John Rennie Short

University of Maryland, Baltimore County | UMBC · School of Public Policy

Street vending is one of the most important economic activities of the informal sector. This paper highlights the diversity of street vending. We extend the previous analysis of the informal economy in one city, Cali, Colombia, with data on informal workers in two public spaces: Downtown and Santa Helena, and workers in the mass transit bus system....

This review paper considers the disjuncture between the rapid pace of climate change and the more sluggish ability of cities to fully implement effective strategies of climate change adaptation and mitigation. We will refer to this as the ‘slow city–quick climate change’ dilemma. Climate change is accelerating, quickly rendering obsolete previous u...

The financial crash that was in full force in the Fall of 2008 triggered the Great Recession. This chapter explores the deeper reasons behind the crisis. Three in particular are noted: the uncritical promotion of homeownership; the enthronement of finance capitalism in a time of global deregulation; and regulatory capture. The crisis was years in t...

Introduces the reader to the notion of stress testing as a way to highlight a system’s weak spots. Crises and disasters reveal, like nothing else, the fracture lines within a society. This chapter introduces five disasters that each provides a major stress test of the United States: the War on Terror, Hurricane Katrina, financial crisis, the Gulf o...

On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of the disease COVID-19 as a “public health emergency of international concern.” The announcement got little traction in the United States. Although professional epidemiologists were worried, there was little expression of official government concern. The United States s...

At 6:10 am on Monday, August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Wind speed had dipped slightly although it was still at a destructive force of 145 mph. The resultant storm surge overwhelmed some of the levees that protected New Orleans. It was not a “natural” disaster. The disaster that befell New Orleans was neither inevitable nor unavoida...

The War on Terror was first announced less than a week after the 9/11 attack on the United States. Waging a war is one of the biggest stresses any society can endure, and the stresses of this war tested the United States to the breaking point. The War on Terror was an open-ended and vaguely strategized response that would quickly mire the United St...

This chapter details the sequence of events that led up the explosion in the Gulf on April 20, 2010, and the subsequent massive oil spill. This chapter explores three structural factors that both led up to and were revealed by the explosion: tough oil, cost cutting corporations, and regulatory capture in an era of limited government.

This chapter draws general conclusions about what the five events reveal about the structural weaknesses of the contemporary United States. They revealed: a commitment to Empire, a discounting of risks and the deregulation of oversight of risky enterprises, the unchallenged metanarratives of neoliberalism, magical thinking, a health system geared f...

Pandemics have shaped the way cities are planned and configured. Throughout history, cities have evolved to solve problems of sanitation, hygiene, and health access while providing space and opportunities for the urban dwellers. COVID-19 will have significant implications in the way cities are planned. This recent crisis highlights a number of issu...

Stress tests highlight a system’s weak spots. This second edition provides a stress testing of the United States by exploring in detail the background to the disasters of the War on Terror, Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis, the Gulf oil spill and the COVID-19 epidemic. These major stresses—the country’s longest war, its biggest natural disas...

Building on the work of critical toponymy, this paper provides an example of the active contestation of a place name. Since the early 1990s, successive Korean governments have argued that the singular use of “Sea of Japan” is a colonial legacy. We provide a brief historical context for this dispute. We identify the array of names currently used in...

This article explores the implications of a growing middle‐income population on the cities of the global South. The emergence of this group, situated between the poor and the very rich, long the standard binary categorization of understanding the global urban South, has important implications for physical reconfigurations and changing social struct...

This paper explores consumption patterns, access to banking services, attitudes to government and aspirations of the growing and vulnerable middle class in the global South. Data comes from a population survey conducted in 2016 in Cali, Colombia. We compare middle income and lower income populations in order to establish differences and similaritie...

There are now a wide variety of global metrics. To find the degree of overlap between these different measures, we employ a principal components analysis (PCA) to 15 indices across 145 countries. Our results demonstrate that the most important underlying dimension highlights that economic development and social progress go hand in hand with state s...

Hosting the Olympic Games reveals the true costs involved for the cities that hold these large-scale sporting events. It uncovers the financing of the Games, reviewing existing studies to evaluate the costs and benefits, and draws on case study experiences of the Summer and Winter Games from the past forty years to assess the short- and long-term u...

In Latin America around 45% of the working population work in the informal economy. In Colombia it is almost half. The informal economy is made up of multiple and different kinds of jobs, one of them street vending. This study examines the heterogeneity of street vending by comparing and contrasting two groups of street vendors. In this analysis, d...

The informal economy is an important part of urban economies in the global South. Almost half of Colombia's working population relies on the informal economy to obtain income. This study examined street vendors in downtown Cali, Colombia. A recent survey of 527 street vendors provides the basis for a detailed analysis of who works as street vendors...

Since the 1970s city marketing has grown in size and importance. A historical contextualization considers the selling of the frontier city, the resort, the suburb, and the industrial city. The article explores the symbolic reconstruction of cities through a discussion of strategies and tactics of city marketing. Marketing strategies include the pro...

This case study explores electric grid failure in the aftermath of a major storm. The thick description of the event highlights broader issues of climate change, the changing regulatory regime of electricity provision, and urban network vulnerability. The reaction to the storm forced a shift in the regulatory regime from one that stressed cost redu...

In this paper we present data from a recent survey of residents' satisfaction levels with a range of urban public goods and government performance in Cali, Colombia. The more affluent report higher levels of satisfaction, especially with regard to security, public space, utilities and government performance, compared to the poor. The low scoring on...

