ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some of the methodological foundations and major lines of investigation within research on globalizing cities, while also alluding to several emergent debates and agendas that are currently animating the field, with specific reference to the conceptualization and investigation of global interurban networks. Much global cities research in the 1980s and 1990s focused on major cities and city-regions in the global North. Research on global cities tends to affirm the policies of municipal boosters concerned to acquire distinction for their cities on the world stage. Critical urban researchers have devoted intense energies to precisely the question: on the one hand, by analyzing emergent forms of globalized urbanization and their impacts upon social, political and economic dynamics within and beyond major cities. Outside of the global core zones of capitalism, new forms of industrialization were emerging in key manufacturing regions within late developing states, for instance in Mexico, Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan and India.
