Dr. Marina
Urban Sociology
Globalization and Urban Change
Notes: Chicago South side
Notes: Modernity and Post-modernity
Next Week's Readings:
Zukin, Whose Culture? Whose City?
Gottdiener, Looking at Themed Environments
Florida, Cities and the Creative Class
Anderson, A Place in the Corner
This weeks Readings:
John Friedman, The World City Hypothesis
Saskia Sassen, The Urban Impact of Economic Globalization
Smith, Power in Place: Retheorizing the Local and the Global
Anderson, A Place in the Corner
Notes from John Friedman, The World City Hypothesis
Seven assertions from Friedmann’s world city hypothesis.
(1) Structural changes in cities will find themselves related to “the form and extent of the city’s
integration with the world economy.” Within this factor the influence of “endogenous conditions” such
as national policy toward immigration, policies such as South Africa’s Apartheid, and referencing
Anthony King, “the spatial patterns of historical accumulation.” The historical background of cities
impact subsequent developments significantly.
(2) Certain cities function in part as tools of “global capital” that use such urban areas as “basing
points” in the spatial organization and articulation of production and markets.” Linkages created by
such conditions arrange cities into a “complex spatial hierarchy.”
(3) The functions of “world cities” manifest themselves in the “structure and dynamics of their
production sectors and employment.” The concentration of corporate headquarters, international
finance, global transport/communications, and high level business services contribute to economic
growth for both upper level workers and low wage laborers (consumer services, support staff for upper
level white collar workers in the aforementioned industries) but also operate ideologically as
metropolises like New York, Los Angeles and Paris “are centers for the production and dissemination
of information, news, entertainment and other cultural artifacts.” (see text page 226).
Additionally, as such areas draw increasing immigration, the informal economy expands since its
formal counterpart can not absorb them. This point relates another aspect of world cities, their role as a
point of destination for migrants and immigrants.
(Note: Friedmann’s final hypotheses focus more directly on transnational economic flows and their
subsequent effects on urban populations and spatialization.)
(4) Global cities provide a location for he “concentration and accumulation of international capital.”
While some nations and cities drew benefits from this development, others developed increasing
amounts of international debt which ultimately damaged their positions.
(5) World cities are points of destination for large numbers of both domestic and international capital.
This includes international and interregional migrants. Cities increasingly attempt to curtail
immigration with legislative control.
(6) For all their economic growth, world cities illustrate the contradictions of industrial capitalism, the
most notable being “spatial and class polarization.” The demise of unionized employment and its
replacement with non unionized personal/consumer services (domestics, boutiques, restaurants,
entertainment) and low wage manufacturing (electronics, garments, prepared foods) further polarizes
income and space as these burgeoning areas juxtapose with financial/business services. Under such
pressures, middle income earners appear to be a shrinking demographic. (see page 228)
(7) The costs of world city status often outweighs the “fiscal capacity of the state” which results in
continuing “fiscal and social crisis” that bedevil municipal governments. The economic infrastructure
desired by transnational capital and social reproduction supported by elites serve as dominant forces
in state policy/actions. Thus, “the burden of capitalist accumulation is systematically shifted to the
politically weakest, most disorganized sectors of the population.” Police repression in the name of both
corporate and state interests further marginalize poorer residents.
Power in Place: Retheorizing the Local and the Global

The Confines of the Local in Urban Structuralism

The Limits of the Postmodern Turn to the Local

Rethinking the Ethnographic Turn

Transnational Networks and the Localization of Power/Knowledge

Reimagining the Politics of Everyday Life

Transnationalism and the Politics of Place-making

Bringing the Social Back In
--Less deterministic approach to understanding globalization and the city
--The local is the site where global processes are experienced and lived in varied, unpredictable ways
The Confines of the Local in Urban Structuralism
Explain how concepts like the “local,” “community” and “urban” have been represented in classical
and past urban sociological studies (242)?
In more contemporary urban studies, how has the term urban been replaced with the global and
globalization (242)?
Explain Smith's problem with the following quote (243):
Global command over resources to reorganize time and space is opposed to the
disorientation of defensive “local” social movements representing the interests of home,
community, place, region, and even nation. The latter are represented as static forms of
social organization, efforts to organize social life around “being” rather than “becoming.”
Defensive place-based movements are represented as cultural totalities expressing entirely
place-bound identities in a world in which the dynamic flows of globalization exist entirely
outside their purview.
Explain the concept “postmodern politics.”
Explain the following quote on the structuralist dialectic of domination and resistance: “Global
domination produces local resistance.” This local resistance is separated into two types: project
identities and resistant identities. What does this mean? Does the author agree with this type of
thinking( 244)?
The Limits of the Postmodern Turn to the Local
Proponents of the postmodern turn to the “the local” privileges ethnography as the only reliable route to
personal knowledge (the only reliable measure of the “partial truths” about the workings of the
world). Ethnography relied on thick “description”
to fix, construct, and hence master colonized objects by vividly detailing the habits,
customs, speech acts, and bodily practices of conquered peoples to “know,” and hence implicitly
control, the colonial subject. Ironically,
the postmodern
cultural turn in urban ethnography in which the “thick description” of ethnographic
narrative is relied upon to romanticize “the postcolonial subject” as embodied in the
everyday practices of such socially constructed "communities." Explain the problems Smith has with
this type of theorizing (244-245)?
Rethinking the Ethnographic Turn
Explain Smith's version of the social constructionist urban analysis that seeks to remedy global
determinism and ethnographic romanticization of local places (245). How does he use ethnographic
work on transnationalism as an example?
Transnational Networks and the Localization of Power/Knowledge
According to Smith, how should the term “urban” be re-conceptualized (246)? How might cities be
conceptualized (246)?
Reimagining the Politics of Everyday Life
The author states that the “everyday” needs to be freed from its association with purely local
phenomenon. They use the example of British Muslims. Explain
Transnationalism and the Politics of Place-making
What does “time-space” compression mean (247)?
Explain the following quote:
Viewing locality (like ethnicity and nationality) as a complex, contingent, and
contested outcome of political and historical processes, rather than as a timeless essence
also challenges the theoretical framing of “locality” as an inexorable space of resistance to
globalization. Instead of opposing autonomous local cultures, be they tribes, militias,
urban formations, or regions to the economic
domination of global capital, the homogenizing movement of cultural globalization, or the
hegemonizing seductions of global consumerism, we must pay close attention to the ways
in which dominant global cultural forms may be appropriated and used or even
significantly transformed “in the midst of the field of power relations that links localities to
a wider world.
Bringing the Social Back In
Explain how Smith summarizes his central points and offers recommendations for understanding urban
theory and research.