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Global city-thinking has, in the past years, had a very real pull on society. Global cities seem an unavoidable fact of everyday world affairs. This volume gathers a forum that integrates the extensive set of disciplinary dimensions to which the interdisciplinary concept of the global city can help to tackle the policy challenges of today's metropolises. Its chapters are drawn from viewpoints including the cultural, economic, historical, postcolonial, virtual, architectural, literary, security and political dimensions of global cities. Tasked with providing a rejoinder to the global city scholarship from each of these perspectives, the authors illustrate what twin analytical and practical challenges emerge from juxtaposing these stances to the concept of the 'global city'. They rely not solely on theory but also on sample case studies either drawn from long-lived global cities such as New York, Shanghai and London, or emerging metropolises like Dubai, Cape Town and Sydney.

Climate change is a highly contested policy issue in Australia, generating fierce debate at every level of governance. In this paper we explore a crucial tension in both the policy and the public debate: a seeming lack of attention to social inclusion and broader equity implications. We pay special attention to the municipal scale, where concerns about social difference and democratic participation are often foregrounded in political discourse, using South East Queensland—a recognised climate change 'hotspot'—as a case study. Mobilising critical discourse analysis techniques, we interrogate three local government climate change response strategies, and place these in the context of transscalar discourse networks which appear to sustain a technocratic, 'ecological modernisation' approach to the issue. Finally, we suggest a broad strategy for reimagining this approach to embed a notion of climate justice in our policy thinking about climate change.

This special issue on housing and socio-spatial inclusion had its genesis in the 5th Housing Theory Symposium (HTS) on the theme of housing and space, held in Brisbane, Australia in 2013. In late 2013 we put out a call for papers in an attempt to collect an initial suite of theoretical and empirical scholarship on this theme. This collection of articles progresses our initial discussions about the theoretical implications of adding the "social" to the conceptual project of thinking through housing and space. We hope that this special issue will act as a springboard for a critical review of housing theory, which could locate housing at the centre of a much broader network of social and cultural practices across different temporal trajectories and spatial scales. This editorial presents an overview of the theoretical discussions at the HTS and summarises the six articles in this themed issue, which are: (1) The meaning of home in home birth experiences; (2) Reconceptualizing the "publicness" of public housing; (3) The provision of visitable housing in Australia; (4) The self-production of dwellings made by the Brazilian new middle class; (5) Innovative housing models and the struggle against social exclusion in cities; and (6) A theoretical and an empirical analysis of "poverty suburbanization".

This Special Issue explores the problematique of the consensus and conflict binary that has emerged in the critical analysis of the post-political urban condition. Focusing on the interstitial spaces existing between consensus and conflict reveals a more relational dynamic that positions consensus and conflict as co-constitutive and continuously being shaped by the performance of politics by state and non-state actors. Critiques of the post-political tend to fail to engage with the conditions that lead to citizen actors acting in political ways beyond the formal processes of planning and decision-making, or when consensus or conflict is used by oppressive politics to produce exclusion and reproduce inequality. In addition to introducing the five papers appearing in this special issue, in this opening editorial, we argue the need to cast attention towards the new expressions of political participation generated by different citizen actors. Critically engaging with these varied expressions may reveal new ways of conceptualising participation that can create new informal spaces where injustices and inequalities are voiced and the structures and hegemonies created are exposed.