ABSTRACT
The “global city” is not an object consisting of key properties that can be identified and measured outside the process of meaning making. It is a historical construct forged by an endless interplay of distinctly situated networks, social practices, and power relations. Viewed from this perspective, all cities, not merely a handful of producer service centers become germane to the comparative analysis of the global-local interplay, namely, the localization of global economic, political, and cultural flows; the globalization of local socioeconomic, political, and cultural flows; and the practices of networks of social action connecting these flows and forces in transnational social space. Transnational urbanism is rooted in four key elements: (1) the agency of transnational social economic, and political networks; (2) the emergence of “translocalities”; (3) the continuing significance of the nation-state in the social construction of transnational social relations; and (4) the need for comparative urban analysis of transnational networks within, between, and across the “local” sites that heretofore have been the domains of urban research.
