Delineating the Urban: The Global City and the Logics of Dissolution

This paper analyzes the recent critical interest in the global city, and assesses the significance of what it calls the city-urban transaction. This latter term refers to a tendency amongst recent approaches to offset waning city definition the rise of the urban, and lament the former in the name of...

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Veröffentlicht in:URI:https://journals.openedition.org/transtexts,
1. Verfasser: Keyes, Jarrad
Format: Article ou chapitre numérique
Sprache:Anglais
Veröffentlicht: Transtext(e)s Transcultures 2009
Online Zugang:Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM
Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:This paper analyzes the recent critical interest in the global city, and assesses the significance of what it calls the city-urban transaction. This latter term refers to a tendency amongst recent approaches to offset waning city definition the rise of the urban, and lament the former in the name of the latter. The point of departure for this reading concerns the relationship between models of development and the often disparaging figuration of the urban. It rejects the technological determinism of William Mitchell and Pierre Lévy, and the idealism of Manuel Castells, to suggest that, whilst the urban engenders the dissolution of orthodox accounts of the city, it does not entail a correlative sense of ontological degradation. In rejecting the negative, amorphous connotations frequently thrust upon the urban, the paper concludes with a reading of John King’s fiction so as to provide a tentative sketch of the logics of dissolution as seen in a positive light.