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Mobility, diversity and community in the global city

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Mobility, Diversity and Community
in the Global City
INTRODUCTION
The notion of ‘global city’ has a central
place in understanding contemporary spatial
patterns of globalization: the ways it impacts
on local life is nowhere more visible than in
the global city. The global city is therefore
the main physical and geographic play-
ground of the globalizing forces: in this
space of population concentration and mix-
ing, the global flows of people, capital and
ideas are woven into the daily lived experi-
ences of its residents. Cultural diversity, a key
marker of the global city and a consequence
of human mobility and migration, is usually
detected on the surface as a ‘cosmopolitan
feel’: the global city’s ‘natives’ encountering
and engaging daily with a variety of immi-
grants and visitors. The result is ‘cosmopoli-
tan’ consumption, ‘cosmopolitan’ work
culture, global networking and ‘glocal’
transnational community relations. Global
city represents and in many ways contains
the world in a bounded space. This means
that many global problems, contradictions,
26_Steger et al_Ch-26-Part-VI.indd 433
26
Va l C o l i c - P e i s k e r
hostilities and inequalities also find expression
amidst the teeming verve of the global city.
Cosmopolitanism is a phenomenon most
readily associated with the global city: large,
diverse cities attract people, material and
cultural products from all over the world.
The idea of cosmopolitanism usually invokes
pleasant images of travel, exploration and
‘worldly’ pursuits enjoyed by those who
have benefited from globalization and who
can, in some ways, consider themselves ‘citi-
zens of the world’. In the capitalist context,
such cosmopolitanism often focuses on con-
sumption in global cities, where everyday
life is significantly shaped by commercial
culture, retail and shopping (Zukin, 1998:
827). Ceaselessly on offer is a cross-cultural
variety of food, fashion, entertainment and
various other consumables and artefacts. The
promise and allure of cosmopolitan con-
sumption is familiar to the dweller of any
large twenty-first century city. To start from
the most visceral type of consumption, the
availability of food from diverse culinary
traditions is taken for granted: a feature of
29-Apr-14 3:28:40 PM
 434 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF GLOBALIZATION
the global city that can be seen, smelt and
tasted, and is always the first to feature in
tourist brochures. The global city also pro-
vides a cosmopolitan variety of cultural
products, in order to attract and satisfy those
with cross-cultural curiosity keen to engage
with ‘otherness’, as well as immigrants who
fight their feeling of displacement by engag-
ing with their ‘original cultures’ through mov-
ies, music and other events, in the company of
their compatriots. Hollywood and Bollywood
nowadays coexist in every global metropolis,
and ‘world music’ is on offer alongside ‘clas-
sical music’ of the concert halls.
However, the cosmopolitan consumption
in all its richness and variety that a global city
has to offer requires time and money, and as
an idea from tourist brochures it is vastly
overstated if we consider the everyday lived
reality of (sub)urban dwellers. Among the lat-
ter, most are short of either the time or money
required for the full enjoyment of the benefits
of living in and ‘consuming’ the global city.
Tourists, a constant and visible presence in
global cities, are the only people fully devoted
to cosmopolitan consumption during their
short, hyper-mobile un-reality known as
‘(overseas) holiday’. A time-rich and genteel
local flâneur, devoted to sophisticated
urban(e) enjoyments, is nowadays a thing of
the past, if it ever was more than a Western
middle-class reverie (Featherstone, 1998).
In the age of the Internet, Featherstone
(1998: 921) suggests, he (the flâneur was
normally a man – not even today do women
enjoy the same freedom to idly roam the city
by themselves) may be replaced by an ‘elec-
tronic flâneur’ who no doubt enjoys much
greater mobility in the virtual reality, and
where s/he can be in the virtual presence of
others through social media. How do Internet
hyper-connectedness and mobility relate to
the global city? Featherstone suggests the
‘data city’, an infinitely ‘reconstructable city
of bits’. Clearly, however, this is a new qual-
ity of which we still have to make sense.
Recent research shows, unsurprisingly, that
the old lives in the new: Internet networking
mostly takes place between people in close
26_Steger et al_Ch-26-Part-VI.indd 434
geographical proximity and in most cases has
a purpose of eventually meeting others face
to face.
For most people, everyday life in a global
city is likely to include at least some down-
sides: high housing costs, long working
hours, competitive and precarious labour
market, long commuting times, urban ano-
nymity and a relative social isolation, a fear
of strangers and crime after (or even before)
dark, residential hyper-mobility and, as the
flipside of anonymity, the challenges of prac-
ticing neighbourliness and multiculturalism
in close propinquity to ‘diverse’ neighbours.
Therefore, global city can be a dream but
also a nightmare. Global city attracts migrants
and visitors but it does not accept all new-
comers with the same welcome and it does
not treat all its residents with the same
benevolence. Globe-trotting business people
and highly paid professionals may be living
a cosmopolitan dream, at least in short epi-
sodes, while mostly hidden from sight in the
global city are its marginal dwellers: sweat-
shop workers, poorly paid labour in the grey
economy, asylum seekers, undocumented
immigrants, women trafficked for sex work,
drug dealers and addicts, the homeless.
Global cities are hubs of innovation, creativ-
ity and productivity and the creators of new
trends and fashions, but also concentrations
of demi-monde and social ills of all kinds.
Urban life, and especially life in large
metropolises, has been celebrated as the pin-
nacle of civilization, but also deplored and
decried as harmful, polluting, ruthless, stress-
ful and ‘unnatural’, alienating people from
the natural milieu and from each other
(Tönnies, 1889/1957; Simmel, 1903/1971).
Concerns about the effect of crowds and
mental overstimulation on the individual do
not seem to belong just to old-fashioned
views of romantically inclined sociologists
but also found confirmation in recent
research.1 Many classic cinematic and liter-
ary works portray the great ‘city lights’
attracting newcomers from smaller commu-
nities, only to have their dreams shattered
and their ambitions crushed.
29-Apr-14 3:28:40 PM
 MOBILITY, DIVERSITY AND COMMUNITY
Keeping in mind the contradictions and
polarities of the global city in the contempo-
rary context, this chapter focuses on the
issues of mobility, diversity and community.
The discussion of mobility focuses on the
tension between capitalist economic dyna-
mism that ruthlessly demands flexibility and
movement and people’s inherent need for
stability, sociality and community connect-
edness. The discussion of diversity considers
the intercultural contact and demographic
variety as prominent features of the ‘global
city’, connecting them with the issues of
mobility and community central to this chap-
ter’s analysis.
WHAT IS ‘GLOBAL CITY’?
It is barely surprising that the idea of ‘global
city’ emerged in the social science literature
in the 1980s, shortly after the concept of glo-
balization captured the social scientific
imagination, becoming one of its most pow-
erful notional gravitational pulls (Gilpin,
2000). However, the idea of global city was
hardly new at the time, and as a phenome-
non, global cities, either as centres of impe-
rial power or ‘free cities’ at the crossroads of
international merchant routes, existed since
ancient times. More recently, the concept
was preceded by the idea of ‘world city’.
