Diversely Global Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 4

Goetz wolff's “world cities” (1992), the theoretical frame of wallerstein's world-
system theory was applied to urban post-fordist society. New forms of capitalism,
held up by a new international division of labor and the fast-developing financing
of the global economy, were seen as shaping the very social, physical, and politi-
cal contours of the city, and the city itself was the motor of this emerging system.
in the 1980s, urban studies returned to the forefront of the academic and
political agenda, attempting to reposition the city as a main actor, to be studied
in its own right. however, the excessive reliance on economic and functionalist
frameworks easily ended up obliterating the city even as it was bespoken. This
was perhaps most clearly the case in the work of manuel Castells, considered one
of the most important (neo-marxist) theorists of globalization. Despite Castell's
focus on network societies, his (early) works were representative of sociological
traditions that, inspired by Durkheim and various strands of marxism, consis-
tently denied any specificity to the urban question, reducing the city to a passive
scenery of struggles around capitalism (Castells 1977). Cities were considered as
inert players in the game, passive subjects of external forces that they could resist
as little as the similarly battered nation-states. This is arguably not the case with
what we today recognize as “global city theory.” especially through saskia sas-
sen's conceptualization (1991), during the 1990s, we became acquainted with the
global city: novel spaces where new forms of economy integrate with streams of
immigration in a global network of hierarchical nodes and layers.
There are different versions of this global city theory, but they do share a set
of common features. The global city is considered a new type of city because:
1. it transcends the national city system, going beyond the state that
geographically encompasses it.
2. it articulates its economy, demography, and society to a global form of
capitalism. That is, it is an economy-driven city.
3. it is connected to other global cities in a network of nodes. and the nodes
have their own hierarchy.
Global city theory was criticized during the 1990s, mostly in order to over-
come its evident western-based perspective. The original models drawn upon
were New York, los angeles, and london, but the attempt to include non-west-
ern cities made the theory itself somehow puzzling: what is the point of a theory
that conflates New York and Cairo, tokyo and mumbai under the same label,
world cities ? and why would one rather than the other city be considered para-
digmatic? because it is more powerful? and if so, how should this be measured?
from the onset of the global city, debate analysts have tried to identify spe-
cific units and have systematically focused on economic and financial features.
in one of the first references to global cities, Robert b. Cohen (1981) isolated a
multinational sale index, measuring the relative strength of a city as a center of