“World Cities, or a World of Ordinary Cities?”

Abstract

Much of the literature about global cities and the world cities network focuses on New York, Tokyo, London, and the other alpha power capitals of the world. But what about ordinary cities? In this selection from Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (2006), urban geographer Jennifer Robinson addresses this question, beginning with the proposition that “all cities are best understood as ‘ordinary’. Rather than categorizing and labelling cities as Western, Third World, developed, developing, world or global,” she asks that “we think about a world of ordinary cities, which are all dynamic and diverse … arenas for social and economic life.” Robinson calls into question many of the assumptions of global cities/world cities theory and lays the basis for a powerful critique of the way that theory disregards both much of the urban world, especially in the Global South, and much of the global cities themselves, especially their poorly educated, low-income populations trapped in dead-end service-sector jobs. Her critique of the global cities literature focuses on the way important global cities are categorized as uniquely special and placed in a hierarchical order that essentially disappears all the other cities of the world that are not leading players in the new global economy. She also criticizes the “developmentalism” of globalist theory, the arguably imperialistic idea that ordinary cities should aspire to becoming global by adopting Western urban values. Robinson also argues that, because of globalism, the field of urban studies has focused on global cities in a way that leaves most cities of the world literally “off the map.” What Robinson wants to develop is “a post-colonial urban studies eager to bring different kinds of cities together in thinking about contemporary urban experiences.” Only in this way can we establish “the basis for a post-colonial urban theory that refuses to privilege the experiences of some cities over those of others.”

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.