Cities in the International Marketplace. By H. V. Savitch and Paul Kantor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. 488p. $65.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

The growing popularity of comparative research is one of the most exciting recent developments in the field of urban politics. Comparison allows urbanists to transcend the local and see cities as part of a national or global system. It helps urban scholars identify which factors derive from the workings of democratic capitalist systems, and which grow from particular national practices and policies. But comparative urbanists have a difficult task as they try to disentangle cities from their national contexts. On the one hand, one can hardly understand, say, education policy in Detroit and Düsseldorf without clarifying local and national roles. On the other, an urbanist eager to highlight what is salient about the local does not wish to make national policy analysis central to his or her research. These special theoretical and methodological challenges confronting the comparative urbanist can be daunting.