Global city goes local? State ambitions and societal undercurrents of food localisation in Singapore

Multiple pathways to global city formation: A functional approach and review of recent evidence in China

ABSTRACTThe global city literature is largely economic-centric and pays insufficient attention to the important issue of migration. Underpinned by a theoretical cross-fertilization of the global city and the knowledge city theses, this study investigates migrant knowledge workers (MKWs) in Melbourne, which has multiple identities as a global city, a knowledge city and a migration city. By doing so, this study aims to use migration as an alternative indicator of a global city and unpack the association between MKWs and the formation of a global knowledge city. It analyses Melbourne’s knowledge economy, and socio-economic attributes and spatial patterns of MKWs compared with other demographic groups. The results show that Melbourne has a higher concentration and stronger growth of knowledge intensive industries than Australia’s national average, for which MKWs provide the substantial workforce. Further, the MKWs demonstrate a different set of socio-economic attributes and settlement patterns that have profound impacts on local communities. This paper concludes with a discussion linking the global city, the knowledge city and migration theories through the nexus of MKWs, to provide a better understanding of associated urban transformations and inform policy implications for a contemporary global knowledge city.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to use a newly developed Global Liveable Cities Index (GLCI), to assess how Abu Dhabi ranks among global cities. The paper sheds some light on the strengths and weaknesses associated with the city’s emergence as a global city, as identified by the index. Design/methodology/approach – This paper makes use of a new measure of liveability – the GLCI – to rank the world ' s major cities. The GLCI advances the measurement of the “Liveability” construct by taking into account the multi-dimensional sensibility of diverse groups of ordinary persons across 64 cities. The paper also conducts policy simulations to help aid city planners invest in areas with low scores in the GLCI. Findings – The results from the analysis show Abu Dhabi as a city that has a lot more potential than what most conventional city benchmarking exercises have revealed. It is a city with immense potential in the region by not just being the driver of growth but also being a nodal center for attraction of global talent. It is fast growing into a city of opportunity and already satisfies the characteristics of an emerging global city with a lot of regional attention. The empirical results also find that its potential has been clearly under-rated by many existing studies and indices primarily because of their narrow scope in measuring liveability. The GLCI results brought together multiple indicators to devise an index that is strongly based on a combination of analytical and philosophical values. Taking stock of the rankings of Abu Dhabi using the GLCI so far as well as the policy simulations, one can conclude that Abu Dhabi has multiple strengths as an aspiring global city. The results also indicate that one area that has been consistently identified as lacking in Abu Dhabi is that of environmental sustainability. Originality/value – While cities have always played a historic role in powering economic growth in some form or the other, the scale of expansions and the speed at which it is happening today appears unprecedented. While a considerable number of indices benchmarking cities exist, they are rather narrow in scope. None of them model liveability from the perspective of an ordinary person with multi-dimensional sensibilities toward issues like economic well-being, social mobility, personal security, political governance, environmental sustainability and aesthetics for a more representative coverage of major cities around the world. These factors are critical measures of “liveability” of a city that in turn elevates it to the status of a global city. This paper thus makes an original contribution to the literature on understanding global cities by applying a newly developed GLCI to assess how Abu Dhabi ranks among global cities. The paper sheds some light on the strengths and weaknesses associated with the city’s emergence as a global city, as identified by the index.

Global cities act as influential hubs in the networked world. Their city brands, which are projected by the global news media, are becoming sustainable resources in various global competitions and cooperations. This study adopts the research paradigm of computational social science to assess and compare the city brand attention, positivity, and influence of ten Globalization and World Cities Research Network (GaWC) Alpha+ global cities, along with their dimensional structures, based on combining the cognitive and affective theoretical perspectives on the frameworks of the Anholt global city brand dimension system, the big data of global news knowledge graph in Google’s Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT), and the technologies of word-embedding semantic mining and clustering analysis. The empirical results show that the overall values and dimensional structures of city brand influence of global cities form distinct levels and clusters, respectively. Although global cities share a common structural characteristic of city brand influence of the dimensions of presence and potential being most prominent, Western and Eastern global cities differentiate in the clustering of dimensional structures of city brand attention, positivity, and influence. City brand attention is more important than city brand positivity in improving the city brand influence of global cities. The preferences of the global news media over global city brands fits the nature of global cities.

