Global City Challenges

Debating a Concept, Improving the Practice

M. Acuto, W. Steele

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137286864
• eBook ISBN: 9781137286871
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The contributors illustrate what twin analytical and practical challenges emerge from juxtaposing cultural, economic, historical, postcolonial, virtual, architectural, literary, security and political stances to the concept of the 'global city'.

1

Introduction

Michele Acuto and Wendy Steele

‘Global city’ is one of the most successful terms that emerged from urban studies. Originally the focus of planning research concerned with the changing impact of urban settlement on our societies, as in Peter Hall’s The World Cities (1966), the discussion of the globalization of major cities extended in the 1970s and 1980s to a survey of the networked imprint of these places on humanity. What was theorized by scholars like John Friedmann (1986) as a hypothesis on how cities influence the new international division of labour as promoted by the growing clout of neoliberalism on world affairs was to become in the following years a complex research programme with a variety of ramifications. Critical in this expansion was the work of Saskia Sassen, who popularized the term ‘global city’ (1991), first employed by David Heenan (1977), and promoted Friedmann’s plea to link global flows with local social developments. Likewise, of key importance was the Globalization and World Cities network (GaWC) founded by Peter Taylor, who pushed for a formalization of the network analysis of how major cities are intertwined with the global economy as well as with each other. Having emerged as a dominant discussion in urban studies through the mid-1990s, the global city paradigm has progressively expanded in the past two decades to extend beyond geographical and urbanist research and has become an attractive area of research of direct appeal to scholars across most of the social sciences. While we will see in closer detail in the next two chapters how this has been the case, it is crucial to understand here two key features. The increasing interest in the ‘global city’ has, firstly, promoted scholarly divergences and cross-disciplinary translations while, secondly, it has at the same time trickled into the practices and rhetoric that uphold urbanist practices, not only academia, in these very cities.

The contested identity, and emerging pull, of the ‘global city’

Popularity rarely translates into universal definitional convergence, and ‘global city’ is no exception to this. As with several other popular terms in urban studies and geography, like ‘scale’ or ‘space’, there persists a vast variety of interpretations of what the ‘global’ city might be. Early urban studies such as those of Hall (1966) put a mostly qualitative emphasis on how these cities represent places where most of the regional and international business is conducted. This was progressively developed into a (mostly quantitative) discussion of the networked interconnection of major centres via Friedmann’s research hypothesis (Friedmann and Wolff, 1982) as well as Peter Taylor (2004b) and GaWC’s key role in formalizing the analysis of the ‘world city network’ of commerce, services and mobility that connects metropolises worldwide. At the same time, Sassen (1991) advocated how the focus on the ‘global’ city as a hub of command and control functions of those advanced producer services that are core to the neoliberal economy needed a conjunct analysis of how this economic order was shaping the social order of these cities. While many focused on how ‘global’ or ‘world’ cities (a definitional discrepancy discussed here in Chapters 2 and 3) are pivotal elements of contemporary world affairs, empirical and methodological divergences progressively developed into a variety of sub-disciplinary stances. If at the outset terminology and strands of global city research were used in a fairly interchangeable way (see, for instance, Brenner, 1998), the late 1990s saw a progressive demarcation in approaches and orientations. Moreover, the global city phenomenon itself grew in popularity and multidisciplinary application. As Ben Derudder (2006) highlighted in more than a few occasions, the scholarship on metropolises and globalization today remains characterized by conceptual confusion and alternative understandings of what these cities really are. Certainly, as the growing interest in fields beyond urban studies testifies, global cities are seen today as more than simply economic pivots. Likewise, this picture is further complicated by the fact that the global city is nowadays challenged on social equality bases by those who advocate for an urbanist scholarship conscious of the ‘uneven development’ (Smith, 1990) embedded in the contemporary economic system. So, if on the one hand global city theorists themselves have acknowledged the dual social effects of neoliberal globalization that are polarizing class divisions and splintering the human geography of these cities (Sassen, 2001; Massey, 2007; Hamnett, 2012), on the other hand other geographers and urbanists like Jenny Robinson have pointed at the unequal division that the global city creates in theoretical terms as much as in practical realities with those cities that are perceived as ‘off the map’ (2002) that the networked pictures of the 1990s analyses have charted. Confronted then by both internal divergences as much as cross-cutting critiques, the ‘global city’ presents us today with substantial scholarly challenges. Yet, the importance of this phenomenon and its contradictions do not stop at the academia.

