Unravelling The Global City Debate on Social Inequality

Analyzing the social consequences of globalization in cities based on global city theory is therefore not only obscuring a core feature of globalization as international competition, but also overstates the social consequences of globalization for many workers in cities in the advanced economies. After all, as argued before, economic restructuring in cities with the advanced economies is largely driven by local and national processes instead of international or global ones. Our findings indicate that even in the global age, local geographical, institutional and historical idiosyncrasies of individual cities seem to be decisive in understanding their socio-economic structure (cf. Smith, 2001).