Global Cities

While globalization has in certain respects “flattened” the world, there is simultaneously a distinct geographic logic to what Manuel Castells refers to as the “space of flows” that defines our current age. Specifically, by serving as central nodes in the worldwide circulation of everything from capital, goods, people, and viruses to ideas, cultural products, and aesthetic preferences, urban areas—and especially those often labeled as “global cities”—are constitutive of modern life. Accordingly, city spaces provide an ideal vantage point from which to contemplate diverse global processes.

Accordingly, this course will focus on cities as globally embedded units and agents. While this will naturally entail paying particular attention to “superstar cities”—such as New York, London, Shanghai, Dubai, and São Paulo—we will also explore how smaller urban areas, including in the Global South, simultaneously participate in globalizing processes and are subjected to globalizing forces. Additionally, we will drill deeper by analyzing how micro-level spaces within cities—including neighborhoods, and even particular streets and buildings—are implicated in, and generative of, these same global flows.

Throughout, we will highlight the dialectical nature of (global) cities and the imaginaries that exist about them, as places defined by both egalitarianism and stratification, freedom and danger, cosmopolitanism and localism, sustainability and ecocide, and utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares. Our broader aims, then, are to understand how the mutual imbrication of the local and the global within cities generates tendencies that simultaneously flatten space while also accentuating disparate socio-spatial dynamics and inequalities. And, second, to consider how cities are on the frontlines of many of the most pressing problems facing humanity, as well as efforts to address them.