Global city-thinking has, in the past years, had a very real pull on society at large. Global cities seem in fact an unavoidable fact of everyday world affairs. For instance, to reach the United States from the Asia-Pacific region, one could in theory fly through any settlement on the Western coast of North America but, as thousands do on a daily basis, people mostly choose Los Angeles as their entry port: tacitly, and most certainly not because of some international covenant, individuals commit themselves to specific networks controlled by this North American hub, which in turn gains prominence as a central place in the geography of regional and global mobility. Global cities have in this sense developed a mutually constitutive relationship with the processes of globalization that uphold them. As Sassen and Taylor illustrated, and at odds with much of the hyper-globalist stances that burgeoned in social science in the early 1990s (Omahe, 1990), contemporary globalization trends have not annihilated the relevance of place and location. On the contrary, as Sassen’s scholarship has demonstrated, the territorial revolution brought about by the age of information technology (IT) and the emergence of a finance-dominated world economy is paradoxically characterized by the increasing centralization of very localized processes that underpin cross-border flows, de-nationalization and the creation of new global orders. Global cities become sites of concentration of those command and control functions necessary to such dispersal of de-territorialized operations, which rely on the local production of a vast range of correlated highly specialized services, telecommunication infrastructures and industrial complexes. These functions, as we will see in Chapter 2 by Christof Parnreiter, are not just limited to economic activities but rather extend through countless sectors stretching through cultural, political and even religious fields. This is because, as Manuel Castells (1996, 384) explained, the ‘spaces of flows’ that sustain today’s ‘network society’ need specific hubs and nodes, ‘informational cities’ as he calls them, that act as ‘spaces of places’ functioning as ‘information-based, value production complexes where corporate headquarters and advanced financial firms can find both the suppliers and the highly skilled specialized labor they require’. Positioned at the crossroads of countless worldwide networks, and blessed with the attractiveness of globalizing infrastructures, marketplace of goods, services and ideas, these cities have developed a form of ‘gravity’ which pulls people to choose them (more or less consciously) as privileged global hubs for their strategic positioning in the networked geography of twenty-first century relations.

The pull of the ‘global city’ as both an idea and a condition of interconnectedness to global processes (Allen, 2010; Acuto, 2011) has developed solid ramifications in the practice of urbanists, local government officials and corporate entities worldwide. In bidding for the 2020 Olympics, for instance, Istanbul self-declared itself as ‘a global city of inspiration for thousands of years’ while Tel Aviv has recently inaugurated a Global City Strategy ‘dedicated to elevating the city’s global positioning’.¹ Istanbul and Tel Aviv are not isolated cases: from the antipodean shores of Melbourne and Sydney to the heart of the old colonial empires of London and Rotterdam, or the emerging geographies of Asia and Latin America as epitomized by Shanghai and Rio de Janeiro, countless metropolises have embraced the idea of the ‘global city’ as strategy and a desirable evolution of their positioning in world affairs. Importantly, this trend has paved the way for a renewed understanding of what makes a city truly ‘global’ and thus of an increasing widening of the appreciation of global city markers. Cities themselves have become widely proficient in this matter: Tel Aviv’s strategy, for instance, is geared not only to attracting international business but also to boosting the city’s reputation as a ‘hotbed of creativity by internationally promoting the city’s other major cultural assets, including dance, design, cuisine, architecture and music’. This appreciation is not just echoed but further enhanced by the encounter of public and private, a connection that has offered a very fertile ground for global city-speak to thrive. Amongst the many cases, for instance, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs issued in 2011 a memorandum for the city’s future by calling specifically on the new mayoralty to ‘define an explicit global city strategy’ that would recognize how ‘the city’s future, like its past, will rest on achieving broad global excellence across many different sectors and not on a single “big bet” in the development of any one new industry or capability’.²

