Five years after the eruption in 2008 of the USA financial crisis, we live in a time of uncertainty overshadowed by the possible fragmentation of the Eurozone and by an effective economic contraction and social crisis. While the causes of these crises may still be the subject of debate, one certainty can be found: the production of space is at their core.

This edited volume is the collected efforts of a heterogeneous group of academics (from different fields — sociology, anthropology, architecture, demography, hydrology, urban planning, and from different national contexts — the USA, Portugal, and Spain) who, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis — but before the Greek, the Irish, and the Portuguese default crises and bailout programs — cast a closer, open, and diversified look at how globalization and metropolization play and are played thematically through different processes that involve transnational metropolitan-local contexts by addressing the above issues within a specific scenario: Europe's West Coast.