Editors' Introduction John Friedmann and Mike Douglass Mike Douglass and John Friedmann, eds., Cities for Citizens: Planning and the Rise of Civil Society in a Global Age (London: John Wiley, 1998). Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local. The space of power and wealth is projected throughout the world, while people's life and experiences is rooted in places, in their culture, in their history." Castells (1996:415-6) According to Manuel Castells, the elites of wealth and power of the new global economy -- who probably amount to less than 10 percent of the population even in industrial countries and to less than 1 percent in the predominantly rural societies of the poorest countries -- hold no special allegiance to local culture and history. Their primary interest is in the unlimited accumulation of profit and influence. The disempowered great majority of the world's population value local traditions and inhabit specific places, but their voices have been rendered silent. The Castellsian human landscape is thus occupied by a pacified proletariat of consumers and semi-consumers of what the global shopping basket holds. This proletariat is subordinated to the global culture of capital and to structures of elite power that control and commodify its penetration into local spaces. In this representation of the elitist world, politics are a matter of arrangements between states and corporations; popular resistance is meek; and emergent counter-movements are easily finessed before they gain substance. Such is the imaginary of the boardrooms of capital. By contrast, the chapters of this book are focused on the local arena of region, city and neighborhood -- local not in the sense of being closed off from global influences, but as the effective terrain for engagement in civic life beyond the household and in relation to the state and the corporate economy. Substitute "citizen" for "people" in the citation above, and a very different imaginary from the one painted by Castells emerges. Whereas people is a generic term that conveys little of substance, citizen is a political term that acknowledges (a) a territorial unit organized for a life in common -- a political community; (b) the rights and obligations of members of this polity --the citizens -- and their claim, legitimated by democratic theory, to be the sovereign of this polity to which the state must be accountable; and (c) the right of citizens to claim new rights for themselves. Citizenship in this view implies a theory -- a normative theory - - of political organization. This political imaginary is of an inclusive democracy whose primary practice is specifically at the local level. Though not necessarily in opposition to the extra-political rule of global elites, it asserts a fundamental right to human flourishing. In all quarters of the world, struggles to secure this right and to translate it into socially just outcomes have moved to the center of popular concern. Citizenship is political and thus a concept in the public sphere. It pertains to only a