This is a book about the role of cities in the production of uneven development, a topic with which I have been preoccupied since I was an undergraduate, and that I have approached from different angles since then. Interested in understanding the mechanisms and geographies of exploitation of what was then still called the “Third World”, I plunged into world-systems analysis (Wallerstein 1974a, 1983), which we were assigned as course reading. The course lecturer also sparked my interest in cities, especially through Braudel-influenced lectures on the cities of northern Italy. I am grateful to Peter Feldbauer for introducing me to a city-centred view of capitalism and its uneven development, and for making me read the emerging literature on peripheral urbanization. One of these books was Michael Timberlake's (1985) Urbanization in the World Economy, and Bryan Roberts’ sympathetic but critical review became the guide – or mandate – for my own research interests. To most of the contributions to the Timberlake book, Roberts levels the criticism that “[r]elationships of inequality are taken as given, but the mechanisms by which power is exercised and reproduced are not fully examined … There is not enough emphasis … on how cities and the classes within them achieve control over other regions” (1986: 459; emphasis in original). After almost 40 years since Roberts urged a comprehensive treatment of the question of “how cities and the classes within them achieve control over other regions”, our knowledge of this is still rudimentary. But worse still, the question has been relegated to the background in both urban studies and in analyses of uneven development, which is why I was prompted to write this book.

To address the challenge of how “cities” and “classes within them” could be brought together in the analysis of the mechanisms of uneven development, I found current debates about the specialness of cities, conducted in different disciplines (e.g. economic geography, regional economics, urban sociology) and across theoretical positions very instructive. They have a common denominator: cities are extraordinary (Taylor 2013) because they have certain properties that are “intrinsically urban in character” (Scott & Storper 2015: 9) and that enable the actors within cities to be more innovative and productive than people elsewhere.