The making of global cities : A symposium and research agenda

Dublin Core

Increasingly, mega cities located in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have become the focus of policy makers and scholarly research. These regions are the locations of the bulk of the world’s largest cities; now house the majority of urban residents worldwide; are experiencing historically unprecedented scales and rates of urbanization; and often do not fit within conventional models of the modern capitalist city. Rapid urbanization is a consequence of rural deprivation, industrialization, shifting cultural norms, increased ease of mobility and communication, shifting development discourses, and globalized flows of commodities, investment capital and labor. The largest such cities are often referred to as ‘mega’ cities—a term that has come to also connote mega challenges, of the sort which cities in the global North have overcome (congestion, shanty towns, pollution, poverty and the informal economy), or so it is often presented. While ‘mega’ has taken on negative connotations, it has become desirable to become a ‘world’ or ‘global’ city, joining the ranks of such places as Tokyo, New York or London.

Such dreams and ambitions have long existed, lying behind continual attempts by states to clean up and modernize their cities, but have taken new forms during the past two decades of neoliberal globalization. Opinion makers and supra-national institutions in the global North have been promoting a neoliberal model of global urbanism, specifying a set of governance, planning and policy prescriptions that are supposed to guarantee that all cities will modernize and all urban residents can eventually prosper, including those in the South. For example, the recently, the World Bank has taken up the challenge of modernizing mega cities in the global South. It has rescaled its development strategies (e.g., structural adjustment, poverty reduction, good governance, fiscal prudence, stakeholder participation) downward from the national to the metropolitan scale, seeking to turn mega-cities into global cities through market-led urban development policies that are circulating as best-practice models across the globe, thereby informing and influencing visions and practices of urban transformation and urban life.
  

The social, political, and ecological consequences and limits of such models and practices necessitate careful examination, however. Dependency theorists and post-colonial scholars alike have criticized this univalent vision of development for its dismissal of local alternatives and its representation of the global South as backward. In this alternative view, solutions for the evident problems of ‘mega’-cities should not simply be conceived in terms of more first-world development models and strategies. Indeed, these first-world models and strategies have hardly been a panacea for the many problems that mega-cities in the global South exhibit.

This symposium takes up these concerns by addressing the following questions:

    * What is the genealogy of urban models of global capitalism? How have global North perspectives on development, politics and society shaped urban development models, conceptions of poverty, civil society, urban living, and legitimate livelihood strategies in the global South?
    * What processes, constellations of actors, practices, and institutions have facilitated the accelerated flow and rapid transfer of global North models of urban transformation and living across cities in the global South?
    * What are the social, political, and environmental consequences and limits of such models? In terms of social consequences, this involves, for example, examining the types of urban displacement that are emerging within global South metropolises. It involves asking why some social and ethnic groups are gaining greater access to ‘world-city’ services such as 24/7 clean water and electricity, safe housing, and secure livelihoods, while others are not.
    * What alternative imaginaries, theories, and practices are already present within or emerging from global South metropolises, and what is their potential for more just and sustainable cities and urban living? Exploring this question will involve examining contestations and local experimentations with alternative development models and practices, particularly those led by civil society organizations, as well as the visions and practices of marginal populations in cities of the global South.