The Globalized City

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book explores the dynamics that have accompanied the implementation of large-scale Urban Development Projects (UDPs) in nine European cities within the European Union (EU). It contributes to the analysis of the relationship between urban restructuring and social exclusion/integration in the context of the emergence of the European-wide 'new' regimes of urban governance. These regimes reflect the reawakening of neo-liberal policy and the rise of a New Urban Policy favouring private investments and deregulation of property and labour markets. The selected UDPs further reflect global pressures and changing systems of local, regional, and/or national regulation and governance. These projects, while being decidedly local, capture global trends and new national and local policies as they are expressed in particular institutional forms and strategic practices. The large scale urban interventions were deliberately chosen as reflections of a particular hegemonic and dominant expression of urban policy, as pursued during the 1990s. The book provides a panoramic view of urban change in some of Europe's greatest cities. The nine case-studies include: The Europeanization of Brussels, The Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, the new financial district in Dublin, the science-university-technology complex 'Adlershof' in Berlin, the 1998 World Expo in Lisbon, Athens's bid to stage the Olympic Games, Vienna's Donau City, Copenhagen's Oresund project, and Naples' new business district. These case-studies testify to the unshakable belief the city elites hold in the healing effects that the production of new urban mega-projects and -events has on their city's vitality and development potential. The book also analyses the down side of this development in terms of social exclusion, the formation of new urban elites, and the consolidation of less democratic forms of urban governance. The principal aim is to show how the production of these new urban spaces is actually also part of the production of a new polity, a new economy, and new forms of living urban life that are not very promising for a socially harmonious and just future for metropolitan urban Europe.

Policies promoting Toronto as a global city and provincial economic engine have been seen as beneficial to the development of all of Ontario, yet much of the province has borne significant environmental, social, economic, and political costs as a result of one city's growth. Contributors to this volume call for a radical re-imagining of public policy at local, provincial, and federal levels, that accounts for Ontario's overlooked regions. Beyond the Global City presents a kaleidoscopic view of the province - the rich fields and small towns of the southwest, the productive agricultural lands of rural Huron County, historic Kingston and the Upper St Lawrence, the social and cultural diversity of the Ottawa valley, the near mythical woodlands and waters of Muskoka and Georgian Bay, and the heavily exploited coasts and waters of the Great Lakes - to provide a deeper understanding of its various communities. In a series of regional studies, contributors describe each area's distinctive qualities and challenges and offer recommendations about what is needed to move them forward in a more equitable and sustainable way. Two initial historical chapters lay the framework for the regional discussions, while cross-cutting and integrated chapters analyze the state of natural and cultural heritage and current development theory provincially, offering guidance for the future.

In How to Build a Global City, Michele Acuto considers the rise of a new generation of so-called global cities—Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai—and the power that this concept had in their ascent, in order to analyze the general relationship between global city theory and its urban public policy practice. The global city is often invoked in theory and practice as an ideal model of development and a logic of internationalization for cities the world over. But the global city also creates deep social polarization and challenges how much local planning can achieve in a world economy. Presenting a unique elite ethnography in Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai, Acuto discusses the global urban discourses, aspirations, and strategies vital to the planning and management of such metropolitan growth. The global city, he shows, is not one single idea, but a complex of ways to imagine a place to be global and aspirations to make it so, often deeply steeped in politics. His resulting book is a call to reconcile proponents and critics of the global city toward a more explicit engagement with the politics of this global urban imagination.

There are now more than three hundred city-regions around the world with populations greater than one million. These city-regions are expanding vigorously, and they present many new and deep challenges to researchers and policy-makers in both the more developed and less developed parts of the world. The processes of global economic integration and accelerated urban growth make traditional planning and policy strategies in these regions increasingly inadequate, while more effective approaches remain largely in various stages of hypothesis and experimentation. 'Global City-Regions' represents a multifaceted effort to deal with the many different issues raised by these developments. It seeks at once to define the question of global city-regions and to describe the internal and external dynamics that shape them; it proposes a theorization of global city-regions based on their economic and political responses to intensifying levels of globalization; and it offers a number of policy insights into the severe social problems that confront global city-regions as they come face to face with an economically and politically neoliberal world. At a moment when globalization is increasingly subject to critical scrutiny in many different quarters, this book provides a timely overview of its effects on urban and regional development, one of its most important (but perhaps least understood) corollaries. The book also offers a series of nuanced visions of alternative possible futures.