E the lay reader, when confronted with figures and accounts of contemporary urbanization trends, is compelled to admit that the 21st century is the age of the city—an ‘urban age.’1 With the most conservative projections predicting that 75 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050, it is undeniable that “the affairs of the city have to become the habits of international politics.”2 Yet, to date, it is possible to count international studies publications concerned with the city as a site of global influence on the fingers of a hand. Kent E. Calder and Mariko de Freytas justly argued against this neglect, in an article published in the Winter-Spring 2009 edition of this journal.3 In this piece, they sought to redress the overall hyperopia of international studies by describing “global political cities as actors in twenty-first century international affairs.” Yet, while the two authors offer a much-needed political perspective on the role of cities, their essay is too timid in describing the political presence of the urban on the global landscape. Despite the promises of their title, which uses the term ‘actors’ to indicate the participation of global cities in international affairs, the article does little to theorize agency. On the contrary, Calder and de Freytas illustrate metropolises as milieu—or hubs—where political influence is gathered, but not exerted. In this rejoinder I argue that global cities are not solely places of, but also agents in global governance and world politics. If we are to understand that cities—and global cities in particular—are increasingly important in shaping international affairs, we need to move away from this passive stereotype of the urban as a mere milieu, and appreciate how it actively engages other political institutions. Calder and de Freytas’s approach is intuitive: if Saskia Sassen described global cities in their economic essence as urbanities with a global significance, the same can apply for other social spheres such as the political.4 If Sassen’s metropolises are strategic sites where the command and control functions of producer services are concentrated, for Calder and de Freytas they are political-

In the late 1980s, the software industry in Japan grew rapidly not only in the 'global city' of Tokyo but also in some rural areas. In short, it was dispersed from the global city to other areas in Japan. In the late 1990s, however, the software industry became concentrated mainly in Tokyo, unlike the late 1980s. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the background of that concentration within the context of international trade.Two hypotheses were examined as driving forces of that concentration. 1) In the late 1980s, software firms in Tokyo outsourced software business to rural areas in Japan where a low cost labor force was available. In the late 1990s, however, software firms in China and India provided lower costs than the rural areas of Japan. Thus, it was expected that software firms in Tokyo outsourced software not to the rural areas in Japan, but to overseas software firms. 2) As the demand for producer services by Trans National Corporations (TNCs) located in the global city grew with the economic globalization of the 1990s, it was anticipated that demand for software would increase in the 'global city' of Tokyo rather than in the rural areas.First, the performance of an extended shift-share analysis on the software industry revealed that the import substitution effect is rarely seen in the Japanese software industry although labor costs are significantly reduced by outsourcing to China and India. One reason for limited overseas outsourcing is that electronic devices made by Japanese manufacturers need highly skilled workers. Embedded software in electronic devices like mobile phones and digital cameras need highly skilled workers most of whom live in the Tokyo metropolitan area. The demand for skilled workers for high value electronic manufacturing products prevented further outsourcing of the software overseas and facilitated the concentration of the software industry in Tokyo. Second, the extended shift-share analysis of TNCs growing demand for software shows that export-led job growth became evident in the late 1990s. The correlation coefficient between export-oriented job growth and software job growth is significant at the 1% level. The high demand for software in the 'global city' and the decrease in government public works investment in rural areas have greatly contributed to the concentration of the software industry in Tokyo in the late 1990s. That helped shift software demand from the rural areas in Japan to the 'global city', Tokyo.With a governmental income transfer policy from urban to rural areas, the software industry grew relatively all over Japan. However, the growth gap between the urban and rural areas was mainly aggravated by economic globalization and the minimal government policy in the 1990s.

‘Global city’ is one of the most successful terms that emerged from urban studies. Originally the focus of planning research concerned with the changing impact of urban settlement on our societies, as in Peter Hall’s The World Cities (1966), the discussion of the globalization of major cities extended in the 1970s and 1980s to a survey of the networked imprint of these places on humanity. What was theorized by scholars like John Friedmann (1986) as a hypothesis on how cities influence the new international division of labour as promoted by the growing clout of neoliberalism on world affairs was to become in the following years a complex research programme with a variety of ramifications. Critical in this expansion was the work of Saskia Sassen, who popularized the term ‘global city’ (1991), first employed by David Heenan (1977), and promoted Friedmann’s plea to link global flows with local social developments. Likewise, of key importance was the Globalization and World Cities network (GaWC) founded by Peter Taylor, who pushed for a formalization of the network analysis of how major cities are intertwined with the global economy as well as with each other. Having emerged as a dominant discussion in urban studies through the mid-1990s, the global city paradigm has progressively expanded in the past two decades to extend beyond geographical and urbanist research and has become an attractive area of research of direct appeal to scholars across most of the social sciences.

