World Cities Are Just “Basing Points for Capital”: Interacting with the World City from the Global South

Abstract

There has been a substantial and continuous critique of the world city concept for several years now. One of the main thrusts this critique is taking is that the world city literature is insensitive to urbanisation processes in the global south and builds its theoretical advances on the empirical examples and perspectives of the global north. This paper traces the origins of world city research before examining the more recent critique of this extensive literature on world cities. The main argument is that the concept of the world city as developed by many prominent writers on the topic is not a recent resurgence of modernisation theory in urban studies, as implicitly submitted by its critics. Instead, it is not only conceptually relevant in the context of third world urbanisation, but provides ample room for critical evaluations of urban development in Africa and the global south more generally.

Advanced Producer Service Firms as Strategic Networks, Global Cities as Strategic Places

“…Bangkok and Johannesburg are the exceptions to Parnreiter's () argument in our analyses (Table and Figure ). In the case of the latter, we use Surborg's (, 325) study that employs positionality as his “point of departure” and treats “cities in the third world for what they are: places occupying a very specific position in the world economy, each one of them a unique place” (Surborg, , 326).…”

“…Drawing on Rogerson (), Surborg () provides hints at what is unique about Johannesburg that may have enabled it to be more strategic than expected in a world of “uneven connections.” Put simply, in the postapartheid era, “Johannesburg's experience was different from most other major cities in southern Africa because South Africa's liberalisation of its economy was largely a result of domestic policy, while that of other countries … was usually the result of externally enforced structural adjustment policies” (Surborg , 324). Beyond his African comparisons, we can note that this posited relative autonomy can be also contrasted with Mexico City “trapped,” as it were, in the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).…”

Relational Cities: Doha, Panama City, and Dubai as 21stCentury EntrepÔts

“…The global cities literatures have made great advances in understanding which cities are global, but have yet to fully address how various groupings of cities can be meaningfully understood through their function within the global economy (Parnell and Robinson, 2012;Surborg, 2011Surborg, , 2012.…”

“…The complexity of contemporary capitalism, and the rise of transnational flows that alternately reflect, reinforce, and disrupt RELATIONAL CITIES: 21 ST CENTURY ENTREPÔTS 617 multi-scalar hierarchies (Parnell and Robinson, 2012;Scott, 2011;Surborg, 2011Surborg, , 2012, requires new concepts. At its core, the concept that I wish to introduce incorporates the intermediary functions of entrepôts and gateway cities but with an inherently globalized orientation and adapted to new mediums of connectivity.…”

The Ordinary City Trap

“…For example, Tokyo and New York-Newark are the original global cities and megacities, and have been discussed at length in terms of how their poverty [eg, Sassen's (1991) social polarization thesis; Friedmann's (1986) class polarization thesis] is a product of a particular model of wealth creation which predominantly and disproportionately rewards only a minority of citizens to the detriment of others both within those cities and beyond them. However, whilst this paper is a critique of a critique, it is not intended as a defence (cf Parnreiter, 2010;Surborg, 2011) of the neo-Marxist world city and global city concepts. (13) I am not seeking to promote the world city and global city concepts, I think these literatures are flawed, just not for the reasons that postcolonial and ordinary cities advocates suppose.…”