ABSTRACT
For Michael Peter Smith, global cities research has focused excessively on the construction of objectivist, structural typologies that bracket the everyday experience of life and struggle within globalizing city-regions. Smith’s critique of global cities research raises a number of key questions regarding the limitations of political-economic approaches to the study of urbanization. The debate about transnational urbanism has been one of the critical departures in the conversations with and beyond the original global city literature. The global cities literature varies in its specification of the financial, informational, and migratory flows that intersect to constitute a global city. In the Indonesian case, a complex web of social relations and conflicting discourses of “globalization” came together and were localized in confrontations in Jakarta and other Indonesian cities. Though differently inflected, a related global-national-local discourse on economic “globalization” was being played out in Seoul.
