ABSTRACT
Cities located “off the map”—that is, in the developing countries of the global South—are almost invariably said to be lacking the characteristics that would qualify them as genuinely “global” cities. There are a large number of cities around the world which do not register on intellectual maps that chart the rise and fall of global and world cities. This chapter explores the extent to which more recent global and world city approaches, although enthusiastic about tracking transnational processes, have nonetheless reproduced this long-standing division within urban studies. In considering the dynamics of the world economy in relation to cities, a structural analysis of a small range of economic processes with a certain “global” reach has tended to crowd out an attentiveness within urban studies to the place and effect of individual cities and the diversity of wider connections which shape them. A diverse range of links with places around the world are a persistent feature of cities.
