Global cities, global commodity chains, and the geography of economic governance
Think&Drink Kolloquium im Wintersemester 2012 // 22.Okktober 2012 // 18:00 Uhr
Auch im aktuellen Semester laden der Lehrbereich Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie und das Georg-Simmel-Zentrum für Metropolenforschung gemeinsam zum Think & Drink Kolloquium alle Interessierten ein und präsentieren eine Reihe hochklassige internationale Gastreferenten (u.a. Kanishka Goonewardena, Mike Raco, Don Mitchell oder Colin McFarlane). Diese Woche zu Gast: Prof. Christof Parnreiter (Universität Hamburg), der über Global Cities, Global Commodity Chains und der Geographie von „economic governance“ sprechen wird:
Since Saskia Sassen’s ‘The global city’ (Sassen 1991), global city research has taken two main routes. One of the most extensive strands is the urban studies approach to global cities, in which the reorganization of urban economies, the emergence of a new socio-spatial order, or shifting scales and power relations in urban governance are analyzed as a conditions as well as consequences of global city formation. Another important thread deals with quantitative assessments of cross-border connections of global cities, of which the ‘interlocking network model’ developed by Taylor (2004) is the best-known.
My contention is, however, that both literatures miss the conceptual core of the global city paradigm as developed by John Friedmann and Saskia Sassen. I maintain that the global city concept is, in essence, an economic geography perspective on how globalization processes are organized and controlled. The key condition for global city formation is that these cities function as places for the management and the governance of cross-border economic activities, and they do so through the provision of producer services to firms operating in or even controlling all types of global commodity chains. As critical nodes in innumerable global commodity chains global cities are places from where economic governance is exercised. This perspective allows for a much more decentralized account of the geographies of command and control than the traditional map of headquarter cities.
Das Kolloquium findet in der Vorlesungszeit immer Montags von 18 bis 20 Uhr in Raum 002 in der Universitätsstraße 3b statt.
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