Roderick McKenzie, a Chicago academic,
conceptualized a global network of cities as
early as 1927 (Acuto, 2011: 2956).
In order to be able to imagine, observe and
define global city, one first needs to be able
to imagine the world, the globe, as one entity.
This is not difficult today, with all its graphic,
visual and conceptual representations, and
with a constant debate on ‘global issues’ in
the realm of economics, security and the
environment. Yet, arguing why and how the
human globe, the global society, is one, or
should be one, remains difficult. Since the
1980s, when the globalization paradigm
started to dominate social sciences, it has
produced ongoing conceptual and ideologi-
cal disputes. Conceptually, the meaning and
26_Steger et al_Ch-26-Part-VI.indd 435
435
timing of globalization have been debated;
ideologically, the apologists and critics of
globalization keep arguing about who bene-
fits from the intensification of the intercon-
nectedness of economic, political, cultural
and environmental processes and transforma-
tions of the late twentieth and early twenty-
first centuries (Bauman, 1998; Beck, 2000;
Hobsbawm et al., 1999; Wallerstein, 1989).
During this time, there have been attempts
to shun the traditional approach of social sci-
ences as an obsolete ‘methodological nation-
alism’ dictating a (nation-state) ‘container
model’ of society, unfit for the ‘global age’
where trans-nationalism, porous borders and
global interdependency were said to condi-
tion all social processes and prompt social
change (Faist, 2000; Wimmer and Glick-
Schiller, 2003). While the nation-state no
doubt remains a powerful institution shaping
not only global macro-processes but also
everyday lives of its citizens, its power is
increasingly relative and steered by global
forces, primarily economic in nature, but also
geo-political, cultural and environmental.
Like many other phenomena of the ‘global
era’, the global city also escapes the full con-
trol of the nation state – although each global
city is also a national city, its significance as
a trans-national and ‘cosmopolitan’ hub goes
beyond its ‘host nation’. In fact, through
global cities the nation-states project their
significance onto the global stage.
What, therefore, is the ‘global city’? This
question may be easier to approach from an
empirical angle: we can ask which cities are
‘global’, and why? In her seminal work on
the topic, Saskia Sassen (1991) identified
only three global cities: New York, London
and Tokyo. This choice indicated that the
criteria for the status of the global city were,
unsurprisingly, primarily economic: global
cities, according to Sassen, are the ‘com-
mand centres’, the main nodes of triumphant
global capitalism (even more triumphant and
global after the fall of its only real-life com-
petitor – communism – at that time). Sassen
(1991: 5) argued that ‘the more globalised
the economy becomes, the higher the
29-Apr-14 3:28:40 PM
 436 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF GLOBALIZATION
agglomeration of central functions in a rela-
tively few sites’ – that is, the global cities.
Twenty years later the three cities are still the
main financial centres, and their respective
stock exchanges and indices – New York’s
Wall Street, London’s ‘Footsie’ (the informal
name for FTSE 100 Index of the largest
listed companies) and Tokyo’s Nikkei, are
concepts familiar even to those with no inter-
est in global finance. Sharon Zukin (1998:
826), taking a ‘cultural view’ of the issue, put
New York, London and Paris at the top of the
‘urban cultural hierarchy’ in terms of cultural
innovation and ability to attract visitors.
Two decades after Sassen’s (1991) book
launched the concept, other cities, primarily
in up-and-coming Asia, started to enjoy the
status of global cities where primarily finan-
cial, but also other ‘productive services’ such
as information technology, law and account-
ancy, are concentrated (Sassen, 1991: 5).
Therefore the ‘things’ that are produced in a
global city are not primarily material: large
manufacturing agglomerations are now
invariably placed outside global cities, nor-
mally in the slum-ridden ‘megacities’ of the
‘Third World’. In fact, it seems that one of
the conditions of the status of global city is to
stop making things and switch to handling
and shifting money and ideas.
Global cities are decidedly post-industrial:
Shanghai, for example, previously a state-
controlled socialist industrial powerhouse,
claimed its global city status when chimneys
started to be replaced by steel-and glass sky-
scrapers, home to finance, commerce and
research and development, facilitated by
massive foreign capital inflows (Wu, 2000).
Singapore is another recent addition to the
global city club, with its efficient global
transport infrastructure and growing profes-
sional service sector. The development of the
city-state of Singapore into a global city
neatly reflects the growing global impor-
tance of the Asia-Pacific region (Baum,
1999: 1097).
Zukin describes the process of switching
to a ‘service economy’ as a ‘cultural turn’ in
the advanced societies where a ‘symbolic
26_Steger et al_Ch-26-Part-VI.indd 436
economy’, based on abstract products such
as financial instruments, information and
‘culture’ (arts, fashion, music, etc.), has
increasing importance. Such ‘symbolic pro-
duction’ by knowledge workers does not
produce smoke, smell, noise or visible
motion and is therefore largely invisible. As
a consequence, global cities are no longer
experienced as ‘landscapes of production’
but as ‘landscapes of consumption’ (Zukin,
1998: 825). Indeed, they are places where
consumer culture reaches its late-Western
paroxysm. Even if the cities are not Western,
the consumer culture definitely remains
an invention of the affluent West (Humphery,
2010).
Perhaps the most famous, and of late also
notorious, symbolic products created in the
command posts of global capitalism are
‘financial products’, the inflation and then
implosion of which triggered the ‘global
financial crisis’ in 2008. Apart from being
financial centres, global cities are also con-
centrations of geopolitical power, and cul-
tural and trendsetting powerhouses, higher
education hubs and playgrounds of creative
industries, such as arts, fashion and design.
They therefore create a specific labour
demand – its key workforce is the profes-
sional class which, according to Sassen
(1991: 280), constituted only five per cent of
New York residents at the beginning of the
twentieth century but grew to 30 per cent by
the late 1980s. These ‘knowledge workers’
are not necessarily part of the core wealth
and power elite of global capitalism, but are
a highly (globally) mobile, career-minded
middle class (Colic-Peisker, 2010). Their
burgeoning presence in global cities, along-
side withdrawal of manufacturing and its
working class, lead to gentrification of previ-
ously industrial inner-city neighbourhoods
over the past half-century. Gentrification is at
the same time a process of social class polar-
ization and residential segregation of the
affluent from the poor. According to Zukin
(1998: 835) gentrification and consumption
of the gentrifiers drives a ‘wedge between
urban social classes’. The lifestyle and needs
29-Apr-14 3:28:40 PM
 MOBILITY, DIVERSITY AND COMMUNITY
of the well-off professional classes bring into
the global city an army of low-paid workers
who deliver personal and labour-intensive
services: cleaning, child-care, delivery, res-
taurants and eateries, catering, maintenance,
transport, hotels, domestic help and retail
(Sassen, 1991; Zukin, 1998: 831, 835).
