Abstract:

It is hard to miss the explosion of writings on cities and globalization. Almost every city function or metropolitan agglomeration and its fragments is now being conceptualized as ‘global’ in some way (Crane and Daniere, 1996; Keil, 1996; Al‐Sayyad, 2000; Taylor and Walker, 2001; Scott, 2002), while the character and composition of world ‘citiness’ is itself a common — albeit contested — subject of study (Knox, 1995; Hall, 1996; Taylor 2000a; 2000b; Douglas, 2001). With the growing popularity of the global city paradigm (Sassen, 1991; 1996), even the most conventional topics long studied by urbanists, ranging from suburbs (Muller, 1997) and ‘midtowns’ (Ford, 1998) to real estate (Haila, 1999; 2000), architecture (Krause and Petro, 2003; King, 2004) and urban governance (Brenner, 1999; Yusuf and Wu, 2000) are now routinely examined in global context. Globalization has even begun to dominate the vocabulary of urban policy‐making and politics, with scholarly articles devoted to the study of how cities market themselves in global terms (Duffy, 1995; Whitson and Macintosh, 1996) or how politicians symbolically use globalization in city electoral campaigns (Machimura, 1998). It seems we are all globalized now. The title of David Clark’s recent book, Urban World/Global City, merely takes this logic to its most extreme, collapsing global cities and an urban world into each other as linguistic shorthand for the modern condition.