“Can the straw man speak? An engagement with postcolonial critiques of ‘global cities research’”

This chapter discusses the most direct and coherent response to poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques as leveled in particular by Jennifer Robinson, Ananya Roy, and others. An unfortunate one-sided representation of the ‘global cities research’ (GCR) literature is prevalent in many postcolonial and ‘ordinary city’ writings on globalized urbanization. Jennifer Robinson’s postcolonial critique of GCR has clearly been a catalyst for a part of the field to distance itself from GCR. Ironically, reducing GCR to global city rankings or league tables – besides often resting on a misrepresentation of that exercise – is to take one particular line of research to stand for the whole. Moreover, the urban-economic geographies under scrutiny stretch well beyond the global city shortlists as they explicitly probe the contours of the world city network by studying world-city formation beyond the ‘old core’.