According to Sassen (1991), global cities
are characterized by occupational and income
polarization, with the highly paid profes-
sional class on the one end and providers of
low-paid services on the other. Instead of
being egg-shaped, with those in the middle
being a majority, the labour market of global
cities is increasingly ‘hourglass-shaped’ ,
with a hollow middle (Autor et al., 2006;
Baum, 1999). The polarization of the ser-
vice-dominated post-industrial labour market
is reflected in the polarization of housing
markets. Gentrified inner city and other
attractive, well-connected and services-rich
areas have expensive real estate because in a
highly developed and sensitive housing mar-
ket (a ‘thick’, dynamic housing market with
much supply and demand) the attractive
features and advantages of an urban area end
up being readily capitalized into higher
property prices. The opposite happens with
less attractive and less liveable outer areas
with fewer job opportunities and services
(Wood, 2004). Given that most people (at
least in home-ownership English-speaking
societies) have most of their wealth stored in
their homes, the polarized housing markets
exacerbate general socio-economic inequality
(Wood, 2004).
The global cities that attract large popula-
tion intakes have high real-estate prices and
as a consequence of population growth suffer
falling housing affordability. This is espe-
cially noticeable in Australia over the past
decade of very high immigration intakes
(Wood, 2004). Zhong, Clark and Sassen
(2007) used census data for all US metro
areas to support their argument that income
polarization is mostly present in large gate-
way cities, where large immigration intakes
tend to depress wages at the bottom of the
labour market. This section of the large urban
26_Steger et al_Ch-26-Part-VI.indd 437
437
labour markets now comprises the most flex-
ible labour – those who hold casual and
insecure jobs, often in the grey economy. Of
course, the polarization argument should be
applied with caution, as every city, however
‘global’, has its local, national and regional
contexts that colour and condition economic
and social processes driven primarily, but not
solely, by economic globalization (Baum,
1999). In Singapore and Shanghai for exam-
ple, the processes of globalization are far less
laissez-faire than in the ‘Western’ cities and
are in fact tightly managed by the state
(Baum, 1999; Wu, 2000). Singapore’s dual
industrial strategy, where ‘up-market’ manu-
facturing is kept alongside burgeoning pro-
fessional services, lessened the workforce
polarization effect (Baum, 1999).
In the twenty-first century, the list of global
cities expanded to encompass cities across
Asia, and few cities in other parts of the
world. According to Japanese Mori
Foundation’s Global Power City Index, the
global power of cities is measured by a com-
bination of six criteria: economy, research
and development, cultural interaction, livea-
bility, environment and accessibility (Mori
Memorial Foundation, 2011: 1). The top five
cities according to these criteria are New
York, London, Paris, Tokyo and Singapore.
Of course, there are different rankings and
criteria and this one cannot be considered
definitive. Ultimately, according to the Mori
Foundation, cities deserve their global status
through their ‘“magnetism”: a comprehensive
power to attract creative people and excellent
companies from around the world amidst
accelerated interurban competition’ (2011: 1).
The main thesis of a recent book by Italian-
American economist Enrico Moretti (2012) is
in agreement with such a view: he argues that
the most important twenty-first century cities
are those which represent ‘brain hubs’, that is,
concentrations of innovative people and
firms, and are also good ‘human ecosystems’
for cutting-edge businesses, providing all the
support functions or ‘secondary services’ for
the innovators (Moretti, 2012: 133, 247;
Solimano, 2006).
29-Apr-14 3:28:40 PM
 438 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF GLOBALIZATION
Moretti (2012) argues, alongside many
other economists, that the continuation of the
success of Western economies nowadays
hinges on the ‘knowledge economy’: the
creation of new ideas, technologies and prod-
ucts (2012: 5, 40–1). A more novel aspect of
his argument is that even more than tradi-
tional industries, the ‘knowledge economy’
has an inherent tendency towards geographi-
cal agglomeration. This goes against the
widely accepted view that Internet communi-
cation makes the place of work irrelevant.
According to economist Moretti (2012: 5,
144) as well as sociologist Florida (2005: 29)
the geographic ‘economies of scale’ remain
relevant, because larger ‘brain concentra-
tions’ have a ‘thicker labour market’ – a high
supply of professionals and a high demand
for them, with a possibility to fast recruit,
which is critical in the ‘time-driven and hori-
zontal’ knowledge economy – and a more
specialized supply of business services, as
well as more opportunities for what they call
‘knowledge spillovers’. The latter means, in
a nutshell, that creative people thrive in the
company of other creative people and tend to
stagnate in isolation, even if Internet-
connected.
The role of cities as critical concentrations
of people and hubs of exchange of products
and ideas is not new: they have been the
engine of civilization since the beginning of
history. Focusing on the United States,
Moretti adds a new dimension to the global
cities debate, identifying the most important
American cities not primarily as financial
hubs but rather as thriving hubs of digital
innovation, and opposes them to ‘struggling
cities’ with low human capital base, that is, a
low proportion of university graduates in the
population. The main brain hubs with more
than half of their population with college
degrees are Silicon Valley (San Francisco–
San Jose area) the home ground of the digital
era giants such as Google and Apple, fol-
lowed by Washington DC, Boston and Seattle.
Moretti (2012) further develops the thesis
about growing polarization of the labour mar-
ket, not just between cities and regions but
26_Steger et al_Ch-26-Part-VI.indd 438
also within large cities (2012: 164): he calls it
the ‘Great Divergence’ and marks the 1980s
as its beginning (2012: 4). While American
cities may be less racially segregated that a
few decades ago, he argues, they are becom-
ing increasingly segregated by education and
earnings. Moretti argues that workers in the
dynamic brain hubs have two to three times
higher earnings than their equally qualified
counterparts in the stagnating ‘rust belt’ cit-
ies. The brain hubs are also good at attracting
the best and brightest from around the world,
while low-skilled immigrants typically go to
the low-tech cities (2012: 93).
This leads us to the issue of mobility.
MOBILITY, MIGRATION AND THE
GLOBAL CITY: ATTRACTING THE
‘CREATIVE CLASS’
Over the past three decades, the globalization
of the labour markets has created a new type
of professional nomadism. Being a dynamic
hub of the global capitalist economy and, to
use Bauman’s (2005, 2007) term, a highly
‘liquid’ environment, makes the global city a
crucible of demographic and social change; a
hub of ‘creative destruction’ that, according
to Moretti (2012: 148), characterizes suc-
cessful market economies. A high level of
economic dynamism, and accompanying
population mobility, are considered signs of
economic health: it has been somewhat of a
mantra that the ‘competitive economy’
requires a ‘flexible workforce’. Submitted to
the requirements of competitiveness and
mobility are both businesses and employees.
