Global Cities

Catalog description

This close look at megacities in the global south decisively challenges the outdated impression that the rest of the world's cities still lag way behind the U.S. and Europe. The social sciences' debate over 'global cities' anchors our examination of the reorganization of metropolitan social space under impact of neoliberal globalization since the 1970s. Explores urban inequalities of slums and dreamworlds; compares vernacular and transnational styles of urbanism (in architecture, design, markets, consumerism, jobs, ads, ways of living); and asks how transnational flows of people, capital and culture have reconfigured ethnic relations and national identities rooted in global cities. Students become virtual transnational flâneurs, tacking between the slums and skyscrapers of global cities, and conduct guided research on a global megacity to investigate how the production of the global city changes the lived space and urban culture of local residents, and how they respond. We ask, whose city is it?