Globalization from Below: The Ranking of Global Immigrant Cities

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to present a new database and index for urban immigrant destinations and contrast it with existing rankings of world cities. Most world city rankings privilege economic measurements, ignoring immigration as an important component of world city formation. We argue that immigration is a powerful example of 'globalization from below' and needs to be integrated into our understanding of global city dynamics. By linking global cities and immigration, this research highlights those cities that are experiencing dramatic socio-cultural changes brought about by large and often diverse streams of immigrants.With the systematic assessment of urban immigrant destinations, cities that are often ignored in the global cities literature (such as Dubai or Tel Aviv) may invite more scholarly attention. Our research also demonstrates that many global cities are largely bypassed by immigrants. Thus, the value of ranking urban immigrant destinations lies in revealing a range of urban outcomes from the hyper diversity of London to the largely bypassed nature of Tokyo. Since a systematic study of the world's urban immigrant destinations does not exist, this study begins to fill the empirical void and in the process we hope to generate new ways of conceptualizing socio-cultural change in global cities.In cities around the world, unprecedented levels of global immigration challenge us to assess how and where immigrants are influencing the political, economic, social and cultural dimensions of cities. This huge task is beyond any one scholar or research team but will best be carried out by a number of detailed urban case studies (for example see Ley and Murphy, 2001; Anisef and Lanphier, 2003;Stepick et al. , 2003; Price et al. , 2005). The goal of this research is to expand the range of criteria used to assess the 'globalness' of cities, to inspire others to include immigration in world cities research, and to call attention to cities experiencing dramatic social and demographic change due to immigration.It is impossible to understand the processes of globalization without studying cities, since they are the central locale for globalization. Urban geographers and sociologists, among others, have attempted to give meaning and coherence to the rapid and dramatic changes to cities in the past 30 years (for example, Hall, 1984;Sassen, 1991; Knox and Taylor, 1995;Clark, 1996; Short and Kim, 1999;Nijman, 2000;Robinson, 2002;Samers, 2002). There appears to be consensus that cities and the dynamics of urbanization have been changed by the intensification of global processes. The most important cities -the command and control centers for economic, political or cultural globalization -are called world cities. World cities have been defined as: major sites for the accumulation of capital; command points in the world economy; headquarters for corporations; important hubs of global transportation and communication; intensified

Competitiveness, Migration, and Mobility in the Global City: Insights from Sydney, Australia

“…One critique to the global city discourse is that a focus on business and technological dimensions of global cities is accompanied by the lack of a focus on the relationship between migration and global cities [30,41]. In effect, migration constituted an important component in the earliest global city hypothesis.…”

“…GMI considers not only foreign-born population as a whole, but also people from non-English-speaking countries and dominant ethnic group, to reflect both stock and diversity of migrants. The construction of GMI has been informed by the Urban Immigrant Index that ranks global immigrant cities [30]. The GloMo is designed specifically for this study to differentiate from previous studies.…”

“…For indicators that have both percentages and total numbers, percentages have higher weightings than total numbers. Likewise, these approaches have been informed by the measures of advanced producer services in global cities [10,12], and compositions and weightings of the Urban Immigrant Index [30]. The data are collected from the Australian Census 2011.…”

“…In 2000 and 2004, Sydney was classified as an Alpha city (very important world cities that link major economic regions and states into the world economy); in 2008, 2010 and 2012, Sydney was classified as an Alpha+ city (highly integrated cities that complement London and New York, largely filling in advanced service needs for the Pacific Asia). Informed by the GaWC's ranking of world cities by advanced producer services, an Urban Immigrant Index was created to measure world cities by immigration stock, in which Sydney was ranked as an Alpha city, following New York, Toronto, Dubai, Los Angeles, and London [30].…”

World City Network Integration in the Eurasian Realm

“…Smith and Timberlake, 2002) connecting the global economy: the most important cities also harbour the most important airports, while extensive fibre backbone networks that support the Internet have equally been deployed within and between major cities, thus creating a vast planetary infrastructure network on which the global economy has come to depend almost as much as physical transport networks. The intermeshing of the above-mentioned infrastructures with other networks such as tourism and business travel (Faulconbridge et al, 2009), international migration (Benton-Short et al, 2005), cultural and ethnicity networks (McEwan et al, 2005), global media (Krätke, 2003), etc. simultaneously mould the outcome of globalization processes through cities, and empirical WCN researches in this approach use this observation to map transnational urban networks through such infrastructures.…”