Director, Centre for Urban and Community Studies
University of Toronto, Canada

One of the most important effects of globalization for large cities and city-regions in the south is increasing social diversity. This diversity may be influenced by internal migration, by immigration from overseas, and by economic and political factors. But in many cases, during the 1990s it has been expressed in increasing economic and spatial fragmentation and even polarization. How southern cities are able to develop institutions of governance to respond to diversity, in order to incorporate it in a constructive fashion for their development is the central subject of this paper. The success of major southern cities in responding to the challenges of diversity will depend on such factors as the character of local civil society, national and local institutional history, the formation of new structures of governance, and their particular location in wider regional systems. Increasingly, however, it appears that in important respects major city-regions in the south are behaving in a similar fashion to their counterparts in the north.