Cities play a key role in economic growth, contribute a greater share of GDP than their populations suggest and generate economic opportunities for their growing populations. However, variations between cities and over time demonstrate that the growth of urban economies is neither autonomous nor automatic. Global and national trends may create a favourable economic climate, in which the activities located in a particular city can ยฏourish, or reduce the proยฎtability of those activities, resulting in economic decline and necessitating restructuring. The research was concerned with two questions: ยฎrst, to what extent do poor residents beneยฎt from growth in urban economies or suffer from economic decline, and second, what scope is there for governance institutions to facilitate economic growth and/or restructuring, to ensure that the beneยฎts of growth reach the poor, or to mitigate the impacts of decline?
The context of urban governance in the South has changed signiยฎcantly in the 1990s. There are clear signs that three trends have all increased signiยฎcantly. Firstly, the process of globalization has gathered pace; the result has been a situation in which to compete in global and local markets has, to a large extent, become the only game in town' for most cities. This has led to an increasing interest in cities marketing' themselves, primarily to attract inward investment (Vidler, 1999). The second trend has been the increasing democratization of many countries of the South; thus of our nine city studies all are now (in 2001) located in multi-party democratic systems. Twenty years ago, with the notable exception of the Indian cities, 1 all were located in non-democratic and authoritarian systems of government. The third change is related to the others, namely that in many countries there have been serious attempts at decentralization/devolution and the transfer of increased powers, resources and responsibilities to the local/municipal level (World Bank, 1999