Exploring Critical Approaches to Global Cities Studies: A Review Essay by Ruei-Suei Sun, Assignments of Dynamics

Download Exploring Critical Approaches to Global Cities Studies: A Review Essay by Ruei-Suei Sun and more Assignments Dynamics in PDF only on Docsity! Critical Planning Summer 2001108 REVIEW ESSAY Exploring Critical Approaches to Global Cities Studies Ruei-Suei Sun Contemporary globalization, specifically the recent three decades, and the related discussion and debate on the formation of global society occupy the center of sociological research and urban studies today. The city is where the impacts of economic, social, political and cultural forces have been most keenly felt, thereby becom- ing the polemical and political space to be further reexamined and retheorized in the global age. In contrast to studies celebrating the success of market-driven globalization, critical approaches that reexamine the dynamics and restructuring of global capitalism, theorizing the formation of global cities and reasserting the impor- tance of local politics, provide us with a fresh look at the complicated consequences of contemporary global- ization. New critical efforts on global cities scholarship have been made, although many of them are still not widely referenced. I introduce two of them here: a collection edited by John Eade, Living the Global City: Globalization as a Local Process (1996), and a book edited by Ayse Öncü and Petra Weyland, Space, Culture and Power : New Identities in Globalizing Cities (1997). An Overview of the Literature Early work in this area focused on world cities (Hall 1984; Friedmann and Wolff 1982; Friedmann 1986; King 1990; Knox and Taylor 1995). This approach inherited its theoretical legacy from world system and modern- ization theory, influenced in large part by the works of Immanuel Wallerstein (1976, 1980, 1989, 1999). The city was seen as a production site for grounding and linking the world economy and the international division of labor, a process starting in the 1960s. The early research focus sought to identify the characteristic symbols of world cities and to show the uneven development within or among cities, while later work in this area described systems or networks of cities and the hierarchical relationships among them. Works in the related field of global cities studies include Sassen (1991, 1994, 1998), Castells (1989, 1996), and Abu-Lughod (1999). Sassen (1991) is the most influential work in this group. By examining the flow of fi- nancial capital and its impact on the formation of a hegemonic class in New York, London and Tokyo, her work explored deeper political manifestations by addressing the concepts of “centrality of space” and “geom- etry of power.” Critical Planning Summer 2001 109 A third division of the literature, global city-region studies, is mainly led by scholars who based their researches on city-regions in southern California (Scott 2001; Soja 2000). By adding concepts such as “new regionalism,” as well as borrowing from differ- ent disciplines such as geography and sociology, this approach takes a broader perspective to tackle the complexity and heterogeneity that globalization has brought to contemporary cities. City-regions are seen as active motors, instead of passive containers, in leading local redevelopment, simultaneously demon- strating the interactive dynamics of global/local pro- cesses and providing the potential for new coalition- based politics at the local level. Research based on the world city hypothesis pro- vided many important empirical cases that can now be used to understand the formation of the global economy. Despite the attention it pays to the un- evenness of capital accumulation within and among cities, the world city hypothesis has an unquestioned focus on the developed world, and the capitalist world order that supports it. A similar bias can also be found in modernization theory, in that it tends to justify the development of capitalism and therefore views the expansion of western values as an essential process. This monolithic image of the world tends to make footloose capital and de-territorialized na- tion-states the only visible actors on the world stage, concealing other agents from view. While sharing a similar bias, Sassen’s theorizing on the global city makes a significant contribution to later empirical studies. Relabeled “globalizing cities,” this framework has been modified by reinterpreting globalization as a continuing process instead of an established or static stage of development, and by paying closer attention to accelerating social inequality and spatial mismatch associated with the interplay of race and class (Marcuse and van Kempen 2000). There are other critiques of Sassen’s work. With an overemphasis on the questions of centrality and of footloose capital, Sassen’s framework tends to en- courage a view of the labor force playing a passive role in globalization and of cities as containers in- stead of active agents. Furthermore, because it inher- its the old binary framework of capital and labor, Sassen’s work does not address how other political regimes or local groups might play roles in reshaping global/local dynamics. Introducing the Social-Cultural Approach Taking a cue from the work of Saskia Sassen yet avoiding its limitations, the works collected by John Eade in Living the Global City successfully articulate the local with the global. The volume engages itself in the debate by prioritizing everyday life and experi- ences of ordinary people as the main subjects for theorization. In contrast to the business-focused rhetoric of world city theory, these case studies (based on the city of London) refresh our understanding of the old world center. The majority of the works consider the experiences of different social and cultural groups and how they actively participate in the process of globalization and strategically formulate new locali- ties in response to global changes (see, for example, Alleyne-Dettmers’s piece on the Notting Hill Carni- val). The book maps out the new “geometry of