Study title

World Wide

Organization

Event/process

Geographic Unit

Time unit

Other

The team began by selecting a target group of 200 cities. The ethos behind these selection criteria was that comparative urban research should aim to incorporate the experiences of a diverse array of cities across both the global North and South. In particular we wished to gather viewpoints that might serve as alternatives to the well-known perspectives of heavily researched so-called ‘global’ and ‘mega’ cities. The team developed an initial list of 200 cities with a roughly equal distribution among regions of the world and city size. The team grouped cities into six regions, based on the regions used by the World Bank. These were East Asia and the Pacific (including Oceania), Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, South and Central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. One deviation from the World Bank approach was our grouping of North America and Europe. The team also included several ‘outlier’ cities, that were geographically isolated, such as island cities (such as Male in the Maldives) and cities in remote regions of the world (Nuuk in Greenland). The research team then sought to identify at least one expert per city to address a series of questions as to the current shape, challenges and performance of city leadership in each city.Experts were selected on the basis of their academic track record (several recognisable publications) of expertise on a specific city in the pool of 200 (finally at 202 in total) cities surveyed.