum, this is an impressive book that adds considerable empirical evidence and theoretical substance to the growing field of comparative urban politics. It is at times perhaps a bit too complex—at certain points I found the many regime types overwhelming, and the efforts to represent many types and variables graphically, through multidimensional figures, more confounding than illuminating. But these problems are probably inevitable given the ambition of this undertaking; efforts to simplify would require elimination of some of the layers that make this work so analytically and empirically rich.