In How to Build a Global City, Michele Acuto considers the rise of a new generation of so-called global cities—Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai—and the power that this concept had in their ascent, in order to analyze the general relationship between global city theory and its urban public policy practice. The global city is often invoked in theory and practice as an ideal model of development and a logic of internationalization for cities the world over. But the global city also creates deep social polarization and challenges how much local planning can achieve in a world economy. Presenting a unique elite ethnography in Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai, Acuto discusses the global urban discourses, aspirations, and strategies vital to the planning and management of such metropolitan growth. The global city, he shows, is not one single idea, but a complex of ways to imagine a place to be global and aspirations to make it so, often deeply steeped in politics. His resulting book is a call to reconcile proponents and critics of the global city toward a more explicit engagement with the politics of this global urban imagination.

In How to Build a Global City, Michele Acuto considers the rise of a new generation of so-called global cities—Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai—and the power that this concept had in their ascent, in order to analyze the general relationship between global city theory and its urban public policy practice. The global city is often invoked in theory and practice as an ideal model of development and a logic of internationalization for cities the world over. But the global city also creates deep social polarization and challenges how much local planning can achieve in a world economy. Presenting a unique elite ethnography in Singapore, Sydney, and Dubai, Acuto discusses the global urban discourses, aspirations, and strategies vital to the planning and management of such metropolitan growth. The global city, he shows, is not one single idea, but a complex of ways to imagine a place to be global and aspirations to make it so, often deeply steeped in politics. His resulting book is a call to reconcile proponents and critics of the global city toward a more explicit engagement with the politics of this global urban imagination.

Over the last three decades, our understanding of the city worldwide has been revolutionized by three innovative theoretical concepts – globalisation, postcolonialism and a radically contested notion of modernity. The idea and even the reality of the city has been extended out of the state and nation and re-positioned in the larger global world. In this book Anthony King brings together key essays written over this period, much of it dominated by debates about the world or global city. Challenging assumptions and silences behind these debates, King provides largely ignored historical and cultural dimensions to the understanding of world city formation as well as decline. Interdisciplinary and comparative, the essays address new ways of framing contemporary themes: the imperial and colonial origin of contemporary world and global cities, actually existing postcolonialisms, claims about urban and cultural homogenisation and the role of architecture and built environment in that process. Also addressed are arguments about indigenous and exogenous perspectives, Eurocentricism, ways of framing vernacular architecture, and the global historical sociology of building types. Wide-ranging and accessible, Writing the Global City provides essential historical contexts and theoretical frameworks for understanding contemporary urban and architectural debates. Extensive bibliographies will make it essential for teaching, reference and research.

Navigating global cities -- Origins: trade and connectivity -- The history of global cities I: ancient -- The history of global cities II: modern -- Understanding global cities -- Global cities today -- The future of global cities: challenges and leadership

Global cities all over the world are taking on new roles as they increasingly participate directly and independently in international affairs and global politics. So far, surprisingly few studies have analyzed the role of the Global City beyond its already well explicated role in the globalized economy. How is it that local governments of Global Cities claim international political authority and develop what appears to be their own independent foreign and security policies despite the fact that such policy areas have traditionally been considered to be the core function of nation-states and central governments? What does it mean to be and to govern the contemporary Global City? In this book Kristin Ljungkvist claims that we can better understand why local governments find it to be in their Global City’s interest to claim international political authority by exploring how the city’s role in the globalized world is constructed and narrated locally. A core claim is that Global City-hood as a specific type of collective identity can play a constitutive part in such interest formation. Combining insights from International Relations and Urban Studies scholarship, and with the help of a case study on New York City, Ljungkvist develops a new analytical framework for studying the Global City as an international political actor. The Global City 2.0 shows that even as the Global City engages in various global issues such as global environmental governance or counterterrorism, such pursuit will be framed and rationalized in terms of the city’s economic growth. The quest for growth and global competitiveness are not necessarily the only available meanings attached to the being and governing of the contemporary Global City. However, there seems to be a remarkable persistency and attraction in economistic ideas and an economistic conception of the Global City.

Politicians and academics alike have made globalization the key reference point for interpreting the 1990s. For many, globalization threatens both community and the nation-state. It appears to represent forces beyond human control. Living the Global City documents globalization's impact on everyday lives by drawing on research rather than rhetoric and arrives at a very different perspective. Living the Global City offers an analysis of globalization and global/local processes by focussing on specific issues and themes which include community, culture, milieu, socioscapes and sociospheres, microglobalization, poverty, ethnic identity and carnival. By advancing the debates which surround these issues through a redefinition of the terms in which they have been developed and engagement with the everyday lives of people in a global city, this book reveals how such key concepts as community, culture, class, poverty and identity can be reconceptualized in the context of global/local processes.

While global cities have mostly been characterized as sites of intensive and extensive economic activity, the quest for global city status also increasingly rests on the creative production and consumption of culture and the arts. Arts, Culture and the