Global cities, then, have sought to locate themselves prominently within international geographies not by just posturing on the map as exotic locations but rather by speaking the language of those globalization processes they aim to stand in the midst of and master. Being ‘globalized’ is, in current global city-speak, maintaining a modern edge that is reflected in prominent urban developments capable of situating the city in the dominant flows of information, representations and trends that characterize globalization. Crucial to the recognizability of today’s globalizing metropolises is then their ability to mirror and enhance dominant ‘signs of modernity’ (King, 2004, 5) and urban development recipes put in place by globally recognized hubs like New York, not just by replicating them, but also by hybridizing them to produce the city’s unique image on a global scale. In this process, as Sharon Zukin (1992) pointed out and as we will see in the chapters 9 and 10, respectively by Kerwin Datu and Oli Mould, culture is more and more the business of cities as metropolises morph into cultural products to be consumed. Global cities have become central marketplaces in the symbolic economy of images, trends, fashion and skill sets that is burgeoning in our age besides commerce, global trade and international finance (Florida, 2005). By organizing their urban texture with international hubs and cultural hallmarks, many cities have devised strategic policies to maintain their ‘grip’ on global audiences, while enhancing their attractiveness as central places of the world system. Yet by doing this, cities also partake in the structuration of transnational processes and in the reproduction of dominant flows and cultures, thus organizing the geography of world affairs while at the same time being highly dependent on it. By sustaining this dependency, global city policies have pushed many metropolises to become providers for much wider publics than their local constituencies. They serve their urban community, those who travel through them, but also national economies and, in many cases, other governments and non-state actors, in an intricate web of transnational and cross-regional relations. The global city scholarship has slowly realized this impact, but, to date, there remains a lack of reflection on the state of affairs of this academic phenomenon, and of its relationship with urbanist practices, as well as a poor comprehension of the avenues for productive scholarly exchanges beyond economic-centric considerations – still the dominant game in town when it comes to theorizing global cities.

Challenging the ‘global’ city

The global city has for long now presented a wide array of scholarly challenges. As an entity characterized by both worldwide connectivity as much as complex localized social processes, it has in the 1990s tested the conventional limits of the social sciences and called for an approach to the globalization of today’s metropolises that is wary of state-centrism, excessive localism and hyper-globalist explanations. Freed from the constraints of methodological territorialism, and empowered with a geographical understanding of the networked spaces making the global city a truly ‘global’ entity, the urban theorist needs to come to grips with the intricacies of almost endless horizons. When we move to consider these urban settlements as places in a complex entanglement of global flows, we are, in fact, prompted to consider the city as a place inextricably linked to places beyond, a situated context in a very fluid human geography that is ceaselessly remade and recast. If these considerations amount to a potentially very progressive approach to what global cities mean for the contemporary conditions of humanity, then this intricate nature also presents us with a variety of analytical and normative challenges.

First we begin with the prominent position occupied by economic-centric thinking in global city research. This has raised growing concerns in the recent years, as the chapters 9 and 11 by Oli Mould and Michele Acuto point out, but presents us with the analytical dilemma of going beyond ‘economicism’ (Bourdieu, 1985) while not dismissing the prominent positioning of global economic processes in the production of the global city. Similarly, the demand for alternative analytics of the global city (Bunnell and Maringanti, 2010) and for innovative disciplinary approaches is necessarily confronted by the challenges of duplication of the substantial work already undertaken by global city researchers since at least the 1970s. At the same time, we need to be wary of not allowing for the scholarship to spin into meta-theoretical speculation of poor relevance to the actual practices of urbanism in these cities.

