Twin Cities across Five Continents

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.

• 1. Introduction: Towards a Global Overview of Twin City Studies. Part 1: Intranational Twin Cities. 2. Twin Cities in Medieval England: the Case of Small Towns’ Development. 3. The Continued Evolution of Fort William and Port Arthur into the City of Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. 4. Banana-Benders and Cockroaches: Cross-Border Planning for Gold Coast-Tweed Heads. 5. Chandigarh Tri-city: Between Conflict and Co-operation. 6. Embryonic Twin Cities: Reggio Calabria and Messina in Italy. Part 2: International Twin Cities A) in Europe. 7. Prussian Border Twin Towns: The Urban Geopolitics of an Amorphous Territorial State. 8. Two Generations of Eurocities along the Northern Section of the Spanish-Portuguese Border. 9. The Past upon which the Future Dwells: Lines and Divisions in Former Yugoslavia. Part 2: International Twin Cities B) in the Middle East and in Africa. 10. Aqaba and Eilat: Twenty-Five Years of 'Good Neighborly Relations' in a Post Conflict Environment. 11. Lomé and Aflao: Ambivalent Affinity at the Togo-Ghana Border. 12. Ketu and Imeko: Yoruba Twin Cities astride Bénin-Nigeria Border in West Africa. Part 2: International Twin Cities C) in Asia. 13. Dandong and Sinuiju: Twin Towns on a Fragile Border. 14. Zabaikalsk and Manzhouli: Dynamic Asymmetry 15. Khorgos – the Making of an Unequal Twin on the Sino-Kazakh Border. Part 2: International Twin Cities D) in South America. 16. Transborder Dwelling in Albina (Suriname) and Saint-Laurent (French Guiana) on the Lower Maroni. 17. The Oyapock River Bridge as a One-way Street: (Un)bridgeable Inequalities in Saint-Georges (French Guiana) and Oiapoque (Brazil). 18. The Everyday of the Twin Cities of Chuí (Brazil) and Chuy (Uruguay): a Semiotic Analysis. 19. ‘You Can't Have One Without the Other’: Bilateral Relations between Paraguay’s Ciudad del Este and Brazil’s Foz do Iguaçu. Part 2: International Twin Cities E) in North America and the Caribbean. 20. Niagara Twin Cities: ‘Living Apart Together’ on the Canada-US Border. 21. Asylees, Removals, Returnees: Mexican Border Cities Response and Adaptation to Mixed Migratory Flows. 22. Ouanaminthe and Dajaboìn: Two Unequal Cities on the Haitian-Dominican Border. Part 3: Twin Cities in Fiction and Editors' Dreams. 23. Twin Cities in China Miéville’s Fiction. 24. Conclusion: The twins that got away.

"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