Globalization has not only created the
global labour market, causing an increase in
transnational mobility and migration, but has
simultaneously affected local labour markets
(Castles and Miller, 2003). Employment
mobility has been markedly increasing since
the early 1970s, especially in the English-
speaking countries which are the most
dynamic in this respect. In the twenty-first
century, a loyal ‘company man’ and a ‘job for
life’ are largely matters of the past. Moretti
29-Apr-14 3:28:40 PM
 MOBILITY, DIVERSITY AND COMMUNITY
(2012: 155) considers the United States as a
hyper-mobile outlier among relatively seden-
tary developed countries (he compares his
native Italy where generations of the same
family live in the same city, and often in the
same suburb or street), but in fact all English-
speaking countries have considerably higher
mobility – residential and job mobility, which
are interconnected – than anywhere else.
Overall, the service sector is inherently more
dynamic and flexible than the manufacturing
sector which shrunk dramatically in the
English-speaking countries post the 1973 ‘oil
shock’, while some other developed countries,
such as Singapore and Germany for example,
decided to keep it going. The importance and
reputation of global cities is largely built on
their ability to attract the key professional and
innovative workforce, as well as investors, but
also to have all the other necessary workers,
including those in the low-skilled, poorly-paid
service sector, at hand and on demand.
The highly educated are the most footloose
section of the population: the professional
middle classes, having in general more control
and autonomy in their workplace, and a ten-
dency to understand their working life as a
‘career’, often change jobs and many are ready
to relocate to another city or country (Colic-
Peisker 2010; Moretti, 2012: 155). They move
largely by their own plan and career design.
The lower-skilled service workers often move
jobs by necessity, but are not as ready to move
between cities and countries. These two sec-
tions of the increasingly polarized workforce
fit nicely into the classical conceptual dichot-
omy of ‘cosmopolitans vs. locals’ proposed by
Merton back in the 1950s and further devel-
oped by Gouldner in the late 1970s. Merton’s
(1968: 447–74) dichotomy was placed in the
context of ‘latent social roles’ in the commu-
nity, and Gouldner (1989) applied it to formal
organizations. The community life of ‘locals’
was preoccupied with local problems, while
‘cosmopolitans’ (Gouldner, 1989: 401, calls
them ‘itinerants’) were, using Merton’s (1968:
448) expression, more ‘ecumenical’ and sought
social status outside the local community, usu-
ally from their professional peers, because
26_Steger et al_Ch-26-Part-VI.indd 439
439
their local community could neither validate
nor reward their professional competence. By
extension, cosmopolitans were more mobile
(Merton, 1968: 449). Clearly, the world needs
both types, those more rooted and those easily
detached, but the globalized capitalist econ-
omy favours and rewards the highly qualified
and the mobile.
The international education market, which
nowadays moves considerable middle-class
populations of young people across the globe,
represents a significant potential of the ‘crea-
tive class’ in large, attractive cities. According
to OECD (2012) the international tertiary
education market has grown fourfold since
1975, reflecting the economic interconnect-
edness of the globe and creation of a veritable
global labour market. All cities worthy of the
‘global city’ title are nowadays also magnets
for international students. The synergies
between education, research and industry are
crucial for global capitalism and its global
‘nodes’; these synergies therefore seem to be
crucial in achieving a global city status in the
twenty-first ‘knowledge’ century. Following
Moretti’s (2012) argument presented above, it
is plausible that global cities indeed need to
be brain hubs and good human ecosystems
attracting and retaining the creative class.
Richard Florida in his work on the ‘creative
class’ (2005: 27) presents a similar argument
about the ‘critical functions of cities and
regions in 21st century creative capitalism’
(2005: 27), also arguing that ‘geography is
not dead’, as it was predicted in the 1990s,
because of the reach of Internet connected-
ness. Therefore, cities remain the critical
‘incubators of creativity’ by attracting the
crucial workforce of the ‘creative capitalism’
(Florida, 2005: 29). This is further elaborated
below, using the case studies of the two larg-
est Australian cities, Sydney and Melbourne.
DIVERSITY AND COMMUNITY IN THE
GLOBAL CITY
In a sociological sense, diversity is a rather
vague and ambiguous, context-dependent
29-Apr-14 3:28:40 PM
 440 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF GLOBALIZATION
concept, at the same time carrying positive
and negative connotation. In government
documents and speeches of politicians in
high-immigration countries (all English-
speaking countries belong to this category) it
is usually presented as a potential for both
positive and negative outcomes. As a posi-
tive, diversity represents potential for suc-
cessful merging of cultures and ideas, what
usually comes under the label ‘cosmopoli-
tan’. There is no cosmopolitanism without
diversity. Although these two concepts are
often associated and taken to have a large
overlap in meaning, they may also carry very
different and even opposite meanings.
Namely, as a negative, diversity can mean a
potential for fracturing social cohesion and
social capital, as well as a synonym for disad-
vantage of those seen as ‘diverse’ or ‘Others’.
For example, over the past decade the
Australian government bureaucracies have
used the formula ‘linguistically and cultur-
ally diverse’ (CALD) to describe disadvan-
taged immigrant minorities: refugees, asylum
seekers, temporary labour migrants and
international students hoping to secure the
famous ‘PR’ (permanent residence) – in short
everyone whose hopes for a better life
encounter significant barriers and are not
always fulfilled. From the perspective of
‘natives’ (the Australian-born, and especially
Anglo-Australians), visible and ‘audible’
diversity can cause discomfort about the
increasingly assertive presence of the ‘Other’
in their midst (Ang, 2001). Concentrations of
‘diversity’ (CALD-high areas) are therefore
also areas of socio-economic disadvantage in
main Australian immigration gateway cities
Sydney and Melbourne. Middle and outer
suburbs with high manufacturing employ-
ment in the past, now areas with few job
opportunities, also areas with scant presence
of services – good schools, hospitals and
other essential institutions – and therefore
suffering ‘traffic disadvantage’ – long com-
muting times to jobs and services. All immi-
grant-attracting global gateways therefore
contain populations, economic concentra-
tions and social stratifications that reflect and
26_Steger et al_Ch-26-Part-VI.indd 440
perpetuate global inequalities. Many recently
arrived immigrants, especially those in the
‘CALD’ category coming from globally
peripheral destinations, often lead precarious
lives in global cities, working in the grey
economy, experiencing occupational down-
grading, poor housing and employment and
housing instability.
