Abstract:

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 nation‐state (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.