Review of “Emerging global cities: origin, structure and significance”

Abstract

The authors challenge the “global city literature” school of urban studies thought advanced by such authors as Saskia Sassen, which empirically rank-orders world cities based on their concentration of business activity and confers higher power and importance to cities atop this hierarchy. The book advances a critique of the global city literature alongside scholars such as Neil Brenner and Jennifer Robinson, arguing that such hierarchical conceptions of world cities ignore third world or Global South cities, instead treating higher-ranked cities as ideal and merely reproducing North American and Eurocentric views of urban life. As opposed to the orthodoxy of global city literature, the authors suggest that “emerging global cities” such Dubai, Miami, and Singapore emerged from a position of insignificance to prominence, without “sponsorship” from the supposed global elite cities atop the world city hierarchy. The book contributes a novel set of characteristics explaining this ascendance, which can most directly benefit global urban studies focused on cities in the Global South: a legal system that investors are confident with, a pro-business yet non-corrupt government bureaucracy, local political leaders motivated to make their city globally competitive, including the use of city branding, and the inward migration of foreign labor to fuel growth in globalizing formal economic sectors. These factors contribute novel criteria missing from the global city literature to explain the flexibility for peripheral cities to ascend.