Apart from their economic importance, the
visible cultural and community features of
global cities are also relevant for their global
role. Global cities are home to a diverse and
visible set of protagonists of the ‘urban life-
style’: artists, bohemians, new media design-
ers, gay and youth subcultures, university
students and immigrants, creating a remarka-
ble and also highly visible ‘ethnic’ and cul-
tural diversity. These groups with their more
of less ‘alternative’ and eclectic lifestyles have
a natural home in ‘global cities’, and exert a
singular influence in defining various urban
subcultures, often giving character to certain
areas within big cities. Florida (2005: 113–14)
and many earlier urban anthropologists and
sociologists, starting from the early twentieth
century Chicago School, saw the connection
between bohemian and alternative lifestyles
and alternative urban enclaves with the gen-
eral urban vibrancy and creativity – the crea-
tivity that can nowadays be channelled into
the ‘core’ knowledge economy of the ‘creative
capitalism’. The importance of the colourful
bohemian ‘cool’ for cities – for example a
city’s thriving music scene or its openness to
gays – transcends its tourist attraction value
and can be, according to Florida (2005: 114),
directly linked to high-tech and innovation
industries and economic growth. What is not
entirely new is capitalism’s ability to suck
creative juices out of bohemia and commer-
cialize its creative ideas. This is eminently
feasible in global cities, where concentrations
of ‘alternative’ creativity share geographical
locations with commercial knowledge-based
industries and concentrations of capital look-
ing for investment.
According to Zukin (1998: 837), urban
cultural diversity is a ‘creative mirror’ to the
paradox of economic polarization, because
29-Apr-14 3:28:40 PM
 MOBILITY, DIVERSITY AND COMMUNITY
cities continue to attract the extremes of
poor, migrant and footloose populations, but
also the affluent and the super rich. Global
cities, the modern Babylons, buzz with
action, mixing diversity and excitement, pro-
viding freedom and anonymity. Within this
colourful urban diversity also reside different
types of marginalities based on gender, eth-
nicity, culture and class: single mothers, les-
bians, recent immigrant and refugee groups,
backpackers, the homeless, the elderly, all
those who indeed cannot be so readily inte-
grated into the dominant economic para-
digm. Their social purpose is therefore in the
realm of community – usually rather mar-
ginal and mutually segregated communities
sharing geographical places but not lifestyles
and life-worlds. One of the flipsides of this is
that coexistence of various disparate groups
does not constitute a wider city community,
and fragmentation born out of diversity
rarely leads to active citizenship.
Consumption, style, work and commercial-
ized leisure take priority over public and
civic concerns as long as the urban space is
functional for a majority of its residents.
Featherstone (1998: 912) asks whether ‘[it is]
possible to see new forms of citizenship and
responsibility for others as capable of being
generated from broader cosmopolitan identi-
fications and the tolerance of diversity?’
How do the issues of community and civic
life coexist with the extreme dynamism and
movement of the global city, and the inherent
anonymity of (sub)urban spaces? Nurturing
communities requires considerable and sus-
tained effort, as well as stability, while mobil-
ity is seen as imperative in global capitalism
which relies on competitive individualism to
provide its impetus and motivation. This ide-
ological set-up is the most pronounced
in English-speaking societies. Hobsbawm
(1994: 342) described the USA and Britain as
the ‘ultra-free-market states’, implying high
mobility. In this context, according to
Bauman (2007: 2), ‘community’ [...] sounds
increasingly hollow because inter-human
bonds that require a ‘large and continuous
investment of time and effort’, and are worth
26_Steger et al_Ch-26-Part-VI.indd 441
441
the sacrifice of immediate individual interest,
are increasingly frail and temporary. Sennett
(1998: 24) expressed the same sentiment
when he talked about deeper ‘social bonds
[that] take time to develop, slowly rooting
into the cracks and crevices of institutions’ –
for which there is little time in twenty-first
century capitalism. People are not sociable
and generous with their time if the ever-
present systemic message is that time can,
and should, be readily exchanged for money.
The hyper-dynamic, economically successful
capitalism, according to Bauman (2007: 3),
leaves no room for longue durée projects:
political histories, as well as individual lives,
are a series of short-term projects and epi-
sodes. Sennett (1998: 10) asked ‘how can
long-term goals be pursued in an economy
devoted to the short term’ and ‘how can
mutual loyalties and commitments be sus-
tained in institutions which are constantly
breaking apart or continually being rede-
signed’? The shifting and ‘liquid’ life in the
global city leaves little firm ground for any-
one to lodge an anchor. Those ‘locals’
devoted to nurturing and serving community
life: solidarity, mutual support and care, have
to be ready to abandon the short attention
span of competitive capitalism and therefore
competition itself.
Hypermobility of competitive cosmopoli-
tans does not allow much room for commu-
nity life (Colic-Peisker, 2010). Dwellers of
the global city, regardless of the population
density, are likely to be spatially and emo-
tionally detached from their neighbours and
co-locals, and devoted to their professional
pursuits, that usually require them to be highly
connected and ‘networked’ in an instrumental
way, these days increasingly through the
Internet. Bauman diagnosed a ‘disintegration
of locally grounded, shared community living’
(Bauman, 2005: 78) and argued that commu-
nity has been largely replaced by ‘network: a
matrix of random connections and disconnec-
tions’. The intensity and anonymity of the
global city is likely to liberate the individual
from the constraints imposed by community
control and community obligations that mark
29-Apr-14 3:28:40 PM
 442 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF GLOBALIZATION
the contexts of dense social bonds. The resi-
dents of a global city are likely to live in a
fragmented and atomized social world
(Bauman, 2005: 14) where self-responsibil-
ity increasingly substitutes for social solidar-
ity. The latter is epitomized not only in
informal communities but also in the welfare
state, whose care has been reduced over the
past decades (Bauman, 2005, 2007; Sennett,
1998). It is symptomatic that more and more
often academic and political jargons resort to
the concept of ‘social capital’, with its capi-
talistic and economic undertones of calcula-
bility, precision and a possibility of
investment and returns, rather than to the
more complex and ‘softer’ concept of com-
munity, when referring to local and everyday
forms of human connectedness. In the highly
mobile, competitive and individualist con-
text, community care, civic responsibility
and common good become secondary con-
siderations (Kelly et al., 2012). The socio-
economic dynamic of the global city gives
primacy to the consumer culture instead,
which promises instantaneous gratification
and happiness.
GLOBAL CITIES AT THE END OF THE
WORLD? THE CASE OF SYDNEY AND
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
The last section of this chapter is devoted to
a case study of the two largest Australian cit-
ies, Sydney and Melbourne, in an attempt to
further illuminate the above presented con-
ceptual framework and analytical debates.
Let’s start with a pertinent question – are
Sydney and Melbourne global cities at all? In
terms of their size and economic perfor-
mance, they are no doubt important cities,
not only in the national context but also glob-
ally. Having started as remote British colo-
nial outposts in the early nineteenth century,
they grew into significant cities by the end of
the century, as the mid-century Gold Rush
attracted large numbers of immigrants. This
was a time when the New World cities in the
main countries of immigration (USA,
26_Steger et al_Ch-26-Part-VI.indd 442
Argentina and Australia) grew at a rate only
matched by some British cities and several
top German industrial cities (Hobsbawm,
1996/1975: 196).
