An agile literature review exercise on the Global City topic

 

Working paper: jh-2021-03-25-a (https://josephho33.blogspot.com/2021/03/an-agile-literature-review-exercise-on.html)

 

 

An agile literature review exercise on the Global City topic

 JOSEPH KIM-KEUNG HO

Independent Trainer

Hong Kong, China

Dated: March 25, 2021

 

 

Abstract: Agile literature review is a nimble way attractive for part-time busy students on University Degree programmes to employ in doing course assignments or final year dissertation. This article provides an illustration of how it is done on the topic of Global City, which is covered in the subject of Geographical Imagination. In turn, Geographical Imagination is often taught in the Undergraduate Degree programme in Housing Studies. The article should be a useful reading to those interested in learning literature review. Moreover, those who are studying the topic of Global City should also find it a helpful reading.

Key words: agile literature review exercise, Global City, intellectual learning, literature review.

 

 

Introduction

The topic of literature review is a major one for students studying for Degree programmes. As a university lecturer on some part-time Degree programmes in Hong Kong, this writer is especially interested in literature review that is agile. The reason is that it is more in sync with the busy pace of life of the part-time students taught by the writer. This article provides a demonstration of how to perform an agile literature review exercise on the topic of Global City. This choice of the topic is made due to the writer’s teaching on the subject of Geographical Imagination for the part-time Undergraduate Degree students on Housing Studies. Specifically, Global City is a particular city image that can be chosen to study a city in a Geographical Imagination assignment. The purpose of this article is simple; the next section presents the agile literature review, followed by a brief “concluding remarks” section.

 

The agile literature review exercise on Global City

The literature review exercise is agile, which means that it is nimble, lightweight, evolutionary and responsive. These exercise features should be appealing to learners who have a busy pace of life, which is typical of part-time Undergraduate students. The topic of Global City is very likely taught in the subject of Geographical Imagination. And Geographical Imagination is often studied in the Undergraduate Degree programme of Housing Studies. This is also how this writer gets involved in teaching this topic. The agile literature review exercise was conducted from March 22 to 24. The literature search made use of Google Scholar and two U.K. university e-libraries. The literature review findings are presented in Table 1, with the academic ideas grouped into three categories.

 

Table 1:  A set of gathered academic ideas related to Global City, grouped in three categories

