Diversely Global Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 5

international business, and a multinational banking index, which measures the
internationality of banking by comparing the share of foreign deposits to the
share of domestic deposits held by each bank in each city. This approach gave way
to more research on the role of transnational corporations as key indicators of a
possible hierarchy of global cities (friedmann and wolff 1982). The subsequent
attention on finance capitalism in the wake of sassen's research brought about
a new interest for the global location strategies of transnational firms (taylor
2003). according to this approach, cities can be ranked on the number of offices
owned by transnational firms, thus producing a hierarchical network. measuring
london's global reach, for instance, this method ranks milan as an “important
link” to london and Rome only as a “minor link” (beaverstock et al. 2000). The
fact that milan seems more globalized than Rome does is on the one hand a
truism (given the industrial history of milan compared to Rome) and on the
other a disappointing outcome of the analysis, since we are left with the annoy-
ing feeling that the whole analytical framework does nothing but confirm com-
mon sense, without a proper description of how globalization has affected minor
links, which may be both theoretically and ethnographically more relevant in
explaining globalization than prime, major, or important links.
writers such as friedmann, sassen, Castells, and taylor are right that some
cities established themselves as dominant players within the global market econ-
omy, as power centers controlling the transnational service economy: what sas-
sen calls “nodes” of networks, capital flows, and human movement. but it is quite
another step to posit these cities as “models.”
This “hierarchical epistemology” dominating urban theory is in fact noth-
ing new. all the merits of the Chicago school notwithstanding, members of the
school such as wirth, park, or burgess took certain characteristics of american
city development as a blueprint for the city in general, generating universal mod-
els on the basis of a very limited number of cases. on the other hand, within the
city proper, and falling into another kind of extreme, the Chicago school put an
exaggerated, almost exclusive emphasis on certain marginal figures, or marginal
forms of existence (crime, deviance), thus failing perhaps to address what really
generates each city: its own “soul” and identities of belonging. There is something
inherently deceptive about dominant trends in urban theory: They simply fail to
capture the essence of lived, urban experience.
at the more comparative-theoretical level, contemporary global city theory
equally fails to accommodate anything that falls in between the dichotomy be-
tween “northern postindustrial hypercities” and “southern ever-growing megac-
ities.” Rome is just such an in-between city: western, even emblematically so, and
therefore not approachable within the frame of the emerging southern capital.
Yet Rome does not comply with almost any of the features of the northern global
city. Rome is clearly peripheral to the streams of capital, finance, and investment
that made a city like london truly global. Rome does not seem directly “con-