These issues have been coupled, as Parnreiter argues more at length in the following chapter, with a set of scholarly critiques of the global city phenomenon that have emerged in urban studies in the past two decades. To begin with, as also noted above, the growing dominance of this frame as a way of thinking of cities and globalization has in the eyes of many placed the ‘global city’ into a wrongful hegemonic position in urban research (Robinson, 2002). Rather, many like Brenda Yeoh (1999) have argued, as even global city author Anthony King pointed out (1990, 82), that every city is ‘global’ to some extent and that instead of focusing on the privileged sites of globalization processes we would be better off studying the pervasiveness of globalization and local distinctiveness of cities. Related to this, and as voiced by Peter Taylor (2004, 33), the global city literature seems to many as characterized by ‘theoretical sophistication and empirical poverty’, with evident limits on the sophistication of the methodological tools available to global city researchers to put the now long-lived urban theory debate on this phenomenon into actual analytical practice. As such, some of the more recent scholarship has been criticized for being affected by a ‘categorizing imperative’ (Robinson, 2002, 536) and a compulsive focus on measurement for the sake of ranking rather than a more critical stance on the multifaceted influence of these cities on world affairs. Importantly, this emerging critical scholarship has often called for multidisciplinary analysis (Amin and Graham, 1997) and for a move beyond the ‘metrocentricity’ that has selectively brought ‘to light certain features of urban worlds while leaving others very much in the dark’ and that has promoted an often uncritical and poorly reflexive replication of the dominant global city paradigm (Bunnell and Maringanti, 2010, 416) – calls that we believe have yet to be answered systematically.

Investigating the ‘dimensions’ of the global city

There is a wonderful juxtaposition, for example, when contrasting the everyday ordinariness of Michel De Certeau’s poetic urban wanderer – the wandersmanner – with the master images, starchitecture, power and hypermobility typically associated with representations of ‘global’ cities as centres of global capital accumulation, command and control. As De Certeau goes:

The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’, below the threshold at which visibility begins … they are walkers whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. These practices make use of spaces that cannot be seen … it is though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces ….

(De Certeau, 1984, 128)

Besides the challenging visuality and critical normative potential of this image, this brief juxtaposition of De Certeausian wandering with the ‘globalized’ rhetoric illustrated above prompts us to take an alternative pathway to produce a reflexive and multidisciplinary response to the emerging critique of the global city paradigm. Instead of seeking a ‘new’ theory of the global city, we aim here to collect a sample of alternative ways of seeing the ‘global’ and the ‘city’ that can hopefully promote both reflexivity in the existing scholarship and a renewed view of the multiple dimensions of this phenomenon that has practical relevance for these ordinary practitioners of the city.

This book has therefore emerged from our concern with the present paucity of multidisciplinary discussions of the idea of the ‘global city’ and what we perceive as a need for a more critical consideration of the practical challenges both faced and inspired by this scholarship. Represented by an almost unanimous reference to Sassen’s two editions of The Global City (1991, 2001) or to the alternative ‘world city’ formulation of this hypothesis by Friedmann and Taylor, the idea of the ‘global city’ has for long been uncritically referenced. More recently, a set of inquiries such as Doreen Massey’s World City (2007) or Jennifer Robinson’s The Ordinary City (2006) has sought to provide more balanced investigations, or indeed postcolonial re-appraisals, of this phenomenon. This calls for a critical re-theorization of global cities and the implications for urban research, policy and practice. Specifically this involves a critical rejoinder to the global city research by actively juxtaposing the established concept of the ‘global city’ with new perspectives that emphasize emergent analytical and practical insights, opportunities and challenges. The key objectives driving the book have therefore been threefold:

1. To re-cast the ambit of what constitutes global city scholarship through the integration of an extensive set of new disciplinary dimensions to which the concept of ‘global city’ can speak;

2. To promote the establishment of cross-disciplinary conversations and novel research collaborations including (but not limited to) perspectives that incorporate the cultural, historical, postcolonial, virtual, architectural, literary and political dimensions of global cities; and

3. To highlight the need for both conceptual and applied research that not solely relies on theory but also draws on urban communities of practice in global cities such as New York, Shanghai and London, or emerging metropolises like Dubai, Singapore and Sydney.

In order to tac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Global City Tradition
• 3. The Network Dimension
• 4. The Economic and Financial Dimensions
• 5. The Historical Dimension
• 6. The Postcolonial Dimension
• 7. The Literary Dimension
• 8. The Virtual Dimension
• 9. The Cultural Dimension
• 10. The Architectural Dimension
• 11. The Geopolitical Dimension
• 12. The Security Dimension
• 13. Global City Challenges: A View from the Field
• Conclusions
• Global City Challenges: A Sympathetic Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index