Wealth of Cities and the Poverty of Nation. Book presentation and discussion with David Bassens, Berverly Silver and the author - Prof. Dr. Christof Parnreiter - University of Hamburg
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20.06.2025
Wealth of Cities and the Poverty of Nation. Book presentation and discussion with David Bassens, Berverly Silver and the author
Cities are seen as essentially “good”: innovative, pro-growth, poverty-reducing. In a challenging corrective to this common portrayal, Christof Parnreiter argues that the same urban properties which make cities so extraordinarily proficient at producing the “good” innovations – agglomeration economies, network externalities and a massive built environment – also provides fertile ground for the development of the “bad” ones, on which urban elites have syphoned off wealth from other localities and regions.
The book scrutinizes the interconnections between wealth creation and poverty generation by putting cities centre stage as a fundamental explanatory category for understanding how the wealth of nations is produced as well as for grasping how the poverty of nations is created. It seeks to correct the developmentalist enthusiasm, commonplace in urban and regional studies, for cities’ efficiency, which has displaced interest in cities’ role in uneven development.
David Bassens, Professor of Economic Geography and Director of Cosmopolis: Centre for Urban Research at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and Beverly Silver, Professor at the Department of Sociology at John Hopkins University and Director of the Arrighi Center for Global Studies discuss with Christof Parrneiter his central theses and what contribution the book can make both to critical urban studies and to research on uneven development.
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