Commodity Chains and World Cities E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 377

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Transnational spatial relations offer a key point from which to study the geographies of contemporary globalization. This book assesses the possible cross-fertilization between two of the most notable analytical frameworks - the world city network framework and the global commodity chain framework.

• Transnational spatial relations have become a key analytical lens through which to study the geographies of contemporary globalization
• Brings together contributions of key researchers from different backgrounds and different parts of the world
• Offers a set of original approaches to the study of the networked geography of globalization

Leseprobe

Contents

List of Contributors

1 World Cities and Global Commodity Chains: an introduction

Steps towards cross-fertilization

Avenues for future research

Notes

References

2 World City Networks and Global Commodity Chains: towards a world-systems’ integration

The two literatures: models and analyses

World-systems integration

Conclusion: what might an integrated research agenda look like?

Acknowledgements

Notes

References

3 Global cities in Global Commodity Chains: exploring the role of Mexico City in the geography of global economic governance

Deeper integration into Global Commodity Chains and global city formation

Thickening empirical evidence

Producer services and the governance of commodity chains

Mexico City in the geography of governance

Conclusions

Acknowledgements

Notes

References

4 City networks and commodity chains: identifying global flows and local connections in Ho Chi Minh City

World City Networks–with invisible linkages

Global Commodity Chains – with invisible global cities

Combining commodity chains and city networks

Globalizing Ho Chi Minh City – chains in networks

HCMC in Asian city networks

Conclusion

Notes

References

5 Cities, material flows and the geography of spatial interaction: urban places in the system of chains

Places and flows, site and situation

Globalization, commodity chains and material flows

Cities in the system of chains and flows

Positionality: placing cities in the global context

References

6 Integrating world cities into production networks: the case of port cities

Integrating world cities and Global Production Networks

World port city networks: a framework for analysis

Empirical results

Conclusions

Acknowledgements

Notes

References

7 Intra-firm and extra-firm linkages in the knowledge economy: the case of the emerging mega-city region of Munich

Theoretical background

The emerging mega-city region of Munich

Conclusion

References

8 Making connections: Global Production Networks and World City Networks

Core concerns, peripheral visions

Limiting essentialisms

Unpacking relationality: actors, governance and methods

Conclusion

Notes

References

9 Global inter-city networks and commodity chains: any intersections?

Five propositions towards an analytic lens

What does a focus on cities add?

Notes

References

Index

This edition first published 2010

Chapters © 2010 The Authors

Book compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and Global Networks Partnership

Edition history: originally published as Volume 10, Issue 1 of Global Networks

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing programme has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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List of Contributors

Ed Brown Loughborough University Neil M. Coe University of Manchester Peter De Langden Eindhoven University of Technology, and Port of Rotterdam Authority Ben Derudder Ghent University Peter Dicken University of Manchester Cesar Ducruet French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) Niels Fold University of Copenhagen Viktor Goebel Swiss Federal Statistical Office Martin Hess University of Manchester Markus Hess University of Luxembourg Wouter Jacobs Utrecht University Stefan Lüthl Munich University of Technology Christof Parnreiter University of Hamburg Wim Pelupessy Tilburg University Saskia Sassen Columbia University Peter J. Taylor Loughborough University Alain Thierstein Munich University of Technology Ingeborg Vind Statistics Denmark Frank Witlox Ghent University Henry Wai-chung Yeung National University of Singapore

1

World Cities and Global Commodity Chains: an introduction

BEN DERUDDER AND FRANK WITLOX

Given the remarkable success of Global Networks, it seems fair to state that transnational spatial relations have become a key analytical lens through which the geographies of contemporary globalization are being studied. The purpose of this book is to assess the possible cross-fertilization between two of the most notable analytical frameworks, namely (i) the World City Network (WCN) framework, in which researchers have studied the emergence of a globalized urban system for the provision of a host of advanced corporate services (for example finance, insurance, accountancy, advertising, law); and (ii) the Global Commodity Chain (GCC) framework, in which researchers have scrutinized the interconnected functions, operations and transactions through which specific commodities are produced, distributed and consumed in a globalized economy. We should hereby immediately emphasize that our adoption of the WCN/GCC terminology does not imply an explicit favouring of the specific concepts advanced by Taylor (2004) and Gereffi and Korzeniewicz (1994) over other, related concepts. Rather, this choice is more reflective of the need for a useful shorthand when addressing the research literatures dealing with the rise of transnational central place systems (the WCN approach) and transnational production systems (the GCC approach) respectively.

Both literatures have emerged as critiques of conventional, state-centric social science interpretations of their subject matters, and they both propose what might be called ‘global network alternatives’: both WCN and GCC scholars stress that, to understand the dynamics of ‘development’ in a given place, research should focus on how places are being transformed by their insertion in networks of commodities, knowledge, capital, labour, power and how, at the same time, places and their institutional and social fabrics are transforming those networks as they locate in place-specific domains.

WCN research has emerged as a critique of mainstream social science interpretations of urban systems. The established way of researching urban systems has long been through analyses of so-called ‘national urban hierarchies’. Usually using data on population sizes or economic specialization, cities from a particular state were assumed to constitute an autonomous city-system as if the rest of the world did not exist. This approach obviously had some analytical purchase so long as a fair degree of economic and societal cohesion was maintained at the state level. However, it is equally clear that this framework has increasingly worked to the detriment of properly understanding major cities such as London and New York, which derive ever-larger portions of their centrality from their function in the global economy at large. Despite a number of earlier attempts to devise alternative frameworks, it was only when such cities came to be interpreted, first as international financial centres (Cohen 1981), then as world cities (Friedmann 1986), and further as global cities (Sassen 1991), that a literature emerged in which the study of cities, or some at least, gradually broke free of state-centric interpretations (for example, Rozenblat and Pumain 1993). Taylor’s (2004) theoretical and empirical research in the context of the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) research group and network has especially brought the relevance of a ‘global network approach’ to centre stage. Drawing on the work of Sassen (2001, 2002), Taylor maintains that one of the most powerful examples of the new geographies of contemporary globalization relates to the fact that major international financial and business centres across the world are interlinked in a single urban network. The intensity of transnational transactions among these cities – particularly through financial markets and transactions in advanced corporate services – has augmented sharply throughout the last two decades. Taylor’s basic contention, therefore, is that major cities increasingly draw their functional centrality from their connections with other cities across the world. As a consequence, in recent years, cities have increasingly been studied as nodes in .