Transnational city-to-city cooperation: Issues arising from theory and practice

Actually Existing Comparative Urbanism: Imitation and Cosmopolitanism in North-south Interurban Partnerships

“…Section 2 provides a brief history of interurban partnerships involving British cities. As it progresses, the focus is narrowed still further to partnerships between British cities and cities of the 'Global South', (Bilder 1989, Hobbs 1994, Kincaid 1989, Kirby et al 1995, Lofland 1989, Shuman 1986-87, 1992 (Shuman 1994), 'international municipal exchange' (Hewitt 1996), 'decentralised cooperation' (Hafteck 2003), and 'city-to-city cooperation' (Bontenbal and van Lindert 2009 But we can also identify an explicit comparativism on display in studies purposefully set up to compare two cities. This latter comparativism might be termed 'pure' comparative urbanism.…”

“…6 It is 19 possible that officers also return having learned something of urban development in a different city. But the evidence for this happening in a significant way is not strong (see Bontenbal and van Lindert 2009). One reason for this is that two further rationalities for entering North-South partnerships constrain these secondments and other engagements in ways that preclude such learning.…”

Globalising care? Town twinning in Britain since 1945

“…There has been next to nothing published on town twinning by geographers since 1991 (though see Clarke 2010aClarke , 2010b. The same cannot be said for other disciplines where a literature does exist on town twinning and related fields such as municipal internationalism (Ewen and Hebbert 2007), municipal diplomacy (Hobbs 1994, Kincaid 1989, Kirby et al 1995, Shuman 1986-87, 1992, and municipal exchange (Bontenbal and Lindert 2009, Hewitt 1996, Shuman 1994. In particular, a few historians have studied the ideals and institutions of post-war town twinning in Western Europe (Campbell 1987, Vion 2002.…”

Town Twinning in Cold-War Britain: (Dis)continuities in Twentieth-Century Municipal Internationalism

“…19 The present paper focuses on the years between these two well-attended periods of municipal internationalism; the period between the end of the Second World War and the economic crises of the 1970s that was characterised by the Cold War and is often depicted as a golden age for nation-states and their welfare form. 20 As such, little attention has been paid to municipal internationalism during this period.…”