ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates the continuous linkages between economic and spatial strategies in Dubai, as alluded on Globalization and the City. Beginning in the 1980's, the internationalization of finance and the intensification of transnational flows of goods and services as a result of technological innovation in transportation and communications were identified as processes of "globalization". Techno-centric research believed that innovations in technology would allow people to work from anywhere in the world, and thus render unnecessary our need to live in cities. Thus, with globalization, the intensification of infrastructural systems magnifies the strategic importance of cities in a dialectical relationship. Urban renaissance brought investment back to downtown areas, while at the same time, a metropolitan landscape had been firmly established which gave "city-regions" poli-nucleated mosaic settlement patterns that blurred distinctions between the urban and the rural.
