Other Global 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, 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.