ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part describes the inherent contradictions of the world city as a source of conflict and struggle. In one particularly vivid passage of their classic text, J. Friedmann and G. Wolff evoke the image of the “citadel” and the “ghetto” to describe emergent patterns of sociospatial inequality in the global city. The metaphors powerfully illustrate the internal cleavages in social fabrics of the global city, which are expressed spatially in juxtaposition between the gleaming office towers of the new downtowns and the impoverished residential quarters of the increasingly internationalized urban proletariat. National and local state institutions are seen as being unable to manage the proliferating regulatory problems associated with global city formation. The resurgence of urban citizenship has been intertwined with diverse transformations of state space under contemporary conditions, which are increasingly relativizing the entrenched role of nationalized forms of economic regulation and political regulation.
