Ola Söderström is Professor of Social and Cultural Geography at the Institute of Geography, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He has published extensively on urban material culture, visual thinking in urban planning, and urban globalization. His current research focuses on a comparative ethnography of contemporary urban ways of life. He is the co-author of Urban Cosmographies (2009) and the co-editor of Critical Mobilities (2013) and Re-shaping Cities: How Global Mobility Transforms Architecture and Urban Form (2010).

“This would be especially valuable in continuing the study of urban developments in the post-communist environment.”  (Geographica Helvetica, 1 May 2015)

• List of Figures viiList of Tables xAcronyms xiSeries Editors’ Preface xiiiPreface and Acknowledgements xiv1 Comparing Cities in Relations 1Relating Hanoi, Ouagadougou … and Palermo 4A Brief Introduction to Two Distant Cousins 5World-city Research Beyond the West 9Relational Geographies 12Comparing Cities 17The Structure of the Book 262 Trajectories of Urban Change in Two Ordinary Cities 31Regime Change in Hanoi and Ouagadougou 33Forms of Relatedness 42Conclusion 553 Transnational Policy Relations 60Mobile Planners and City Networks 63Concrete and Paper in Hanoi’s Urban Development 64Ouagadougou’s Competing Worlds of Policy Relations 76Conclusion 874 Public Space Policies on the Move 92A Repertoire of Translocal Connections 94Public Space: Understandings, Practices and Things 97Translocal Connections and Public Space Policy in the Making 103The Politics of Translocal Connections 108Traveling Participation and Public Space Design 110 Conclusion 1165 Connecting to Circuits of Architectural Design 120Stretched Geographies of Design 121Circuits of Architectural Design in Hanoi and Ouagadougou 123Hanoi: Design Spaces of an Emerging Economy 125Ouagadougou: Architectures of Development 131Grounding Design 136Conclusion: Transnational Learning Processes and “Banal” Nationalism 1406 On Road Interchanges and Shopping Malls: What Traveling Types Do 145Modernization as Morality and Power 147Modernization Through Ouagadougou’s Built Environment 150Staging New Social Identities in Hanoi’s Shopping Malls 159Conclusion 166Conclusion: For a Politics of Urban Relatedness 171Comparing Processes, Worlds of Relations, and Relational Effects 172The Evolving Relational Worlds of Cities 175An Assets-based Politics of Relatedness 178References 181Index 196