sustainability Article A Tale of Three Cities: The Rise of Dubai, Singapore, y and Miami Compared Alejandro Portes 1,2 1 School of Law, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL 33146, USA;
[email protected] 2 Center for Migration and Development, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA Revised and updated version of an article by Portes and Martinez published in the Spanish Sociological Review y 28 (3): 9–21. Received: 17 September 2020; Accepted: 9 October 2020; Published: 16 October 2020 Abstract: The literature on “global cities”, following a publication by Saskia Sassen of a book under the same title, has focused on those prime centers of the capitalist economy that concentrate on command-and-control functions in finance and trade worldwide. New York, London, Tokyo, and sometimes, Frankfurt and Paris are commonly cited as such centers. In recent years, however, another set of mercantile and financial centers have arisen. They reproduce, on a regional basis, the features and functions of the prime global cities. Dubai, Miami, and Singapore have emerged during the first quarter of the XXI century as such new regional centers. This paper explores the history of the three; the mechanisms that guided their ascent to their present position; and the pitfalls—political and ecological—that may compromise their present success. The rise of these new global cities from a position of insignificance is primarily a political story, but the stages that the story followed and the key participants in it are quite different. A systematic comparison of the three cities offer a number of lessons for urban scholarship and development policies.