The Global City

 Identify the attributes of a global city

 Analyze how cities serve as engines of globalization.

Reading materials:
Chapter 26 of textbook: “Mobility, Diversity and Community in the Global City” by Val Colic-
Peisker
Sassen, Saskia 2005,”The Global City: Introducing a Concept” Brown Journal of World Affairs
XI(2): 27-43

Introduction
The notion of “Global City” has a central place in understanding contemporary spatial patterns of
globalization: the ways it impacts on local life is nowhere more visible than in global city.
The GLOBAL CITY is therefore the main physical and geographic playground of the globalizing
forces: in this space of population concentration and mixing, the global flows of people, capital and
ideas are woven into the daily lived experiences of its residents.
CULTURAL DIVERSITY, a key marker of the global city and a consequence of human mobility and
migration, is usually detected on the surface as a “COSMOPOLITAN FEEL”: the global city’s ‘natives’
encountering and engaging daily with a variety of immigrants and visitors. The result is ‘cosmopolitan’
consumption, ‘cosmopolitan’ work culture. Global networking and ‘glocal’ transnational community
relations.
GLOBAL CITY represents and in many ways contains the world in a bounded space. This means
that many global problems, contradictions, hostilities and inequalities also find expression amidst the
teeming verve of the global city.
COSMOPOLITANISM is a phenomenon most readily associated with the global city: large, diverse
cities attract people, material and cultural products from all over the world.
The idea of cosmopolitanism usually invokes pleasant images of travel, exploration and ‘worldly’
pursuits enjoyed by thoe who benefited from globalization and who can, in some ways, consider
themselves ‘citizens of the world’. in the CAPITALIST context, such as cosmopolitanism often focuses
on consumption in global cities, where everyday life is significantly shaped by commercial culture,
retail and shopping (Zukin, 1998:827).