Formulation of the problem. The phenomenon of world (global) cities is of considerable interest and is the subject of research of specialists from different spheres. The study of world cities at the present stage of the society’s development is complicated by a number of aspects, including complex and dynamic development of the geopolitical and geoeconomic world space, which explains rapid transformation of cities; the complexity of a statistical base formation for the study of world cities, expressed in a large amount of diverse information and limited access to it; lack of a holistic and unique methodology for studying world cities.The purpose of the article. The article studies the human-geographical approach to the formation and development of the concept of world (global) cities in the XX‒XXI centuries.Results. In modern scientific literature there are a number of terms describing the phenomenon of world cities, in particular, including «global city», «world center», «world financial center», «сosmopolis», «information city», «media city», «metropolis», «ecumenopolis», «global city region», «сapitals of capital», «international city», «globalizing city» «megacity», «interactive city», etc. The variety of terms is an indicator that reflects the ambiguity and complexity of this phenomenon in modern science, as well as the diversity of approaches to its study. Definition of «world cities» concept is based on such aspects as economic development, political influence, social significance.Formation of the world cities concept has a fairly long history. A significant contribution to its formation and development was made by P. Geddes, P. Hall, C. Doxiadis, F. Braudel, H. Reed, J. Friedmann, G. Wolff, N. Thrift, S. Sassen, M. Castells, C. Abbott, Y. Jao, A. E. Tschoegl, Y. Cassis, P. Taylor, A. Scott, P. Marcuse, R. Van Kempen, E. Isin, D. Clark, N. A. Slucka, S. McQuayer and others. In their research, the world city is, firstly, as a phenomenon unique and singular; secondly, the scope of its influence clearly has a planetary or, ultimately, macro-regional coverage; thirdly, the world city represents a special force concentrator, whether in the field of ideology, religion, military force, innovation economy, etc.; fourthly, it acts as a hegemon, functions as a governing and controlling element within the framework of another, «subordinate» territorial-social system; fifthly, the spatial organization of such a system has a clearly pronounced center-peripheral character; sixthly, the presence of the dominant one-, two-way links that support the system.Several approaches to identifying the phenomenon of a world city based on different principles can be singled out: geoeconomic, geopolitical, socio-cultural, historical-geographic, geodemographic, information and communication, service, innovation. Human-geographical approach is important as it combines all of the above-mentioned and provides the most comprehensive study of the phenomenon of world cities.

This study discusses the measurement of the global city with the primary aim to uncover the logical grounds to measure the features of “the global” in the study of ranking and comparing the cities. The study sets up a three-dimensional analysis framework with infrastructure (economy), fluidity (openness), and reputation (influence) for the basic dimensions of measurement for the global cities. Using this framework, the studies of top-10 Chinese cities in the global city comparison have been conducted with the data of cities’ scores from various ranking systems. The resources used include the index of Globalization and World Cities, global urban economic competitiveness index, Economic daily and United Nations global urban sustainable competitiveness rankings. The study tests the effectiveness of this framework by illustrating the coherence and dissimilarity of this analysis with other city ranking systems, and further discloses the advantage of this indicator system. This study exposes the existing problems in the logic and rationale of the urban studies and establishes the basis of global city ranking, thus offering policymakers new perspective on the strategy of city development.

This paper explores some of the unique characteristics that define globalization and global cities through an investigation of recent design trends in New York City restaurants, specifically gentrification, new users of global cities, casualization, and the processes of contestation and absorption of the dominant as well as nondominant cultures and classes in the city as they are played out in the physical, social, and economic morphology of the city over the past fifteen years. I will argue that these features define place in very specific and complex ways. Although locally oriented, restaurants reflect deeper and broader social and economic global forces that help to create the meaning of that space. The importation and exportation of specific restaurants to other existing and emerging global cities is already in progress. As such, restaurants offer a basis for analyzing emerging cities—those that, although not global, have an important relationship to global cities. The findings offered here are part of a larger five-year study of restaurants and come from personal interviews, questionnaires, onsite observations, and sources internal to the restaurant industry as well as other relevant sources.

Extant literature in the interdisciplinary field of globalization and world cities defines global cities as the intertwined product of a seemingly paradoxical trend: the dispersal of economic activities and societal trends in an increasingly networked society while the power over these activities and trends is being more and more centered and concentrated. This concentration of power resulted in some leading cities being globally interconnected hubs with a dominating role within the world economy. Global cities are centers for multinational corporations’ headquarters and places in which they exert their “control and command” functions. The role of global cities for SMEs with internationally or globally dispersed activities has not yet been extensively studied. This thesis aims to explore the role of global cities for such internationalizing SMEs, in particular with regard to Singapore and Southeast Asia.

