Global Cities in Theory and Practice

What does it mean to be a “global city”? What is the state of the art in understanding this term in urban studies? How do contemporary metropolises become “global cities”? Is there a recipe for ‘making’ growing urban centres into the strategic hinges of globalization? Focusing on the evolution of global city research and on the pathways to global city formation, this project, developed by the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS) in collaboration with the Urban Research Program (URP) at Griffith University, Australia, and led by Michele Acuto, seeks to unpack and analyze the evolution and governance of contemporary global cities. This project was funded by support from the Centre for Studies in Property Valuation and Management Trust with matched funding from Oxford Martin School, and previous fieldwork support from the Australian National University’s Vice Chancellor and the International Alliance of Research Universities(IARU).

Theoretical background

What does it mean to be and become a ‘global city’? Several scholars have to date investigated the nature of popular metropolises like New York, London or Tokyo, presenting the academic public with accounts of the socio-economic characteristics of these easily recognizable cities. However, what remains relatively overlooked in both research and practices the process of becoming: if the ‘global city’ is a common object of discussion, empirical application, and even fascination in the contemporary scholarship, less so can be argued for the dynamics and nature of the process that leadsto the emergence of global cities. Likewise, academic research on global cities has to date offered little self-reflexive analysis of the growing popularity and expanding interdisciplinarity of this term.

To redress these limits, the project consists of two parts. Part 1 is focused on unpacking the processes of becoming and governing emerging “global cities.” It involves fieldwork activities in Sydney and Dubai, and comparative analysis between these cities and the case of London. Part 2 is focused on collaborative and interdisciplinary initiative carried out jointly with Dr Wendy Steele at URP, Griffith University, stimulating a debate on what it means to study “global cities” and leading to a primer on the state of the art of the scholarship on these metropolises for Palgrave Macmillan.

Part 1: Building Global Cities

Building Global Citiesinvestigates the connections between global city theory and urbanist practice. The project is the result of four years of research based at the Australian National University and at the University of Oxford, with fieldwork conducted in Dubai, Sydney and London. Comparing these cities, and analyzing the relation between “global city” theory and its urban public policy practice, this part of the project seeks to unpack the political strategies beyond these cities’ ascent to ‘global’ status. In doing so, the study is pinpointed on a double disciplinary target: while drawing on the global city literature, and conversely speaking to that growing college of urban studies researchers that work on this theme, the project also reaches out to political science audience, to introduce the global city theme in the analysis of transnational processes while contemporaneously connecting it to some of this discipline’s main problem fields. As such, the project has a twin purpose: one the one hand, for the urbanist readership, test the scholarly development of ‘global city research’ against the practice on the ground; on the other hand, for a broader and non-initiated audience, open the global city discourse to multidisciplinary research and a reflexive practice.

Part 2: Global City Challenges

Global City Challenges is a collection geared towards providing a practice-oriented review of the global city scholarship that is critical, case-based and inherently multidisciplinary. The book gathers a forum that integrates the extensive set of disciplinary dimensions to which the concept of “global city” can speak to promote cross-disciplinarity when it comes to tackling the policy challenges of today’s metropolises. The 16 contributions are representative of a multitude of specific viewpoints that include the cultural, economic, historical, postcolonial, virtual, architectural, literary, security and geopolitical dimensions of global cities. Tasked with providing a rejoinder to the global city scholarship from each of these perspectives, the contributors illustrate what twin analytical and practical challenges emerge from juxtaposing these stances to the concept of the “global city”. The authors rely not solely on theory but also on a sample case study either drawn from long-lived global cities such as New York, Shanghai and London, or emerging metropolises like Dubai, Cape Town and Sydney.

Contributors: Prof David Bassens (Free University of Brussels); Dr Ben Derudder (University of Ghent); Mr Kerwin Datu (London School of Economics); Dr Howard Dick (University of Melbourne); Dr Mark Graham (University of Oxford); Dr Sheila Hones (University of Tokyo); Dr Michael Hoyler (Loughborough University); Dr Oli Mould (Royal Holloway); Prof David Murakami-Wood (Queens University); Dr Christof Parnreiter (University of Hamburg); Prof Peter Rimmer  (Australian National University); Prof Glen Searle (University of Queensland); Dr Wendy Steele, (Griffith University); Prof Peter J. Taylor (Northumbria University); Prof Vanessa Watson (University of Cape Town).

Project organizer and partners

The project is carried out both individually by the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities in its “Building Global Cities” component, and collaboratively with the Urban Research Programme at Griffith University, Australia, in its “Global City Challenges” component.

Project coordinator: Dr Michele Acuto is Stephen Barter Fellow in the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities and holds a CPD Fellowship in the Center on Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.

Co-Editor, “Global City Challenges”: Dr Wendy Steele is an Australian Research Council (DECRA) Fellow and Senior Research Fellow in the Urban Research Program at Griffith University, Australia.

Publications

Acuto, M. and Steele, W., eds (forthcoming October 2013) Global City Challenges. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Acuto, M. (2012) “Ain’t about politics? The wicked power-geometry of Sydney’s greening governance” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36 (2), 381-399

Acuto, M. (2012) “Sydney: a greening global city” in Ben Derudder et al. (eds) International Handbook of Globalization and World Cities Cheltenham: E. Elgar, 538-550.

Acuto, M. (2011) “Finding the Global City” Urban Studies 48 (14), 2953-2973.

Acuto, M. (2011) Baking the global city: an Emirati recipe for global significance. In: F. Zanni (ed.). Urban Hybridizations. Milan: Maggioli and Milan Polytechnic Press, 10-19.

Acuto, M. (2010) “High-rise Dubai: urban entrepreneurialism and the art of symbolic power.” Cities 27 (4), 272-284.