Categories	Academic ideas of Global City
Category 1: nature of Global City [idea 1.1]	“In 1986, John Friedmann published “The World City Hypothesis,” an article in which he elaborated on the concept of world cities and put forth seven assertions about the relationship between the world’s large cities and globalization…. Scholars working on cities and globalization have subsequently concentrated on this “world city” concept (Friedmann, 1986) and the related one of “global cities” (Sassen 2001). From the perspectives embedding these concepts, organizational ties across cities (e.g., headquarters and back offices) and the flows of capital, information, and people between cities have interconnected the world’s great cities (Friedmann 1986, 1995 2001; Sassen 1991, 2001; Taylor et al. 2002)” (Timberlake et al., 2012).
Category 1: nature of Global City [idea 1.2]	“The literature on global and world cities asserts that the spatial, social, and political development of certain cities is profoundly shaped by their function as ‘command and control’ centers in the global economy. Very large cities in developing countries have increasingly been analyzed under this rubric, and some have argued that we are seeing a convergence of global/world cities around a model of urbanization that originates in the West, and particularly in the United States (Cohen, 1996; Dick and Rimmer, 1998; Cowherd and Heikkila, 2002; Leichencko and Solecki, 2005). This assertion has proven controversial, however, and a growing chorus has argued that the global/world city concept overstates the power of actors and institutions operating at a global level, and underestimates local agency and contingency (Robinson, 2002; Flusty, 2004; Hill, 2004; Roy, 2005)” (Shatkin, 2007).
Category 2: ingredient concepts of Global City [idea 2.1]	“For both Sassen and Friedmann the mechanisms that link cities’ global centrality to polarization emanate from structural concomitants of the roles they play in the world economy. Class polarization in these cities is characterized by “large income gaps between transnational elites and low-skilled workers, large-scale immigration from rural areas or abroad, and structural trends in the evolution of jobs” (Friedmann 1986, p. 72). In cities atop the world city hierarchy, production (in both manufacturing and producer services) is more capital intensive, leading to “an ecology of jobs” defined by small (but growing) high wage professional, technical, and managerial workers (largely in producer services) and the “destruction of jobs in the high wage unionized sectors” (1986, p. 77). High-wage professional occupation growth creates demand for low-wage jobs in consumer and personal services—jobs often filled by women and immigrants” (Timberlake et al., 2012).
Category 2: ingredient concepts of Global City [idea 2.2]	“…the restructuring of the global economy has created a need for new types of cities that coordinate decentralized forms of production by playing host to highly centralized coordinating functions such as corporate headquarters, legal and financial services, and research and development (Friedmann, 1995; Sassen, 2001). The modification of cities to these new roles has a profound effect on social and cultural change, leading specifically to the emergence of a new class of highly skilled professionals, and the marginalization of the old industrial working class and immigrants, who are relegated to low-wage jobs in the service economy (Mollenkopf and Castells, 1991; Friedmann, 1995; Sassen, 1998). These economic functions also create an impetus for the retrofitting of the built environment of cities, as developers create new types of office, residential and commercial space to meet the demands of business and the new elite (Marcuse, 1997; Marcuse and van Kempen, 2000a). Simultaneously, the politics of redevelopment require a new type of governance, one that is able to identify the shifting demands of capital in an unstable and rapidly changing economic climate and bring capital to the table in pushing a redevelopment agenda (Logan and Molotch, 1987; Fainstein, 1995). The result is increasingly ‘entrepreneurial’ local Governments” (Shatkin, 2007).
Category 2: ingredient concepts of Global City [idea 2.3]	“…the global cities literature as a whole is tinged with ethnocentrism as it assumes that all such cities will follow the trajectory of New York and London, when in fact these cities are uniquely shaped by a liberal economic ideology, a consumerist culture, and a polarized social structure (White, 1998; Hill and Kim, 2000; Hill, 2004)” (Shatkin, 2007).
Category 2: ingredient concepts of Global City [idea 2.4]	“Cities can be conceptualized as nodes from which goods, people, capital, and information flow through networks— what Manuel Castells (1996, 2010) calls “the space of flows” and should be viewed as centers where processes occur instead of merely geographically defined places. Empirical research on the world city network has elaborated Castells' theories. Scholars such as Sassen (1991) and Taylor, Catalano, and Walker (2002) describe a global network of relationships among cities organized largely by advanced producer services (APS) firms. A small number of cities, where APS firms are highly concentrated, have disproportionate command and control influence on the world city network. Other empirical studies of flows and connectivity use indicators such as the presence of multinational corporations, airplane arrivals and departures, the presence of foreign bank branches, and throughput of cargo containers to rank world or global cities (Jacobs, Ducruet, & Langen, 2010; Mahutga, Ma, Smith, & Timberlake, 2010; Taylor & Derudder, 2016)” (Yao and LeGates, 2018).
Category 2: ingredient concepts of Global City [idea 2.5]	“Cities per se do not act, plot, think, scheme. Cities are sites of ongoing human activity and repositories of the history of this activity, activity that involves, for example, both cooperation and competition over what becomes of these places. And, the actors involved range from mayors and other political officials, to real estate developers, to voluntary associations of neighbors and labor unions, to public institutions such as universities, to directors of firms selecting sites for investment (c.f., Savitch & Kantor, 2002). When, over time, through the complex machinations of such actions, important firms end up locating relatively more of their important operations (e.g., headquarters) in particular cities, those cities become more central within the network of global cities” (Timberlake et al., 2014).
Category 2: ingredient concepts of Global City [idea 2.6]	“While it is obvious that a structural transformation of the global economy, an increase in informatisation and the cultural and political integration of societies all influence urban development, such a view nevertheless fails to account for the fact that cities are not merely places where global flows of capital, goods or cultures are localised. Cities are also engines of global economy that (re)produce the global economy as much as they are affected by it. In general, urban management is a mechanism of mediation between different public, private and civil society stakeholders within cities, which, in this particular case, determines how a city responds to the pressures and opportunities of globalisation” (Uršič and Križnik, 2012).
Category 2: ingredient concepts of Global City [idea 2.7]	“Globalisation and the parallel process of growing economic and political autonomy of regions and cities have significantly changed the relationship between a city and its regional and national institutional contexts. The role of the nation state is diminishing, and there is a redistribution of power towards the regional and local level taking place, with cities consequently gaining major importance within the national sphere. In such circumstances, major cities have re-emerged as sub-national entities and even taken the opportunity to develop new forms of integration, political autonomy, strategic networking and management of resources” (Uršič and Križnik. 2012).
