Globalization and the City (original) (raw)

Cities in Contemporary Capitalism

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 38, No. 5, pp. 1660-1677

This article outlines essential concepts of the political economy approach of urban research and offers critical modifications and clarifications to some of its contentions concerning the functioning of cities as 'strategic places' of capital accumulation. The interrelations between contemporary capitalism and urban economic development are discussed at the scale of a transnationally extended urban system. Based on the general context of the global economic downturn, I focus on the role of cities in distinct circuits of capital, the switching of capital flows within the urban system and the different functional roles of cities within the world city network that interconnects cities both in the global North and South. I call into question the established focus of urban economic research on the role of cities as financial and service centres, arguing that cities might redirect their economic development trajectories towards 'real economy' activities, in contrast to relying on the disastrous development model of finance-dominated capitalism.

Cities in a Global Age: Critical Areas of Theory and Research 1

In this paper, I propose to set out some thoughts about theory and research on global urbanism. I use this term for convenience's sake, because no single concept sufficiently describes how our understanding of cities and space is actually being shaped by a turn in world events that began more than a generation ago, when new technologies in communication and transport were becoming available that would allow for the first-ever coordination of a global system production and markets in something approximating real time. By the late 1970s, corporate capital in the capitalist West was in a serious crisis of accumulation that led not only to the search for lower-cost production sites "off-shore" but also to an extraordinary concentration of capital, as smaller corporations were bought out and merged with dinosaur-sized conglomerates. The visible results were both, a shift of many production facilities abroad and de-industrialization at home. Thus was born the idea of a post-...

Cities in global context: A brief intellectual history

International Journal of Urban and Regional …, 2005

Studies of cities in global context have been around almost as long as scholars have been studying cities (Weber, 1927; Pirenne, 1936). Use of the concept 'global city' did not necessarily figure in the early writings on cities, but international market connections and trade linkages did. In many of these works, physical, social and economic changes in cities were tied to national and international political conditions-ranging from the demise of feudal or absolutist orders (Weber, 1958) to the rise of the modern nationstate (Tilly, 1975; 1990)-as well as the appearance of the social relations of modernity (Durkheim, 1933; Simmel, 1950), which themselves were seen as materializing in cities and reinforcing capitalist development. Still, the concern with economic aspects of urbanization among those who studied cities had its own particular 'geography'. In the United States, most early generations of urban scholars did not emphasize the economic dynamics of urban development to the same degree as did their counterparts in Europe, and they rarely examined cities in global context. This was particularly true during the 1940s and 1950s, when US sociologists became ethnocentrically focused on American urban problems relating to community and culture, neighborhood transformation, and social deviance or disorder. Yet it is precisely the fact that European and American urbanists initially approached the study of cities somewhat differently that helps explain the content, character and assumptions of subsequent research on global cities or cities in global context, both here and abroad.

Globalization and the Spatial Politics of Cities

Springer Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance, 2017

Description Introduction: Urbanization is said to be the hallmark of the contemporary era. The majority of people, as itis widely stated, now live in cities (UN2014). Cities are variously seen to epitomize the peaks and troughs of development, house and provide playgrounds to the wealthiest elites, and, in their vast sprawls, contain the majority of humanity. More generally, the global future of humanity, as far as one can be described, is now widely under-stood and presented as an urban future. A future of cities and their successes and failures that is tied into global processes, social, economic, cultural, and environmental. These processes are often, also, political and enmeshed in globalization. While cities are increasingly seen to create transnational networks and alliances, they also become islands differentiated from their regions in political as well as economic terms. Cities, and the processes that influence them, are broadly understood as now caught up in increasingly global flows of capital and culture that dislodge them, at least partially, from the politics of the nation-state. This presents new forms of territory and politics beyond and alongside the state, both in the sense of politics as contests of interest and in the more nuanced sense of politics as differing ideals of social organization, rule, and imagining, as defined above. This is always, however, a manifestly partial account, because cities are not constant, or able to be bounded, or defined consistently, across time and space. From within, cities are lived and known in disparate ways. As such, statements and frameworks that describe cities in the above terms risk conflating vastly different contexts through the label of the city. These frameworks and understandings of the city, in turn, inform policy and governance and are increasingly global. Accordingly they wield great power in both influencing the direction of cities, through globally circulating policy approaches, and in defining what is counted as valid and desirable. As such the politics of describing cities must also be engaged. The field of spatial approaches to cities, globalization, and their politics, while certainly established as of crucial relevance across a range of academic and practice domains, is not a discipline containing a discrete body of knowledge or theory. Indeed the hallmark of many spatial approaches is that they necessarily bring together interdisciplinary perspectives. As such, like the processes and contexts engaged, scholarship in this area is hotly debated and contested and is rapidly emerging. It is also extremely extensive. In order to address this topic adequately, yetwithin the scope of this chapter, the following text introduces a diverse set of recent work at this juncture and explains important current debates and scholarship at the nexus of cities, globalization, and politics. These contain contestation and rarely lend themselves to singular dis-courses, overarching frameworks, or straightforward conclusions. However, as geographer Doreen Massey asserts,“an insistence on complexity leaves open more opportunities for politics”(2007, p. 11), and it is in this spirit that the following text introduces the topic.

Global Cities as Market Civilisation

ABSTRACTBuilding upon interdisciplinary efforts to understand the origins, logic and significance of global cities, this article argues that global cities should be seen as a critical component and outcome of a political project to generate a global market society. Global cities should be seen as the successful implementation of free-market political philosophy, constructed and defended by a particular historical configuration of international society. The historical transformation of urban form signalled by the "global city" concept is tightly bound to the neoliberal restructuring of the world economy in the 1970s, underpinned by US hegemonic power. The first part of this article argues that the distinctive historical origin of global cities has shaped their current trajectories and draws the horizon of their future prospects. Having established the connection between liberal world order and global cities, the second part of the article argues that the contemporary form of the global city is under threat from two sources. The first threat is internal to the global city form itself. Global cities have internalised the contradictory forces of market liberalism. They have registered astonishing economic growth over the last four decades, and generated vast material and intellectual resources. But, at the same time, they have become deeply divided and polarised in ways that threaten the urban fabric. The second source of threat comes from the possible weakening or collapse of liberal world order, with the accelerating decline of US hegemony. Drawing on aspects of Karl Polanyi's analysis of the nineteenth-century "great transformation", the article argues that a number of future trajectories for the global city can be identified in the contemporary moment.