This book explores cities and intra-regional relational dynamics to challenge common representations of urban development ‘success’ and ‘failure’. It provides innovative alternative relations and development strategies that reimagine the subordinate status of secondary cities.

This study of three Argentine provincial capitals introduces a new concept in Latin American urban studies: the historical role of secondary cities, settlements large enough to possess all the elements commonly associated with urban areas and yet too small to figure among a country's major cities. The principal contribution of the book is to explain how and why smaller cities grew. What determined and shaped their growth? How did local inhabitants, and especially the dominant social elites, react to internal and external influences? To what extent were they able to control growth? What relationships developed with the surrounding regions and the outside world? The study shows that secondary cities linked rural economies and inhabitants with the outside world while insulating the traditional rural environment from the changing character of large urban centers. In this intermediate position, economic relationships and social structure changed slowly, and only in response to outside innovations such as railroads. Continuity within the secondary centers thus reinforced conservatism, accentuated the gap between the major cities and the rest of the country, and contributed to the resistance to change that characterizes much of Latin American today. The book is illustrated with photographs and maps.

This volume features the research of international scholars, whose work addresses the representative history of small cities and urban networking in various parts of the Indian Ocean world in an era of change, allowing them the opportunity to compare approaches, methods, and s...

This book explores cities and the intra-regional relational dynamics often overlooked by urban scholars, and it challenges common representations of urban development successes and failures. Gathering leading international scholars from Europe, Australia and North America, it explores the secondary city concept in urban development theory and practice and advances a research agenda that highlights uneven development concerns. By emphasising the subordinate status of secondary cities relative to their dominant neighbours the book raises new questions about regional development in the Global North. It considers alternative relations and development strategies that innovatively reimagine the subordinate status of secondary cities and showcase their full potential.

The role secondary cities play in the global space economy and national urban hierarchies is increasingly receiving attention from scholars and international agencies, most notably the Cities Alliance. Secondary Cities and Development considers the role of secondary cities through the lens of South Africa, a middle-income country with characteristics of both the developed and developing worlds. This book brings together a broad overview of international literature on secondary cities in South Africa and mirrors them against global experience. Chapters emphasize the importance of secondary cities as regional services areas, their potential roles in rural development, the vulnerabilities to which they are prone and their signifcant potential. By means of review, six South African case studies, and an assessment of contemporary policy approaches towards these cities, this unique volume provides insight into a spectrum of globally significant challenges. This book would be of interest to academics and policy makers working in urban studies or regional development.

This book is the first to consider the roles, challenges and governance responses of secondary cities in southern Africa to changing circumstances. Among the challenges are governance under conditions of resource scarcity, managing informality, the effects and responses to climate change and the changing roles of the cities within the national space economy. It fills the gap in the literature on secondary cities with original case studies drawn from South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. The authors are all African scholars, working and living in the region with intimate knowledge of the settings they describe. The book is critical as it includes such regional case studies of different secondary cities in Southern Africa but also because of it’s multidisciplinarity: it contains substantive and pertinent issues such as climate change, disaster management, local economic development, and basic services delivery. It considers diverse environments, yet with similar challenges that could provide useful policy and governance proposals for other cities.