Globalization and the City

Students:

First of all for those of you who have not taken a summer course before please be prepared to keep up with the reading, which will seem like a lot if you do not stay on top of it.

Secondly, I'd like to offer a couple of thoughts about the first week's topic of globalization. I urge you to think about the quote from Waters on the page 3 of Short & Kim (1999):

"The concept of globalization is an obvious object for ideological suspicion because, like modernization, an earlier and related concept, it appears to justify the spread of Western culture and of capitalist society by suggesting that there are forces operating beyond human control that are transforming the world"

One of the most important things to keep in mind about globalization is that however powerful its many aspects may appear, it is NOT INEVITABLE and there are alternatives. So when the authors talk about "metanarratives," they mean that just the idea or the story we tell ourselves about 'globalization' can take the place of what's really happening, why things happen the way they do, and the fact that people are always making the decisions responsible for what is called globalization.

Hopefully that sinks in, because one of the things we are bombarded with is that "there is no alternative" to globalization, which makes it a slippery subject to critically think through.

But, I also encourage you to look over yesterday's lecture, which highlighted many of the topics covered in the Short and Kim book. Here are some ideas to keep in mind:

--globalization is not one thing but many trends suggesting the transnational, interconnected nature of the contemporary world. These include trade, finance capital [money & investments], communications, culture, working bodies [immigration], and many others.
--globalization is often centered in cities [i.e. Tokyo p28] but it affects cities as well, encouraging incredibly vast, uneven growth in cities across the world, but also producing hierarchies between cities, as the book nicely details.

There are two ways in which you will be evaluated in this course, the midterm and the project. So when you read these books, keep in mind that of course we cannot test you on every aspect of every text. What you should be doing is looking for the important themes the authors suggest, as I have started to do for you above. This will help you keep going through the readings. But secondly, look for interesting themes and ideas the authors put forward that you will be able to delve into more deeply for your project. Even if the example is about Tokyo, you could really be interested in this idea of a "command center" and want to explore it regarding Sao Paulo, for instance.

I hope this helps you get off on the right foot, and feel free to post questions, thoughts, and other relevant issues to this space--
AC