In 2013, the US Supreme Court overturned key elements of the Voting Rights Act relating to the racial geography of the USA and relations between federal and state government. The historical background to the Act and its role in changing the political geography of voting are explored. A detailed analysis of the ruling, Shelby v. Holder, reveals comp...

The revalorization of the U.S. metropolis and restructuring of the U.S. economy are leading to increasingly complex patterns of population growth and decline. In this article we provide an empirical context for understanding the embodied nature of these changes by analyzing the long-term, demographic changes for the 100 largest cities. In terms of...

Using census data from 2000, the authors examine differentiation among urban immigrant neighborhoods in a sample of U.S. metropolitan areas. They use principal components analysis (PCA) followed by cluster analysis to identify four types of urban immigrant neighborhoods: Hispanic, White Working Class, Asian, and Gentrified. This typology describes...

We live in a world of big cities. Urbanization, globalization and modernization have received considerable attention but rarely are the connections and relations between them the subjects of similar attention. Cities are an integral part of the network of globalization and important sites of modernization.

Exploring the connections between globalization and urbanization, this notable book places particular emphasis on understanding the economic function of global cities, the political process of globalizing cities, and the cultural significance of cosmopolitan cities.

Empire is a big story that dominates the United States. The Empire defines the United States in the modern world, its character, government policies, internal politics, and external relations. There is, however, another metanarrative that plays an increasing role in the internal politics of the country, neoliberalism. It arises, like most ideologie...

The War on Terror was first announced less than a week after the 9/11 attack on the United States. On September 16, 2001, George Bush said, “the American people understand, this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” Not only was a war announced, but it was also given a name, The War on Terror. And it was just not a war but The...

On a Sunday morning in April 2007 Matthew Tannin emailed a colleague. Tannin was a manager of two hedge funds operated by the New York–based financial company Bear Stearns. His colleague, Ralph Cioffi, was a fellow fund manager. Tannin wrote to Cioffii that the “entire subprime market is toast … we should close the funds now.”1 Cioffi removed $2 mi...

In the first decade of the twenty-first century four major catastrophes befell the United States. What did they reveal, individually and collectively, about the United States?

On Tuesday, August 23, 2005, approximately 300 miles off the south east coast of Florida, in an area of shallow, warm ocean known as the Bahama Banks, a storm began to brew. As wind speeds were only 34 mph, it was classified as a tropical depression and given the prosaic name Tropical Depression Twelve, indicating its order in the 2005 storm season...

In March 2008, in the city of New Orleans, the giant oil company BP purchased the right to drill for oil at the Macondo well in an area identified as Mississippi Canyon Block 252 in the Gulf of Mexico about 40 miles offshore. The oil company estimated that they could siphon up to 50 million barrels of oil from the well. It was an enticing prospect....

In this volume, the USA is treated as a system that has been stress-tested by four unique events: The War on Terror, Hurricane Katrina, the Financial Meltdown that led to the Great Recession and the Giant Oil Spill. The author uses stress-testing to identify weaknesses within the "system," and examine the response to disaster.

I will review the major changes in the distribution of the metropolitan population of the United States (US), as revealed by the 2010 data recently released by the US Census. These data allow us to track recent changes and provide the basis for a discussion of longer-term trends identified in previous studies of US cities (Short 2006, 2007) and the...

This article contributes to theories of the postcolonial city. The town of Alice Springs/Mparntwe is situated in the middle of Australia. Its shift from colonial control center to postcolonial city involves four interrelated processes: land rights negotiations, residential segregation, the use and regulation of public space, and the development of...

In this paper we review the history and current revival of flânerie, assessing it as a lens for understanding and representing cities undergoing globalization. We will examine a strong connection of artist–flâneuristic and sociological practices in 21st-century transnational terms that nevertheless recall the heroic flânerie of the 19th century. We...

Megalopolis was the name given to a Peloponnesian city that was founded around 371- 368 BCE. Though planned on a grand scale, the city failed to realize the dreams of the founders, and it declined by the late Roman period. In 1957, the renowned geographer Jean Gottman applied the term in his description of the densely populated area of the northeas...

This paper considers the rise of traffic accidents in the creation of the modern city. The notion of accidents is deconstructed. There is a brief review of current literature on mobilities and then evidence is presented of the shifting configuration of vehicle-pedestrian accidents. The epidemic of traffic accidents of cities in developing world is...

This book is a systematic examination of the historical and current roles that cities and suburbs play in US metropolitan areas. It explores the history of cities and suburbs, their changing dynamics with each other, their growing diversity, the environmental consequences of their development and finally the extent and nature of their decline and r...

This paper reviews the empirical and theoretical material on urban primacy. The problems with data are highlighted. A measure of primacy is estimated and calculated for most countries in the world. Countries with relatively high rates of primacy are noted. The hyperprimacy of Thailand is discussed as well as the high primacy in middle-income Latin...

Large city-regions around the world are the principal hubs of economic and cultural glob-alization. In the United States, for example, 10 megapolitan regions, defined as clustered networks of metropolitan regions, have been identified. Using the criterion of contiguous metropolitan counties, in this paper I propose a definition of US Megalopolis th...

This study examines the relationship between the increasing globalization of the Summer Olympics and the effect on host cities. The impact of the Games on city structure, the competition to host the Games, the selling of the Games to urban communities and the opportunities, the dangers of the city as a focus of global media attention and the role o...

The Authoritarian CityThe Cosmic CityThe Collective CityReferences

Cities and Economies explores the complex and subtle connections between cities and economies. The rise of the merchant city, the development of the industrial city and the creation of the service-dominated urban economy are all explored, along with economic globalization and its effects on cities in both developed and developing economies. This bo...