In the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, the Gold Rush turned Melbourne,
alongside Chicago, into the fastest growing
New World city. Melbourne reached half a
million inhabitants in the 1880s and by 1890
it entered the league of the top 20 largest cit-
ies in the world ((Hobsbawm, 1989: 20;
Hobsbawm, 1996/1975: 196, 211). As the
Gold Rush ended, Melbourne stagnated and
Sydney gradually took over as the largest
Australian city. After the 1901 federation of
the British colonies in Australia into a unified
new nation, the Commonwealth of Australia,
the rivalry between the two cities developed
as a permanent feature of the economic and
cultural landscape. At federation, it could not
be decided which city was to serve as the
federal capital and a new city (Canberra) had
to be built for that purpose (Melbourne
served as the Australian capital in the mean-
time, 1901–27).
Melbourne had another growth spurt at the
beginning of the twenty-first century, when it
surpassed Sydney in terms of its immigrant
inflows. ‘Greater Melbourne’ recorded the
largest growth of all capital cities between
2001 and 2011 Censuses, increasing by
647,200 people in this period, followed by the
‘Greater Sydney’, which was up by 477,600
people (ABS, 2012). In the 2011 Census the
two cities were very close in terms of their
population, four million in Melbourne and
4.4 million in Sydney (ABS, 2012).
In the historical as much as in the contem-
porary context, the geographical location of
the Australian continent can hardly be an
advantage in terms of global significance of
its two largest cities. When Australia is visu-
ally placed in the middle of the globe, the
only other lands on this Australia-focused
hemisphere are the Indonesian islands,
Indochina, New Zealand and a few small
Pacific island-states. This means that the rest
of the world is, literally, on the other side of
the earth. It takes a minimum of 20 hours in
29-Apr-14 3:28:41 PM
 MOBILITY, DIVERSITY AND COMMUNITY
a jumbo jet to reach Europe from either
Sydney or Melbourne, and 15 hours to reach
the west coast of the United States. Yet, the
world ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ is determined
more on the basis of economic and political
power than geographical location – although
the latter cannot be discounted as a factor, as
discussed above. It is with the reference to the
‘tyranny of distance’ and its remote geograph-
ical location that Australians developed their
‘cultural cringe’, the feeling of cultural inferi-
ority in relation to the distant metropolises. In
1990, one of the more colourful Australian
prime ministers described Australia as the
‘arse end of the world’. Admittedly, the dis-
tance was certain to cause a cultural lag in
relation to the faraway northern-hemisphere
metropolises at the time when news travelled
for weeks and months on transcontinental lin-
ers. Conversely, it can be claimed that the
distance has much diminished as a factor of
instantaneous and cheap electronic communi-
cation and relatively affordable air travel. This
is especially true in the case of Australians
who are in the club of rich nations and there-
fore able to traverse the globe not only virtu-
ally but also physically, which many are
indeed regularly doing. In spite of, or per-
haps because of, the tyranny of distance,
Australians are one of the best travelled
nations. Close to 700,000 Australians trav-
elled overseas ‘short term’ each month dur-
ing 2011–12 (ABS, 2012b).
Over recent years, Sydney has regularly
featured on various ‘global city lists’, unlike
Melbourne. In spite of their similar popula-
tions and economic outputs, as well as the
fact that most socio-economic indicators for
the two cities gleaned from the most recent
(2011) Census are comparable (Table 26.1),
over the past decades Sydney has achieved
the ‘first name familiarity’ and ‘single-photo
recognizability’ (through its famous land-
marks: Sydney Opera House, Sydney
Harbour Bridge) that Melbourne seems to
lack. Therefore one feels compelled to say
‘Melbourne, Australia’ rather than just
‘Melbourne’. Looking at average values
from the 2011 Census (Table 26.1),
26_Steger et al_Ch-26-Part-VI.indd 443
443
Sydneysiders are marginally richer than
Melbournians and somewhat more diverse in
the ethno-cultural sense, but the differences
are not significant. By their economic out-
puts, types of industries represented and the
diversity and mobility of their populations,
as well as the number of immigrant settlers
they attract, both cities can easily claim their
place in the global cities league.
One important difference however, that
cannot be discerned from the data on average
values, is the extent of social polarization, a
trend Sassen (1991) considered typical for
‘global cities’. Sydney has the proportion-
ately highest number of rich residents, but no
smaller proportion of homeless people than
Melbourne (Chamberlain and MacKenzie,
2008). Baum (1997) argued that the polariz-
ing forces of globalization exerted consider-
able influence in Sydney, as the city is the
most integrated into the global economy
among major Australian cities, primarily
through the presence of US and European
multinational corporations’ Asia-Pacific
regional headquarters (Baum, 1997: 1884). It
is noticeable from Baum’s (2008) more
recent analysis based on the 2006 Australian
Census that Sydney has considerably more
noticeable socio-economic spatial polariza-
tion, that is, a larger number of both richest
and most disadvantaged suburbs than
Melbourne, and any other Australian city for
that matter (Band 1 and Band 6 suburbs,
according to a General Deprivation Index
constructed on the basis of 16 select Census
variables). While Sydney has 37 suburbs in
Band 1 (most disadvantaged) and 48 suburbs
in Band 6 (most advantaged), Melbourne has
23 suburbs in Band 1 and only 4 suburbs in
Band 6 (Baum, 2008). The total number of
suburbs is higher for Sydney but the differ-
ence in polarization still stands when this is
taken into account.
At present, Melbourne’s main claim to
global importance is its image as a ‘knowl-
edge city’. According to the City of
Melbourne’s (2013) ‘Enterprise Melbourne’
website, ‘the City of Melbourne supports a
thriving information, communication and
29-Apr-14 3:28:41 PM
 444 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF GLOBALIZATION
technology (ICT) industry, from start-ups to
world-famous brands’.2 Melbourne’s ‘knowl-
edge city’ image has been heavily reliant on
its seven universities and a large, visible
presence of the international student popula-
tion, especially in the northern part of the
central business district where two universi-
ties are located creating a visibly cosmopoli-
tan ‘university precinct’. According to
‘Global University City Index’ created by
RMIT University (Royal Melbourne Institute
of Technology), Melbourne has been ranked
fifth among the global university cities,
behind London, Boston, Paris and Tokyo.
Sydney is close behind, ranked sixth (see
mams.rmit.edu.au/ddglvp4xqmgy.pdf). The
purpose of the index is described thus:
The Global University City Index highlights those
cities where there is confluence between their
size, liveability and connectedness, the number of
excellent universities within their bounds and
sustained investment in education and research.
These cities are home to knowledge workers and
research clusters that make them a significant
driving force of the knowledge economy.
Worldwide these cities are few in number.
Currently they are predominantly in the developed
world drawing on long relationships between the
city, industry and the academy […].
