ancient cities

Ot h e r Gl O b a l Cities
The concept of the global city typically refers to
those cities that function as command and control
sites in coordinating transnational finance, production,
and information processes integral to the
global economy. As an object of analysis, the
global city highlights the importance of spatial
analysis and the local for the study of globalization
and destabilizes the primacy given to the
nation-state’s role in governance over global processes.
Yet, this paradigm has been criticized for
its overly economic and reductive approach to the
study of cities and the urban and its tendency to
generalize the global city as an urban form based
on advanced capitalist cities in the North. As a
result, alternative theorizing about the global city
is emerging based on “other cities” of the South
and alternative urban forms, often spaces of
exclusion and poverty, such as the camp and the
slum. This alternative approach represents a significant
contribution to the study of urban and
global politics. First, it raises questions about
whose knowledge and experiences of the city
count in defining the global city as an object of
analysis. It theorizes these other urban spaces
from the experiences of those excluded from the
processes of global capitalism and industrialization
heralded by more traditional global cities
literature. Second, it engages with these other spatial
locations, not merely as spaces of exclusion
but also as sites of engagement. In response to living
in conditions of marginalization and poverty,
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new subjectivities and new ways of engaging
emerge, including strategies for making claims to
rights to the city. Within this critical interdisciplinary
approach to other global cities and
“urban” forms, two general trends can be distinguished:
theorizing these other spaces as sites of
exclusion and as places of resistance and
cosmopolitanism.
Globalization, Urbanization,
and the Global City
The literature describes global cities as nodal
points of accumulation and organization in the
grid of globalization. Typically, global cities are
portrayed as either urban centers of advanced production
and capital accumulation in the world
economy or as a network of flows from urban
spaces based on linkages between advanced services,
production, and markets. Seminal in developing
the concept, Saskia Sassen’s work depicted
the global city as a command and control center in
the global capitalist economy. It was a place where
financial capital and a transnational class of skilled
professionals concentrated together with a large
pool of immigrant (often female) low-wage labor,
engaged in the informal, service and care economies.
Consequently, Sassen saw global cities as
places where identity became “unmoored” from
territory, with new transnational forms of politics
emerging as a result. Global cities thus initially
represented a reconfiguration of the dominant collective
geographical and political imagination such
that it was no longer possible to discuss “first” and