ABSTRACT
Throughout the last two decades, researchers have analyzed the emergence of a global urban network centered on a number of key cities in the global economy. Taken together, these studies are loosely united in their observation that cities such as New York and London derive their importance from a privileged position in transnational networks of capital, information, and people. There is, in other words, a widespread consensus that under conditions of contemporary globalization an important city ‘is no longer identifiable for its stable embeddedness in a given territorial milieu. It is instead a changing connective configuration with variable actors which can be thought of as “nodes” of local and global networks’ (Dematteis 2000:63).
