1st Edition
Twin Cities across Five Continents Interactions and Tensions on Urban Borders
This international collection provides a comprehensive overview of twin cities in different circumstances – from the emergent to the recently amalgamated, on 'soft' and 'hard' borders, with post-colonial heritage, in post-conflict environments and under strain.
With examples from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, South America, North America and the Caribbean, the volume sees twin cities as intense thermometers for developments in the wider urban world globally. It offers interdisciplinary perspectives that bridge history, politics, culture, economy, geography and other fields, applying these lenses to examples of twin cities in remote places. Providing a comparative approach and drawing on a range of methodologies, the book explores where and how twin cities arise; what twin cities can tell us about international borders; and the way in which some twin cities bear the spatial marks of their colonial past. The chapters explore the impact on twin-city relations of contemporary pressures, such as mass migration, the rise of populism, East-West tensions, international crime, surveillance, rebordering trends and epidemiological risks triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. With case studies across the continents, this volume for the first time extends twin-city debates to fictional imaginings of twin cities.
Twin Cities across Five Continents is a valuable resource for researchers in the fields of anthropology, history, geography, urban studies, border studies, international relations and global development as well as for students in these disciplines.
List of figures
List of tables
Acknowledgements
List of contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction: Towards a Global Overview of Twin City Studies
Ekaterina Mikhailova
Part 1: Intranational Twin Cities
Chapter 2: Twin Cities in Medieval England: the Case of Small Towns’ Development
Anna Anisimova
Chapter 3: The Continued Evolution of Fort William and Port Arthur into the City of Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada
Michel S. Beaulieu and Jenna L. Kirker
Chapter 4: Banana-Benders and Cockroaches: Cross-Border Planning for Gold Coast-Tweed Heads
Paul Burton and Aysin Dedekorkut-Howes
Chapter 5: Chandigarh Tri-city: Between Conflict and Co-operation
Ganeshwari Singh, Simrit Kahlon and Ekaterina Mikhailova
Chapter 6: Embryonic Twin Cities: Reggio Calabria and Messina in Italy
Dario Musolino and Luigi Pellegrino
Part 2: International Twin Cities A) in Europe
Chapter 7: Prussian Border Twin Towns: The Urban Geopolitics of an Amorphous Territorial State
Thomas Lundén
Chapter 8: Two Generations of Eurocities along the Northern Section of the Spanish-Portuguese Border
Juan-M. Trillo-Santamaría, Valerià Paül and Roberto Vila-Lage
Chapter 9: The Past upon which the Future Dwells: Lines and Divisions in Former Yugoslavia
Dorte Jagetic Andersen
Part 2: International Twin Cities B) in the Middle East and in Africa
Chapter 10: Aqaba and Eilat: Twenty-Five Years of 'Good Neighborly Relations' in a Post Conflict Environment
Tamar Arieli
Chapter 11: Lomé and Aflao: Ambivalent Affinity at the Togo-Ghana Border
Paul Nugent
Chapter 12: Ketu and Imeko: Yoruba Twin Cities astride Bénin-Nigeria Border in West Africa
Anthony Asiwaju
Part 2: International Twin Cities C) in Asia
Chapter 13: Dandong and Sinuiju: Twin Towns on a Fragile Border
Tony Michell
Chapter 14: Zabaikalsk and Manzhouli: Dynamic Asymmetry
Vladimir Kolosov
Chapter 15: Khorgos – the Making of an Unequal Twin on the Sino-Kazakh Border
Verena La Mela
Part 2: International Twin Cities D) in South America
Chapter 16: Transborder Dwelling in Albina (Suriname) and Saint-Laurent (French Guiana) on the Lower Maroni
Clémence Léobal
Chapter 17: The Oyapock River Bridge as a One-way Street: (Un)bridgeable Inequalities in Saint-Georges (French Guiana) and Oiapoque (Brazil)
Fabio Santos
Chapter 18: The Everyday of the Twin Cities of Chuí (Brazil) and Chuy (Uruguay): a Semiotic Analysis
Gianlluca Simi
Chapter 19: ‘You Can't Have One Without the Other’: Bilateral Relations between Paraguay’s Ciudad del Este and Brazil’s Foz do Iguaçu
Omri Elmaleh
Part 2: International Twin Cities E) in North America and the Caribbean
Chapter 20: Niagara Twin Cities: ‘Living Apart Together’ on the Canada-US Border
Nick Baxter-Moore and Munroe Eagles
Chapter 21: Asylees, Removals, Returnees: Mexican Border Cities Response and Adaptation to Mixed Migratory Flows
Hilda Garcia-Perez and Francisco Lara-Valencia
Chapter 22: Ouanaminthe and Dajaboìn: Two Unequal Cities on the Haitian-Dominican Border
Lena Poschet El Moudden
Part 3: Twin Cities in Fiction and Editors' Dreams
Chapter 23: Twin Cities in China Miéville’s Fiction
Catherine Olea Johansen, Ruben Moi, Ekaterina Mikhailova and John Garrard
Chapter 24: Conclusion: The twins that got away
John Garrard
Index
Biography
Ekaterina Mikhailova is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Geography and Environment, University of Geneva and Visiting Lecturer at the Graduate Institute of International Development Studies (Swit\erland). Ekaterina’s work lies at the crossroads of urban studies, border studies and Russian studies.
John Garrard was Senior Lecturer in Politics and Contemporary History at Salford University (UK) until 2011. Although primarily a historian, his central teaching and research interests have bordered with political science.
"The book is inspiring and opens up new lines of research, such as the seven themes set forth in the Introduction, to which several others could be added, such as everyday border and cross-border practices and the representation of twin cities in the media, film, and literature. Personally speaking, reading this book has led me to wonder about how twin cities fascinate, how they are idealized, and how these two elements influence their conceptualization. It also makes me wonder what kind of spatial objects at different scales (bodies, buildings, neighborhoods, cities, regions, protected areas, etc.) and on distinct borders (not only political borders) also can be considered twins." - Xavier Oliveras-González, Journal of Borderlands Studies