Category 2: ingredient concepts of Global City [idea 2.8]	“The predominant “global city” approach treats the space of the urban as a given in which different global flows of capital, people, information, ideas, services, goods, and information come together and reconfigure the space of the local. Cities of the global South are seen to lag behind in the process of convergence around this model of urban development creating a false dualism between the so-called First- and Third-World cities (Robinson, 2002, 2003). These models tend to focus on global actors as the change agents with relatively little attention to local or translocal actors and preexisting conditions” (Chen et al., 2009).
Category 2: ingredient concepts of Global City [idea 2.9]	“Many local, regional, and city-level governments in the developing world are creating new urban spaces through the production of new integrated townships, on the fringes of existing large urban centers, as another common form of globalizing the local. These supposedly self-sufficient new towns dotting the reconstituted urban landscape manifest the current urban development strategies of attracting capital investment” (Chen et al., 2009).
Category 2: ingredient concepts of Global City [idea 2.10]	“Yeung and Olds (2001) label Shanghai an ‘emerging global city’ as opposed to ‘hyper global cities’ such as New York and London. They have presented a different typology for the two categories” (Wong et al., 2005).
Category 2: ingredient concepts of Global City [idea 2.11]	“Bloom et al. (2002) have added to the debate of floating population on the basis of their economically active age structure. They argue that age structure of a population is a critical dimension that will determine the economic performance of the nation or city as it has great influence on the economic behaviour. Their framework separates the population into three classes – the young (20 years and below), the prime age adult (20–60 years old) and the aged (above 60 years old).” (Wong et al., 2005).
Category 3: application considerations of Global City [idea 3.1]	“One oft-cited study found that 18 of the 25 largest cities outside of Europe, the United States and Japan ranked somewhere on the roster of world cities (Beaverstock et al., 1999—see Table 1 for a detailed breakdown). These cities tend to achieve global/world city status due to their role in coordinating the integration of their national economies into the global economy, and often lie at the center of large ‘global city-regions’ (Scott et al., 2001). For example, Metro Manila, Bangkok and Jakarta have emerged as ‘gamma’ world cities as they have become the center for national headquarters of transnational corporations and producer service firms that coordinate manufacturing production, and increasingly export-oriented services, in their extended metropolitan regions” (Shatkin, 2007).
Category 3: application considerations of Global City [idea 3.2]	“Recognizing that development worldwide is largely driven by cities that are most connected to the world economy, scholars have studied Chinese “world” or “global” cities and their role in the world city network in order to better understand how globalization has contributed to the rise of the Chinese economy (Chubarov & Brooker, 2013; Liu, Derudder, & Wu, 2015; Ma & Timberlake, 2008)” (Yao and LeGates, 2018).
Category 3: application considerations of Global City [idea 3.3]	“… an unintended consequence of the scholarship on global cities has been to stimulate place-promoting projects in China (and elsewhere) that are deliberate efforts to raise the global status of cities like Beijing and Shanghai as part of a national development project” (Yao and LeGates, 2018).
Category 3: application considerations of Global City [idea 3.4]	“The fact that the central government is heavily engaged in global city formation processes does not rule out the importance of inter-city competition for global city status amongst China’s leading cities (Lai, 2012; Shi & Hamnett, 2002). For example, Wei and Yu (2006) describe some of this competition between Beijing and Shanghai – and Guangzhou (also see Breznitz & Murphree, 2011). It is clear that each city has certain advantages that it plays in the global city formation game. Wei and Yu argue, ‘‘Shanghai is favoured by foreign-owned bank branches, and Taiwanese investors, who tend to keep low profiles, do not favor politically sensitive cities like Beijing’’ (2006: 385). Beijing is a politically sensitive city because it houses foreign embassies, regional headquarters and representative offices of transnational corporations” (Timberlake et al., 2014).
Category 3: application considerations of Global City [idea 3.5]	“Singapore’s attempt to attract foreign talent will eventually also impact upon the current approach to mother tongue education (Stroud & Wee, 2012, pp. 200, 201). This is because the foreign talent policy aims to persuade such talent to take up Singaporean citizenship, and the success of this policy could well change the nation’s demographics. Japanese, Korean, French, or American foreign talent who become citizens obviously cannot be expected to embrace Mandarin, Malay, or Tamil as their official mother tongues. The insistence on mother tongue education has also had to be more flexible because the children of Singaporean expatriates returning to Singapore would probably not have been studying their official mother tongue while studying abroad” (Wee, 2014).
Category 3: application considerations of Global City [idea 3.6]	“From a practical perspective, although global cities are widely hailed as the engine of economic growth, their rise also presents a grave challenge to city managers and policymakers. Burgeoning urban population growth drives up the real estate market so affordable housing is in short supply (McKinsey & Co, 2018). Lack of financial resources renders the cities incapable of meeting the rising demand for services (World Economic Forum, 2018), such as transportation, education and healthcare, etc. Urban poverty leads to formation of slums and rise of crime rates (Forbes, 2018)” (Wang, 2019).
Category 3: application considerations of Global City [idea 3.7]	“…the production of urban form associated with Tokyo as a global city – its airport, its public spaces, the type of export-oriented financial activities that go on there, and the domestic bubble – need to be situated within the geo-politics of the era and the social struggles that animated it” (Gottfried, 2018).
Category 3: application considerations of Global City [idea 3.8]	“Global cities have three unique characteristics (see Sassen, 2002) that Shanghai potentially enjoys: (a) Concentration of command functions at the national level; (b) Post-industrial production sites for leading industries, finance and specialised services supported by top universities; (c) National or transnational marketplaces where firms and governments require financial instruments and specialised services” (Wong et al., 2005).
Category 3: application considerations of Global City [idea 3.9]	“Looking at the city’s social fabric, we might classify Berlin as a ‘multicultural’ or internationalised city, which has a large percentage of people coming from many different countries. Thus we find some features which might indicate that Berlin is a city developing towards the global city category. However, the most important criteria for global cities focus on a city’s positioning as a leading centre of strategic economic functions for the national and the international business world” (Kratke, 2001).

