ABSTRACT

This chapter describes how globalization and information technology are changing relationships among cities and reconfiguring the physical arrangement of activities within metropolitan space. Economic globalization and telecommunications have contributed to produce a spatiality for the urban that pivots on cross-border networks and territorial locations with massive concentrations of resources. The chapter argues that economic inequality is sharply increasing particularly in the global cities at the center of the world economy. Highly developed telecommunications infrastructure in global cities facilitates transmission of information in staggering quantities at lightning speed. Urban regions are also changing as a result of globalization and information technology. Stock markets worldwide have become globally integrated. Central business district (CBD) in major international business centers is one that profoundly reconfigured by technological and economic change. The center can extend into a metropolitan area in the form of a grid of nodes of intense business activity.