Alejandro Portes is professor of law and distinguished scholar of arts and sciences at the University of Miami. He is the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle S. Beck Professor of Sociology (emeritus) and the founding director of the Center for Migration and Development at Princeton University. Portes is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the former president of the American Sociological Association. His books include City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami (1993) and Immigrant America: A Portrait (fourth edition, 2014). Ariel C. Armony is vice chancellor for global affairs and director of the University Center for International Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is also a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. He was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Fulbright scholar at Nankai University, and a resident fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. His publications include The Dubious Link: Civic Engagement and Democratization (2004) and, with Portes, The Global Edge: Miami in the Twenty-First Century (2018).
Emerging Global Cities examines the processes of globalization from below through distinct yet potentially generalizable historical sequences. Portes and Armony explain how and why some cities in the developing periphery have managed to rise from positions of inferiority and insignificance to become leading players in the global economy. This book will soon become a benchmark for the study of global cities and a new classic for urban studies, development studies, and economic sociology. -- Min Zhou, UCLA Emerging Global Cities breaks new ground by bringing together into one comparative study a set of emerging global cities (and hopefuls) to explain how the global capitalist system is devolving power to new regional hubs. Portes and Armony bring new perspectives-on climate change, poverty, and inequality, for example-to bear in their study, with great attention to class and ethnic structures in these cities. -- James F. Hollifield, Ora Nixon Arnold Professor of International Political Economy, SMU