 

 

Referring to Table 1, the academic ideas are grouped into the three categories of “nature of Global City”, “ingredient concepts of Global City” and “application considerations of Global City”. The key words in the academic ideas are in bold font. Based on these ideas, a brief description of them can be made as follows:

On the “nature of Global City” (category 1), Global City study examines the world’s large cities having functions as a command and control centers in the global economy; thus, it is attentive to the relationship between these cities and globalization, e.g., organizational ties, information, capital and people flows between cities (especially the world’s large cities).

On the “ingredient concepts of Global City (category 2), the major ingredient concepts include (i) class polarization, (ii) world city hierarchy, (iii) command and control centers in the global economy, (iv) city image influencing factors, (v) city images and stereotypes, (vi) Lyn’s five city elements, (vii) redevelopment politics, (viii) city trajectory of New York and London, (ix) cities as nodes, (x) cities as engines of global economy, First- and Third-World cities, (xi) emerging and hyper global cities, and (xii) economic performance of city.

On the “application considerations of Global City” (category 3), some of main topics of study include: (i) place-promoting projects, (ii) the role of world city network on the rise of the Chinese economy, (iii) the role of the central government on global city formation processes, (iv) foreign talent attraction to global cities and the urban form production (e.g.. in Tokyo), (v) Global City characteristics, and (v) the city’s social fabric consideration in Global City assessment.

The agile literature review findings provide some critical and major knowledge on the Global City concept, with the referencing pointing to the additional reading that enables readers to gain a deeper level knowledge.

 

Concluding remarks

The account of the agile literature review exercise on Global City demonstrates how this type of exercise can be done. This should be of use to readers interested in literature review and intellectual learning. More specifically, the literature review findings on Global City (re: Table 1) offers some relevant academic information to Housing Studies students learning the Global City topic, probably in the subject of Geographical Imagination. They should especially find it helpful for doing course assignments or final year dissertation projects. As this method is an agile one, part-time students should find it more feasible to employ given their busy pace of life.

 

 

References

Chen, X.M., Wang, L. and Kundu, R. 2009. “Localizing the Production of Global Cities: A Comparison of New Town Developments Around Shanghai and Kolkata” City & Community 8(4) December: 433-465.

Gottfried, H. 2018. “The Phoenix Rises: Tokyo’s Origins as a Global City” Critical Sociology 44(3): 421–435.

Kratke. S. 2001. “Berlin: Towards a Global City?” Urban Studies 38(10): 1777–1799.

Shatkin, G. 2007. “Global cities of the South: Emerging perspectives on growth and inequality” Cities 24(1):1–15.

Timberlake, M., Sanderson, M.R., Ma, X.L., Derudder, B., Winitzky, J., Witlox, F. 2012. “Testing a Global City Hypothesis: An Assessment of Polarization across US Cities” City & Community 11(1) March: 74-93.

Timberlake, M., Wei, Y.D., Ma, X.L. and Hao, J.M. 2014. “Global cities with Chinese characteristics” Cities 41: 162–170.

Uršič, M. and Križnik, B. 2012. “Comparing urban renewal in Barcelona and Seoul—urban management in conditions of competition among global cities” Asia Eur J 10: 21–39.

Wang, D.D. 2019. “Performance assessment of major global cities by DEA and Malmquist index Analysis” Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 77  101365.

Wee, L. 2014. “Language politics and global city” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 35(5): 649-660, DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2014.922740.

Wong, T.C, Yeow, M.C. and Zhu, X. 2005. “Building a global city: Negotiating the massive influx of floating population in Shanghai” Journal of Housing and the Built Environment  20: 21–50

Yao, C.G. and LeGates, R. 2018. “China's hybrid global city region pathway: Evidence from the Yangtze River Delta” Cities 77:  81–91.