Urban Empires charts the backgrounds, mechanisms, drivers, and consequences of the radical changes in contemporary urban systems within a broad global perspective. Featuring contributions from renowned scholars, this book serves as a touchstone for exploring the scientific and policy needs of cities as new global power centers.

Introduction: Do Urban Empires Rule the World? [Edward Glaeser, Karima Kourtit, and Peter Nijkamp] Part One. Positioning of Cities 1. Re-Inserting Place in the Analysis of the Global Digital Economy - An Essay [Saskia Sassen] 2. Winner-Take-All-Cities [Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Karen King] 3. Winners and Losers in the Urban System [Tony Venables] 4. Promiscuous Agglomerations: Towards Integrating Urban Agglomerations with Urban Networks [Peter J. Taylor] 5. Network Communities as Urban Empires [Zachary Neal] 6. Large Urban Agglomerations and Efficient Public Services: Local vs. Regional Control [Richard L. Church] 7. The Rise of Mega Urban Regions and the Future of Spatial Organization [Kinglsey E. Haynes and Roger R. Stough] 8. The "New Urban World": Challenges for Large Urban Agglomerations [Eduardo Haddad and Ana Barufi] Part Two. Assessing of Urban Developments 9. Network Infrastructure and the Economy [Ake Andersson and David Emanuel Andersson] 10. Proximity and Agglomeration, Two Understanding Keys of City [Lise Bourdeau-Lepage and André Torre] 11. A Scientific Program on Urban Performance and Dynamics [Roberto Camagni, Roberta Capello, and Andrea Caragliu] 12. The Analysis of Big Data on Cites and Regions: Some Computational and Statistical Challenges [Laurie Schintler and Manfred Fischer] 13. Defining City Size and Growth [Michael Batty] 14. In Pursuit of High-Performance Global Cities - An Extended Dea Model: For Assessing Urban Socio-Economic and Environmental Indicators [Soushi Suzuki, Karima Kourtit, and Peter Nijkamp] Part Three. Learning from Cities 15. Innovative Transformations of Global City Regions in the Post-Urban World [Charlie Karlsson, Hans Westlund and Tigran Haas] 16. The Changing Industrial Organization of American Megaregions [Harrison S. Campbell, Isabelle Nilsson and Neil Reid] 17. The Quaternary City: "Financialization" and "Thin Globalisation" in Prospect [Philip Cooke] 18. Seoul as an Urban Empire: Evidence from Spatial Interaction Models [John Carruthers and Su-Jung Lee] 19. Material Flows in the Global City [Genevieve Giuliano, Sanggyun Kang, Nathan Hutson and Quan Yuan] 20. The Public Expenditure Impact on Urban Population Growth [Steven Craig and Janet Kohlhase] 21. Resilience to a Cyber-Attack on the Detroit Automobile Industry: A Computable General Equilibrium Approach [Adam Rose and Zhenhua Chen] 22. Metropolitan Cities: Which Development Strategies? Which New Perspectives For Improving Productivity ? Which Governance Tools? [Luigi Fusco Girard]