Global City Challenges Debating a Concept, Improving the Practice

Global city-thinking has, in the past years, had a very real pull on society. Global cities seem an unavoidable fact of everyday world affairs. This volume gathers a forum that integrates the extensive set of disciplinary dimensions to which the interdisciplinary concept of the global city can help to tackle the policy challenges of today's metropolises. Its chapters are drawn from viewpoints including the cultural, economic, historical, postcolonial, virtual, architectural, literary, security and political dimensions of global cities. Tasked with providing a rejoinder to the global city scholarship from each of these perspectives, the authors illustrate what twin analytical and practical challenges emerge from juxtaposing these stances to the concept of the 'global city'. They rely not solely on theory but also on sample case studies either drawn from long-lived global cities such as New York, Shanghai and London, or emerging metropolises like Dubai, Cape Town and Sydney.

Michele Acuto is Stephen Barter Fellow of the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities in the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS) at the University of Oxford, UK, and Fellow of the Center on Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California, USA.

Wendy Steele is Australian Research Council Fellow of the Urban Research Program (URP) at Griffith University, Australia, and a member of the editorial board of Urban Policy and Research.

Introduction; Michele Acuto and Wendy Steele
2. The Global City Tradition; Christof Parnreiter
3. The Network Dimension; Ben Derudder, Michael Hoyler and Peter J. Taylor
4. The Economic and Financial Dimensions; David Bassens
5. The Historical Dimension; Peter Rimmer and Howard Dick
6. The Postcolonial Dimension; Vanessa Watson
7. The Literary Dimension; Sheila Hones
8. The Virtual Dimension; Mark Graham
9. The Cultural Dimension; Oli Mould
10. The Architectural Dimension; Kerwin Datu
11. The Geopolitical Dimension; Michele Acuto
12. The Security Dimension; David Murakami-Wood
13. Global City Challenges: A view from the field; Glen Searle
Conclusions; Michele Acuto and Wendy Steele
Afterword; Roger Keil