ABSTRACT
Anthony King’s (1995) work on the world city, its meaning and representation in an era of globalization and post-colonialism, has not only expanded the geography of world cities but the possibilities of bringing cities on the periphery closer to cities in the core. Subsequently, Jane Jacobs (1996) has unsettled the traditional Third world/First world divisions, especially as she has demonstrated the existence of the third world city within the first, and revealed a ‘Fourth world’ that suggests new geographic divisions. Other scholars have used these frameworks in studying cities in relation to the global economy, placing them in a hierarchical order, with some at the centre of decision-making and others at the periphery. These approaches, including some writing focused on Middle Eastern cities (Hubreychts, 2002; ElSheshtawy, 2004), have juxtaposed once obscure non-Western cities with Western cities, and attempted to render existing binaries irrelevant. However, more generally, world city and global city perspectives have kept a lot more cities ‘off the map’ (Robinson, 2002), particularly a majority of cities in the Middle East.
