The Particularity of Global Places: Placemaking Practices in Los Angeles and Sydney

Abstract

What makes places different from one another in the context of globalization? An analysis of 17 emblematic practices in two global cities, Los Angeles and Sydney, provides the empirical basis for answering this question. Evidence from the built environment, the social geography, and the patterns of disorder in the inner cities of these two global places shows that these cities were more alike in the late 1960s than they are today. The differentiation of the two places has increased as the effects of globalization have become more pervasive. The evidence presented in this paper suggests that there is nothing inherent in contemporary globalization that requires global cities to have inner city slums, ghettoes, massive homelessness, residential disinvestment, White flight, relict or suboptimally-utilized brownfields, illegal prostitution, a war on drugs, public spaces awash with guns, and so forth. Places are viewed here as constellations of distinctive practices configured in particular geographical settings at the intersection of specific conjunctures of historical change. Places matter in the epoch of globalization as differentially embedded, bounded particularities consisting of a mixed assortment of human practices forming causally consequential fields of effects.

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