Previously published as a special issue of Policy Studies, this volume demonstrates the vitality of the field of urban politics and presents future challenges for urban political research in the years ahead.If it does not already, the population of cities will very soon make up more than half the global population. As the global urban population continues to expand, the challenges facing urban politics grow with it. How do we understand the relationship between politics and urban policy? What are the political challenges facing citizens and politicians in a radically unequal developing country like South Africa? How are patterns of urban governance institutionalised? How might we understand the changing relationship between hierarchies, markets and networks? And is it possible to develop a genuinely comparative urban politics in countries as different as Canada, South Africa and Bangladesh? Drawing together the work of new and established scholars from the UK, Canada, the US and South Africa in an impressive and wide ranging collection of articles, this book demonstrates the contribution of urban scholarship to answering these questions.