ABSTRACT
Much of the research on global cities has given analytic primacy to the socio-economic factors that have engendered urban spatial arrangements, the hierarchy of world cities, and the changing forms of interaction between the structural features of the global, the national and the local. Cities are also, of course, privileged sites for a global cosmopolitan culture and conduits for a range of powerful forces, not just financial. The global city is a more complex organism than cities in previous eras, more interconnected with other cities and more nebulous. It now demands a range of theoretical perspectives. Amin and Thrift’s description of cities as ‘relay stations in a world of flows’ (Amin and Thrift 2002: 51) is now as important for an understanding of the global city as Friedmann’s earlier description of cities as ‘basing points for global operations’ (1986). Michael Peter Smith has encapsulated the problematic of the global city when he states that:
there is no solid object known as the global city appropriate for grounding urban research, only an endless interplay of differently articulated transnational networks and practices best deciphered by studying the agency of the local, regional, national, and transnational actors that shape and sustain these transnational networks and their attendant practices and outcomes.
