Book launch by Ekaterina Mikhailova on “Twin Cities across Five Continents: Interactions and Tensions on Urban Borders”
The Zukunftskolleg invited everyone to the book launch led by Research Visit Fellow Ekaterina Mikhailova.
We invited you to the hybrid book launch on
“Twin Cities across Five Continents: Interactions and Tensions on Urban Borders”
organized by Research Visit Fellow Ekaterina Mikhailova on 5 May.
About:
This event will present a newly published book on twin cities – adjacent, mostly independently founded but closely interrelated urban pairings on either side of an administrative or international border. As the book’s title suggests, the volume surveys internal and cross-border twin cities on all continents across the world from the Baltic Sea region in the North to Australia in the South and presents them as an overlooked global urban phenomenon.
Published by Routledge in Global Urban Studies Series and with Ekaterina Mikhailova and John Garrard as the editors, Twin Cities across Five Continents posits that external (or cross-border) twin cities are deeply susceptible to global pressures such as the territorial restructuring coupled with economic globalisation notably integration projects that fragment the geo-economic and political space by erasing some borders and (re)creating others. Twin cities are presented as intense thermometers, even barometers, for what is happening in the wider urban world – globally, around and across international borders. They are trans-shipment points for legitimate and illegitimate trade, and the interface and interchange of cultures and peoples. More recently, they have become points of stress where the implications of, say, international mass migration and the political responses to/exploitations of this phenomenon are experienced with particular intensity.
The book launch will comprise three presentations by chapter authors – an overview of the phenomena and book’s theoretical framework and presentations of two case studies: so-called "eurocities" on the Galician-Portuguese border, and Lomé, the capital of Togo, and the adjacent Ghanaian border town of Aflao. Case study presentations will shed light on relationships among twin citizens in Western Europe and West Africa and showcase how bilateral relations, broader geopolitical and economic integration projects, trade flows and institutional set-ups (or absence thereof) influence twin-city dynamics.
Please find more information on the programme and the speakers on our website.