Performance And The Global City

Winner of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Excellence in Editing Award 2016 Urban studies has long understood the city as a 'text'. What would it mean now to use performance to rethink that metaphor? Performance and the City queries the role theatre and performance play in urban policy, architecture, and civic history, while also exploring their important place in the memories created in the wake of urban trauma.

Winner of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Excellence in Editing Award 2016 Following the ground-breaking Performance and the City, this new volume explores what it means to create and experience urban performance – as both an aesthetic and a political practice – in the burgeoning world where cities are built by globalization and neoliberal capital.

Global cities all over the world are taking on new roles as they increasingly participate directly and independently in international affairs and global politics. So far, surprisingly few studies have analyzed the role of the Global City beyond its already well explicated role in the globalized economy. How is it that local governments of Global Cities claim international political authority and develop what appears to be their own independent foreign and security policies despite the fact that such policy areas have traditionally been considered to be the core function of nation-states and central governments? What does it mean to be and to govern the contemporary Global City? In this book Kristin Ljungkvist claims that we can better understand why local governments find it to be in their Global City’s interest to claim international political authority by exploring how the city’s role in the globalized world is constructed and narrated locally. A core claim is that Global City-hood as a specific type of collective identity can play a constitutive part in such interest formation. Combining insights from International Relations and Urban Studies scholarship, and with the help of a case study on New York City, Ljungkvist develops a new analytical framework for studying the Global City as an international political actor. The Global City 2.0 shows that even as the Global City engages in various global issues such as global environmental governance or counterterrorism, such pursuit will be framed and rationalized in terms of the city’s economic growth. The quest for growth and global competitiveness are not necessarily the only available meanings attached to the being and governing of the contemporary Global City. However, there seems to be a remarkable persistency and attraction in economistic ideas and an economistic conception of the Global City.

Since the late 1970s the role of key world cities such as Los Angeles, New York and London as centres of global control and co-ordination has come under increasing scrutiny. This book provides an overview and critique of work on the global context of metropolitan growth, world city formation and the theory it has generated. Suggesting ‘post-imperialism’ as the most appropriate framework for analysis, the author demonstrates the extent to which urban and regional development, both in Britain and elsewhere, were linked to a colonial mode of production, and highlights the effects of its disappearance. Against this background, the author charts the transformation of London from imperial capital in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to world city in the capitalist world economy of today.

Global City Makers provides an in-depth account of the role of powerful economic actors in making and un-making global cities. Engaging critically and constructively with global urban studies from a relational economic geography perspective, the book outlines a renewed agenda for global cities research. Focusing on financial services, management consultancy, real estate, commodity trading and maritime industries, the detailed studies in this volume are located across the globe to incorporate major world cities such as London, New York and Tokyo as well as globalizing cities including Mexico City, Hamburg and Mumbai.

Politicians and academics alike have made globalization the key reference point for interpreting the 1990s. For many, globalization threatens both community and the nation-state. It appears to represent forces beyond human control. Living the Global City documents globalization's impact on everyday lives by drawing on research rather than rhetoric and arrives at a very different perspective. Living the Global City offers an analysis of globalization and global/local processes by focussing on specific issues and themes which include community, culture, milieu, socioscapes and sociospheres, microglobalization, poverty, ethnic identity and carnival. By advancing the debates which surround these issues through a redefinition of the terms in which they have been developed and engagement with the everyday lives of people in a global city, this book reveals how such key concepts as community, culture, class, poverty and identity can be reconceptualized in the context of global/local processes.

This classic work chronicles how New York, London, and Tokyo became command centers for the global economy and in the process underwent a series of massive and parallel changes. What distinguishes Sassen's theoretical framework is the emphasis on the formation of cross-border dynamics through which these cities and the growing number of other global cities begin to form strategic transnational networks. All the core data in this new edition have been updated, while the preface and epilogue discuss the relevant trends in globalization since the book originally came out in 1991.

This book identifies and accounts for the characteristics of the contemporary city and of urban society. It analyzes the distribution and growth of settlements and explores the social and behavioral characteristics of urban living. The latest theoretical and empirical developments and insights are synthesized and presented in an accessible and engaging way. This second edition has been extensively updated and referenced. Each chapter includes sets of learning objectives, annotated readings and topics for discussion. Well-illustrated throughout, it will be essential reading for students of geography, sociology and development studies and all who seek an understanding of how the urban world has evolved and how it will change in the twenty-first century.