Cities and Spaces of Leadership (PDF)

Cristina D'Alessandro is Professor at the Paris School of International Affairs, France, and Senior Fellow at the Centre on Governance, University of Ottawa, Canada. She served as Knowledge Expert at the African Capacity Building Foundation in Harare and as professor at the University Lyon 2.

Frannie Léautier is Chairperson and Co-Founding Partner of Mkoba Private Equity, Tanzania. She was formerly World Bank Vice President and Chief of Staff to the President; Executive Secretary of the African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF); and Managing Partner at the Fezembat Group.

"This is a truly original contribution to political geography. D'Alessandro and Léautier have brought together two literatures – leadership studies and human geography – to provide a fresh take on agency and context. The key contribution is to show how the career trajectories of 15 Asian and African leaders are influenced by a plethora of spatial factors covering combinations of place, scale, and connections. This very concrete approach to studying political process is a timely challenge to more conventional approaches to understanding relations between space and power." - Peter Taylor, Northumbria University, UK
 
"Cities and Spaces of Leadership: A Geographical Perspective is a fascinating book demonstrating how a spatial approach gives way to a relevant understanding of leadership building and practices. This approach is very innovative and definitely fruitful. It takes advantage of the huge amount of publications devoted to the various forms and ontologies of spatiality (clarifying the respective meanings of place, network, national territory, urban lived space, personal trajectory, etc.) and explains how they provide analytic tools for understanding the way leaders ground their knowhow in space and with space. The writing is very efficient both in providing a strong conceptual and theoretical background and in illustrating this overall frame with case studies made of a selection of lively individual practices and 'spatial talents' :15 global, connected and place-based leaders selected in different parts of the world. A very inspiring way of linking spatiality, political geography and leadership studies.' - Bernard Debarbieux, Université de Genève, Switzerland