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New Global Cities in Latin America and Asia: Welcome to the Twenty-First Century proposes new visions of global cities and regions historically considered “secondary” in the international context. The arguments are not only based on material progress made by these metropolises, but also on the growing social difficulties experienced  (e.g., organized crime, drug trafficking, slums, economic inequalities). The book illustrates the growth of cities according to these problems arising from the modernity of the new century, comparing Latin American and Asian cities.

This book analyzes the complex relationships within cities through an interdisciplinary approach, complementing other research and challenging orthodox views on global cities. At the same time, the book provides new theoretical and methodological tools to understand the progress of “Third World” cities and the way of understanding “globality” in the 21st century by confronting the traditional views with which global cities were appreciated since the 1980s. Pablo Baisotti brings together researchers from various fields who provide new interpretative keys to certain cities in Latin America and Asia.

From submarines to the suburbs—the remaking of Pittsburgh during the Cold War

During the early Cold War, research facilities became ubiquitous features of suburbs across the United States. Pittsburgh’s eastern and southern suburbs hosted a constellation of such facilities that became the world’s leading center for the development of nuclear reactors for naval vessels and power plants. The segregated communities that surrounded these laboratories housed one of the largest concentrations of nuclear engineers and scientists on earth. In Nuclear Suburbs, Patrick Vitale uncovers how the suburbs shaped the everyday lives of these technology workers. 

Using oral histories, Vitale follows nuclear engineers and scientists throughout and beyond the Pittsburgh region to understand how the politics of technoscience and the Cold War were embedded in daily life. At the same time that research facilities moved to Pittsburgh’s suburbs, a coalition of business and political elites began an aggressive effort, called the Pittsburgh Renaissance, to renew the region. For Pittsburgh’s elite, laboratories and researchers became important symbols of the new Pittsburgh and its postindustrial economy. Nuclear Suburbs exposes how this coalition enrolled technology workers as allies in their remaking of the city.

Offering lessons for the present day, Nuclear Suburbs shows how race, class, gender, and the production of urban and suburban space are fundamental to technoscientific networks, and explains how the “renewal” of industrial regions into centers of the tech economy is rooted in violence and injustice.