1Cities in a Global Age: Critical Areas of Theory and Research1

In this paper, I propose to set out some thoughts about theory and research on global urbanism. I use this term for convenience’s sake, because no single concept sufficiently describes how our understanding of cities and space is actually being shaped by a turn in world events that began more than a generation ago, when new technologies in communication and transport were becoming available that would allow for the first-ever coordination of a global system production and markets in something approximating real time. By the late 1970s, corporate capital in the capitalist West was in a serious crisis of accumulation that led not only to the search for lower-cost production sites “off-shore” but also to an extraordinary concentration of capital, as smaller corporations were bought out and merged with dinosaur-sized conglomerates. The visible results were both, a shift of many production facilities abroad and de-industrialization at home. Thus was born the idea of a post-industrial economy, the first signs of which were already on the horizon in the mid-1960s (Bell1973). In practice, it meant a shift out of manufacturing to high-level services. On the political front, the state was put under considerable pressure to reduce its social expenditures (housing, welfare) and shift many of its traditional responsibilities to the corporate sector, local governments, and the burgeoning voluntary sector of civil society. On the ideological front, the old Keynesianism, which had assigned a major interventionist role to the national state during the post-war era, was declared “dead ” and replaced by supply-side economics, macro-financial management, and the global push towards free trade. Invoking neo-liberal dogma, much of which had been coined in Britain and the United States, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization became the spearheads for the globalization of capital, opening new markets overseas, obliging national governments around the world to reduce subsidie