GLOBAL CITIES, LOCAL STREETS

Sharon Zukin, CUNY; Philip Kasinitz, CUNY; Xiangming Chen, Trinity College + research partners

Local shopping streets are the public face of urban communities, but they are also contested spaces of globalization and gentrification.  They are the first places where most city dwellers see faces, hear languages, and find products from different parts of the world, all of which may spur feelings from strangeness to acceptance that the neighborhood is changing.  Clearly, these streets are not just places to shop; they are social spaces where local identity is formed, in an increasingly global framework.

Yet with more people shopping online, and many products made technologically obsolete by digital formats and changing consumer tastes, small shops, restaurants, and cafés that are traditional spaces of local sociability have disappeared.  New cultures and lifestyles spawn yoga studios, espresso bars and “ethnic” food stores.  What does all of this mean for the urban experience?  What does it mean for the city’s social, cultural, and economic diversity?  Are local shopping streets, and cities, becoming more alike—or do they remain both distinctive and different?

Global Cities, Local Streets: Spaces of Everyday Diversity aims to create a community of readers and researchers around the world who are interested in these questions.  The book and website use text and images to explore the experience of local shopping street across spaces and times.  On this website, users can learn more about the 12 shopping streets in the book, from New York to Shanghai, by way of Toronto, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Tokyo, and upload their own writing, maps, photos, and links.  By sharing their materials, users will create a digital archive that shows changes in their local shopping streets, the local and global forces that are reshaping them, and the people who keep them alive.

Click on the Research Project tab on the toolbar to learn more about the transnational research teams that created the book, and click on any tab to see more about each city.

 

Interviews with Sharon Zukin and Phil Kasinitz about the book by CityLab of The Atlantic, here.

Review of the book in Contemporary Sociology (45, 6), 2016 here.

Review of the book in Metropolitics online on May 23, 2017 is here.

Review of the book in Urban Research and Practice, October 12, 2017 here.

Review of the book in the Journal of World-Systems Research, 2018 here. 

The Chinese edition of the book was published by Tongji University Press in Shanghai in October 2016. You can read a detailed introduction in Chinese to the Chinese edition here.

A short introduction in Chinese to the Chinese edition is here.

Chen talked about the book at the official launch of its Chinese edition sponsored by Tongji University Press and 时代建筑 magazine at Tongji University on December 23, 2016.
(For more information about this event and four other events about the book in Shanghai and Beijing, please go the Shanghai page or click here.)

Chen talked about the book at a book reading event in Shenzhen sponsored by The Shenzhen Urban Design Promotion Center on July 4, 2017. (For more information about this event and a summary of the talk, click here.

The Korean edition of the book was published by Korean Research Institute for Human Settlement in 2017, with the link to the cover here.