ABSTRACT
As the material anchors of globalization, North America’s global port cities channel flows of commodities, capital, and tourists. This book explores how economic globalization processes have shaped these cities' political institutions, social structures, and urban identities since the mid-1970s. Although the impacts of financialization on global cities have been widely discussed, it is curious that how the global integration of commodity chains actually happens spatially — creating a quantitatively new, global organization of production, distribution, and consumption processes — remains understudied. The book uses New York City, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Montreal as case studies of how once-redundant spaces have been reorganized, and crucially, reinterpreted, so as to accommodate new flows of goods and people — and how, in these processes, social, environmental, and security costs of global production networks have been shifted to the public.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|47 pages
Introduction
chapter |17 pages
Globalization's Hidden Anchors
chapter chapter 2|28 pages
Blind Spots of Globalization
part II|79 pages
Discourses of Urban Progress
chapter chapter 3|22 pages
The Logistics Revolution and the End of Fordism
chapter chapter 4|23 pages
The Redundancy of Fordist Infrastructures
chapter chapter 5|32 pages
Imagining a Postindustrial Future
part III|81 pages
Frictionless Supply Chains
chapter |27 pages
How Social and Ecological Costs Have Been Externalized
chapter chapter 8|27 pages
Secure Flows, Optimized Networks
part IV|30 pages
Conclusions