ABSTRACT
This book is a reflection on the theme of urban globalization in which we bring together a collection of essays on cities that are not usually part of conversations about globalization or global cities (see Map I.1). This will at first appear to be a counterintuitive approach. The literature on global cit-ies has tended to focus on the global economy’s seemingly dominant nodes: New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, and more recently, Shanghai and Mumbai. Hardly any of the cities examined in this volume approach the physical scope, demographic size or economic power of these world metropo-lises. In some cases, the volume’s contributors write about urban areas caught up in trajectories radically different from that of globalization’s winners: cit-ies and urban regions, in Brent Ryan’s words (in Chapter 5), that inexorably spiral toward a condition of “de-globalization.” Our unconventional choice of case studies, however, is directly connected to our argument in this book: “secondary,” less well-examined cities bring better to light global processes that have been marginalized or neglected in the literature on global cities. Such processes include the emergence of alternative and new cartographies of globalization (Dawson and Edwards 2004: 2); the role of local, regional, and “deep” (economic, colonial, national) histories in shaping contemporary urban globalization; and the multifarious, complex role of cultural and sym-bolic structures in urban experience and the construction of global urban circuits. By focusing on this diverse set of “secondary” cities that are also “global” in different ways, we hope to chart a few new pathways or sideways through the somewhat familiar terrain of the global city scholarship.