The Global University City Index ranking
uses four main criteria: 1. ‘Global university
recognition’ (meaning there should be at least
two high profile universities in the city, with
at least five per cent of international students
in the city’s student population and an ability
to attract offshore research investment at the
level of at least five per cent); 2. ‘Amenity’
(including ‘liveability’, that is, being ranked
in the top 100 liveable cities; ‘connectivity’,
that is, the prevalence of Internet use; and
‘population scale’, that is, in order to qualify
a city must be larger than two million people
‘to ensure scale, diversity and vibrancy’); 3.
‘Research inputs and performance’ (consist-
ing of ‘expenditure on research and develop-
ment’ as percentage of GDP expenditure;
patent grants and applications per million
residents; and commercialization of research
in the form of royalties and licence fees); and
26_Steger et al_Ch-26-Part-VI.indd 444
4.‘Education inputs and performance’ (meas-
ured by GDP expenditure on higher educa-
tion, student numbers and graduations). All
criteria and sub-criteria adopted in the Global
University City Index have been previously
developed in various international research
reports, mainly, but not exclusively, by vari-
ous UN agencies.
Melbourne also currently holds the honour
of winning the title of the world’s ‘most live-
able city’ in 2011 and 2012, in the ranking
created by The Economist Intelligence Unit
(EIU, 2012), where it won the competition
from an entry of 140 cities. Sydney was in
seventh place. Clearly, this is a specific rank-
ing (critics say with a heavy Anglo-bias) with
specific criteria (stability, healthcare, culture
and environment, education and infrastruc-
ture), while other existing rankings present a
different picture. For example, Melbourne
does not appear among the top ten in the
Mercer 2012 Quality of Living Survey, while
Sydney takes the tenth rank there (see www.
mercer.com.au/press-releases/quality-of-living-
report-2012). In most other rankings, the two
cities are not far from each other.
With its attractive and diverse natural
environment and glamorous city land-
marks, Sydney serves as one of the primary
attractions for overseas visitors and the
Australian port of entry for the largest
number of overseas arrivals. Melbourne’s
attractiveness is considered more subdued
and ‘sophisticated’ – Melbourne for tour-
ists and other visitors is often presented as
a gastronomic Mecca but also an artistic
city. Apart from a vibrant formal arts scene,
with many theatres, galleries and museums
and art festivals, it also claims to be the
global ‘street art capital’. The city centre, in
its many narrow lanes, indeed features an
impressive ‘permanent transience’ of graf-
fiti and murals, a living urban exhibition
being continuously ‘reassembled’ at random
short intervals for the enjoyment, wonder
and sometimes also outrage, of visitors and
locals. A peculiar distinction of the street art
is that it has long balanced on a thin line
between the outlawed ‘vandalism’ of the
29-Apr-14 3:28:41 PM
 MOBILITY, DIVERSITY AND COMMUNITY
city building’s façades and a legitimate and
democratic expression of its creative bohe-
mians and subalterns who have been unable,
or unwilling, to penetrate the ‘official’ arts
scene which, in its own way, exists in a con-
tradictory space straddling subversion, com-
mercialization and status-consciousness.
Just like in its demography, diversity is the
key word here: a large city, and especially a
‘metropolitan area’ is really many urban
communities in one, offering different forms
and varied contents of multicultural educa-
tion, entertainment, cultural tourism and
urban adventure.
The variety of ‘cosmopolitan’ cultural
diversity is the key to activeness of both cit-
ies. Not only their large migrant populations.
No fewer than 1.469 million Melbourne resi-
dents or 36.7 per cent of its population, were
born overseas; the equivalent figures for
Sydney are 1.759 million, constituting 40.1
per cent of its population (ABS, 2012a).
Such demographic composition ensures there
is a variety of cosmopolitan consumption on
offer, but multicultural population in itself
represents an attraction for their overseas
relatives and friends through the ongoing
transnational connections. The diversity of
the two cities is composed of slightly differ-
ent elements. For Melbourne, the main
source countries in the 2011 Census were
UK (166,000), India (107,000), China
(91,000), Italy (69,000), New Zealand/
Vietnam (67,000), while the top five origins
for Sydney’s overseas population were
England (152,000), China (149,000), India
(88,000), New Zealand (85,000) and Vietnam
(70,000). The high mobility in the two cities
is represented by large temporary and tran-
sient populations of international students at
seven universities in Melbourne and five in
Sydney; young travellers in Australia known
as ‘working holidaymakers’, a visa category
on a steep rise since its introduction in the
1990s. Working holidaymakers come to
Australia from 27 countries and represent
capitalism’s dream workforce: educated,
enthusiastic, cheap and flexible, that is, eas-
ily hired and fired. Other temporary migrant
26_Steger et al_Ch-26-Part-VI.indd 445
445
categories, including the controversial
‘skilled 457 visa’ bringing in a category of
‘guest workers’ on four-year visas since
1996, are also growing. Tourists and short-
term family visitors are a constant visible
presence in the two cities.
International students do not only increase
cultural diversity and ‘strengthen Australia’s
global networks’ (ABS, 2011: 1), but contrib-
ute considerably to Australia’s economy.
‘Education services’ are Australia’s largest
service export industry, and the second largest
overall, after mineral exports. In 2010,
470,000 international students studied in
Australia. In Australian tertiary education, on
average 22 per cent of students were foreign-
ers, which is by far the highest proportion in
OECD (the second is UK with 15 per cent of
international students at its universities).
Australia holds a large share of the interna-
tional student market (7 per cent in 2009) in
spite of being a small country population-wise
(ABS, 2011). Transnational connections with
Australian permanent residents are no doubt a
factor of attraction for international students,
and the fact that English is a global lingua
franca represents another important favour­able
factor. However, the global appeal of
Australia’s liveable and affluent cities should
not be discounted, especially given that, since
1999, when visa regulations were changed,
many international students arrive in Australia
with the ambition of eventually qualifying for
permanent residence (Marginson et al., 2010).
Like most ‘New World’ cities, Sydney and
even more Melbourne, are ‘low density’ cit-
ies: ‘Greater Melbourne’ occupies 9990 km²,
which translates into a population density of
400 people per km2. Three-quarters of
Melbournians are suburbanites living in
detached houses, and nearly two-thirds of
Sydneysiders. High mobility within metropoli-
tan areas coupled with high car dependence
causes both cities to suffer from traffic conges-
tion. Sydney’s traffic is notorious in this
respect and Melbourne’s woes are only mar-
ginally smaller. The HILDA Survey (Housing
and Labour Dynamics Australia) shows that
commuting times in the metropolitan areas
29-Apr-14 3:28:41 PM
 446 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF GLOBALIZATION

Table 26.1  Select Census indicators for Australia’s two largest cities

Personal Household
weekly weekly English only Labourers Professionals
Uni- median median spoken at (% of the (% of the Unemployed
educated income $ income $ home (%) 15+) 15+) (% of the 15+)

Australia 14.3 577 1,234 76.8 9.4 21.3 5.6

Greater 17.4 591 1,333 66.3 8.0 24.1 5.5
Melbourne
Greater Sydney 16.5 619 1,447 62.2 7.3 25.5 5.7

Source: ABS, 2011 Census, Basic Community Profiles (The incomes are in AuD).