Globalisation has been associated with the development of 'command node' cities in the global economy (Friedman, 1986; Sassen, 1991). Some scholars have argued that the social and spatial structure of such cities has been polarised, because of changing demand for labour and land. A number of debates have developed around this hypothesis, challenging the general applicability of these socio-economic trends to all global cities (e.g. Bruegel, 1996; Hamnett, 1996), while the spatial changes in the housing markets of global cities have been shown to be varied (Marcuse & van Kempen, 2000). They are heavily dependent on local context, but always associated with increased segregation of rich and poor, whether through displacement of the poor from the urban core (Smith, 1989) or through their displacement within it (Lyons, 1996). The present paper suggests that much can be learnt about urban change in an era of globalisation, from analysis of the differences between global and other cities. The hypothesis is that spatial restructuring of housing markets in London, a global city, is likely to have important similarities with those of other cities in England, which occupy lower positions in a global urban hierarchy. A comparison of the extent of socio-spatial clustering of home ownership in London, with six English cities at various levels of the urban hierarchy is presented, which partly supports the hypothesis, comparing change over a 20-year period, based on cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of ONS Longitudinal Study data for the years 1971, 1981 and 1991. Findings were that, despite its more socially polarised labour market, London's home ownership market was less spatially segregated than that of other cities in the sample. Implications for global city theory, and for the interpretation of the dynamics of other urban markets, are discussed.

Global European cities are important targets for foreign direct investment (FDI). The purpose of the article is to identify the causes of this phenomenon on the basis of empirical and theoretical analysis based on the concepts of global cities. London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Warsaw, which represent different types of global cities, were taken to conduct such a study. This determined the structure of the work, which consists of theoretical and methodological introduction, sections of the analysis of the FDI inflow in these cities, as well as a conclusion, which contains the main results ofthe work and the possibility of applying them to Moscow. The main conclusions of the article can be summarized as follows: global cities have their own specialization in FDI inflows, which is ensured by the presence of special attractive factors against the background of the general investment attractiveness of a country. It is possible to distinguish three key specializations (functions, roles) of a global city from the point of FDI inflow: international hub for transit capital, regional hub for the transfer of FDI to other parts of a country, site for FDI inflow to the city economy. The cities under consideration clearly demonstrate the different nature of their specialization, which depends on the different endowment of each city with specific attracting factors. London is a world leader and is able to accumulate an extremely large volume of FDI due to all three specializations. Dublin, although it is a young global city, already plays a key role in the inflow of FDI into the country as an international hub and partially as an attractive city economy. Amsterdam also specializes in the international hub activity and to a lesser extent as an attractive city economy. Frankfurt attracts substantial FDI into its economy on the base of its banking sector and also plays a role of the regional hub. Warsaw also plays the roles of a recipient of FDI and a regional hub.

ABSTRACTTypical of the 1990s, the global cities phenomenon preceded the past decade’s massive spread of smart cities. Yet the question of how the two phenomena currently coincide remains to be considered, as well as an analysis based on viewing smart cities as global cities. An analysis related to the European scenario is developed in this article, aimed at giving a response to the previous considerations. An index is also proposed; concerning the global character of the cities, it considers the ability of the cities to attract Foreign Direct Investments (FDI). Results of the proposed analysis show that in Europe four main scenarios exist. Two regarding positive and negative correlations between the diffusion of global and smart cities, and another two scenarios demonstrate cases in which the two features are not correlated. The first two cases are respectively related to smart cities that are also global cities. The last two cases deal with the presence of different drivers that are not related to smart urban plans, which could, however, drive the attraction of FDI or which could also promote smart actions without the thrust of FDI. Correlation and regression analyses complement the work.

While much of global or world city research is framed as urban studies, in this chapter I apply an economic geographical perspective to scrutinize the role of these cities in uneven economic development. A concern with the role of specific cities in the organization of economic globalization marked the beginning of global city research (Hymer 1972; Cohen 1981; Friedmann and Wolff 1982; Friedmann 1986; Sassen 1988), and Sassen (2001, pp. 359 and 361) recapped in the second edition of The Global City that '[t]he key indicator of global city status is whether a city contains the capabilities for servicing, managing, and financing the global operations of firms and markets. . . . The question is whether coordination and specialized servicing of global firms and markets is taking place'. Over time, however, this economic geographical perspective faded into the background. Instead of examining global cities as 'highly concentrated command points in the organization of the world economy' (Sassen 1991, p. 3), their analysis was increasingly moved to the field of urban studies (Parnreiter 2013). Together with the increasing dominance of quantitative studies on the form and changes of the world city network (Taylor 2001; Taylor and Derudder 2016), this shift has caused an unfortunate move away from what had originally been a central interest of global city research, namely, the critical analysis of the geographies of power in globalization processes. Sassen, who describes herself as a 'political economist interested in the spatial organization of the economy and in the spatial correlates of economic power' (Sassen 1998, p. 182), reiterated in the second edition of The Global City that the notion of global cities has been elaborated as a critical inquiry into 'questions of power and inequality' (Sassen 2001, p. 351). She contends that global cities represent spatial correlates of economic power; they are a 'spatialization of inequality' (Sassen 1998, p. 182).