The global city-regions under study have been thoroughly examined for decades (though rarely compared), particularly London and Los Angeles; so much so that they have become touchstones for global city-region theorisation, to the detriment of knowing and comparing other, more ‘ordinary cities’, especially in the Global South (Robinson, 2002). However, this does not mean that we know everything about London, Los Angeles and Sydney, especially with regard to overlooked service hubs in backwater inner-city space (but see Wolch & Dear, 1993, on Los Angeles). My overall aim in this chapter is to flesh out the critical exogenous dimensions of resilience. I first do this by embedding the global city-regions within their larger national political context. Second, I trace the local welfare and voluntary sector settlements in each global city-region, which also involved tracking the dramatic reinventions from the 1980s onwards, when London, Los Angeles and Sydney all attained a certain global city status. With reference to Sydney, but certainly applicable to the London and Los Angeles, McGuirk and O’Neill (2002: 303) contended that the rise to global city status entails a ‘deepening insertion into global circuits of capital [that] has coincided with the consolidation of neoliberalism, and an associated fiscal austerity as the dominant Western political ideology’. Third and finally, I will offer a place typology for the ten inner-city areas that will structure the empirical analysis from Chapter Six onwards.

Politicising the case studies: national welfare states and voluntary-sector regimes

An unintentional drawback to the global cities literature – and perhaps even the policy mobilities one – is that the primary emphasis on a relational yet emphatically autonomous urban scale downplays the premise that global city-regions are unavoidably and inextricably moored to and entangled with their national contexts (Jones, 2012; Marr, 2012). While global city-regions may well have economically detached themselves from their national space-economies to command and control the global economy, the same autonomy cannot be assumed for certain political and social policies (McGuirk, 2007). This is only natural, given that cities do not have the fiscal capacity to escape the orbit of national social policies, taxation policies and currency controls (Peterson, 1981). Wacquant (2008) was well aware of these macro-level contexts when he compared Chicago and Paris: the withered American welfare state produced very different results on the ground in inner-city Chicago than the more robust French one did in the Parisian banlieues.