are fast growing in the first decade of the
twenty-first century. A large majority of driv-
ers are frustrated with having to commute for
more than one hour each day on average.
This is a steadily decreasing element of both
cities’ liveability – a problem that they share
with all other large and affluent, automobile-
dependent cities.
Table 26.1 presents a snapshot of select
census variables for the two cities, mainly
focused on economic and socio-economic
indicators. The Australian national values are
provided as a reference. Overall, Sydney is
more diverse (a smaller proportion of people
who speak ‘English only’ at home) and
slightly richer on average. A smaller propor-
tion of ‘labourers’ (the bottom census occu-
pational category) in the labour force of
Sydney as compared with Melbourne may
mean a stronger emphasis on the service
economy; a slightly higher proportion of
‘professionals’ (the top census occupational
category) may indicate the same, although
some low-skilled services also include the
occupational category of ‘labourers’. Highest
incomes in Sydney may reflect higher cost of
living, especially housing.
CONCLUSION
Global Cities, Social Change and
‘Liquid Life’
Outside the advertising discourse of tourist
brochures and the upbeat rhetoric of local
politicians, the super-diverse global cities are
places that harbour many contradictions. On
the one hand, they are places where the
forces of capitalist neo-liberal globalization
have their stronghold, but on the other hand
they are crucibles of social change where
existing political, social and ideological cat-
egories and relationships are being con-
stantly challenged and transformed by
alternative lifestyles, ideas and movements.
Wherever one stands in the structure vs.
agency debate, it is clear that people and
their local communities are not mere puppets
of the powerful global economic and politi-
cal forces. While globalization endangers the
livelihoods of individuals, groups and even
nations, it also offers many opportunities,
and these are concentrated in global cities.
People therefore flock to these nodes of
global economy and society looking for busi-
ness and work opportunities, excitement,
adventure, change, creative pursuits, educa-
tion and various ‘cosmopolitan’ experiences.
Yet, not everyone finds luck, success and
fulfilment in global cities. Apparently, and in
spite of victorious discourse of its apologists,
the hyper-competitive capitalist globaliza-
tion inevitably creates winners and losers.
Some people have more agency than others,
and more power to withstand structural
forces pushing them in a certain direction due
to their gender, ethnicity, socio-economic
background, education, age group, and other
‘determinants’. Some others will inevitably
end up in sweatshops or even worse, as

26_Steger et al_Ch-26-Part-VI.indd 446 29-Apr-14 3:28:41 PM

 MOBILITY, DIVERSITY AND COMMUNITY
trafficked sex workers; some recent arrivals
and uninitiated visitors will end up as crime
statistics; some tourists will get robbed; a
majority of small business hopefuls will go
bankrupt; some immigrants will languish
unemployed, underemployed or not estab-
lishing themselves in the new place the way
they had hoped for; some of their children
will end up in youth gangs, or as drug
addicts, or homeless. The face that the global
city first shows to visitors and settlers is usu-
ally the dazzling face of affluence, historic
glory and ‘culture’, but some of them will
inevitably experience the dark side of the
global city.
In order to understand the social dynamics
of the global city, it is important to keep in
mind the ‘regular’ categories of winners and
losers in the competitive capitalist system,
rather than its accidental victims. According to
many authors, the winners in the global city
are those who take it on with consider­able
financial or human capital: money or knowl-
edge. Social capital – a network of useful
connections – is also very helpful. Many have
argued that the distance between winners and
losers seems to be increasing socially, but also
geographically and residentially. In terms of
global cities, they themselves win and lose,
wax and wane, depending on whether they
can attract innovative workforce and the right
kinds of immigrants.
Paraphrasing Bauman’s (2005: 1) argu-
ment, it can be said that the winners of capi-
talist globalization are those individuals,
communities, cities and nations that can cul-
tivate the ultimate virtue of flexibility in the
era of ‘liquid modernity’ – the society where
the frenetic pace of innovation and change
makes the ‘conditions under which its mem-
bers act change faster than it takes the ways
of acting to consolidate into habits and rou-
tines’ and where ‘a pool of choices’ at the
same time represents a ‘hotbed of uncertain-
ties’ (Bauman, 2007: 1). Those armed with
globally recognized professional credentials,
entrepreneurial spirit and cross-cultural com-
petence are the ultimately desirable ‘human
capital’ and the paragons of the ‘liquid life’:
26_Steger et al_Ch-26-Part-VI.indd 447
447
the model residents of global cities (Colic-
Peisker, 2010).
But those who are not thus endowed, and
perhaps coming from distant hinterlands with-
out educational and urban skills, may struggle
to keep afloat in the liquid modernity of the
global city. They may end up as unintentionally
flexible workforce in poorly paid, uncertain
causal jobs, or undocumented arrivals left to
the mercy of their employers and those provid-
ing their accommodation, sometimes working
in underground industries and in Third World
conditions, lingering on the social and eco-
nomic margins of the city. In spite of the acco-
lades given to the ‘knowledge workers’ and
innovators, the global city, and globalization
itself, could not work without those who end up
fulfilling the unglamorous but nonetheless
indispensable ‘low skilled services’.
The city lights have always attracted and
will continue to attract the young, the hope-
ful and the entrepreneurial, and the cities will
always be the history-making places. In the
early twenty-first century, one half of human-
kind lives in urban areas and this proportion
is bound to increase. However, the growth of
cities comprises very different pathways:
affluent global cities, able to attract financial
and human capital, will continue their
planned growth to increase their liveability
and global significance, and the gap between
them and the chaotic, slum-ridden megacities
of the Third World is likely to become wider
as a consequence of capitalist globalization.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1 In what ways are global cities ‘global? That is, in
what ways they reflect and represent global phe-
nomena and processes?
2 Apart from being ‘control centres’ and ‘focal
points’ of global capitalism, global cities also
harbour challenges to its logic and its global
domination. Can you provide some contemporary
examples?
3 Why do Florida (2005) and Moretti (2012) argue
that the ‘geography has not died’ in spite of the
universal reach of Internet connectedness, and
that being in certain places is as important as ever?
29-Apr-14 3:28:41 PM
 448 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF GLOBALIZATION
NOTES
1 See ‘Are Cities Bad for You?’, 8 January 2009, at
(www.findingdulcinea.com/news/science/2009/
jan/Are-Cities-Bad-for-You-.html) Last accessed
on 9 January 2014.
2 See (www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/enterprise
melbourne/industries/highereducation/Pages/
HigherEducation.aspx/Pages/Contact.aspx)
Last accessed on 9 January 2014.
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