Writing the Global City: Globalisation, Postcolonialism and the Urban

223 Pages·2016·8.013 MB·English

by  Anthony King

Writing the Global City
Over the last three decades, our understanding of the city worldwide has been
revolutionised by three innovative theoretical concepts – globalisation, post­
colonialism and a radically contested notion of modernity. The idea and even the
reality of the city has been extended out of the state and nation and re­positioned
in the larger global world.
In this book Anthony King brings together key essays written over this period,
much of it dominated by debates about the world or global city. Challenging
assumptions and silences behind these debates, King provides largely ignored
historical and cultural dimensions to the understanding of world city formation as
well as decline. Interdisciplinary and comparative, the essays address new ways of
framing contemporary themes: the imperial and colonial origin of the
contemporary world and global cities, actually existing postcolonialisms, claims
about urban and cultural homogenisation and the role of architecture and built
environment in that process. Also addressed are arguments about indigenous and
exogenous perspectives, Eurocentricism, ways of framing vernacular architecture,
and the global historical sociology of building types. Wide­ranging and accessible,
Writing the Global City provides essential historical contexts and theoretical
frameworks for understanding contemporary urban and architectural debates.
Extensive bibliographies make it essential for teaching, reference and research.
Anthony D. King is Emeritus Professor of Art History and of Sociology at
Binghamton University, State University of New York, USA, and now lives in the
UK. He has been Visiting Professor of Architecture at University of California,
Berkeley, USA, and was, for five years, Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences
at the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India.
THE ARCHITEXT SERIES
Edited by Thomas A. Markus and Anthony D. King
Architectural discourse has traditionally represented buildings as art objects or
technical objects. Yet buildings are also social objects in that they are invested with
social meaning and shape social relations. Recognizing these assumptions, the
Architext series aims to bring together recent debates in social and cultural theory
and the study and practice of architecture and urban design. Critical, comparative
and interdisciplinary, the books in the series, by theorizing architecture, bring the
space of the built environment centrally into the social sciences and humanities, as
well as bringing the theoretical insights of the latter into the discourses of
architecture and urban design. Particular attention is paid to issues of gender, race,
sexuality and the body, to questions of identity and place, to the cultural politics of
representation and language, and to the global and postcolonial contexts in which
these are addressed.
Framing Places Writing Spaces
Mediating power in built form Discourses of architecture, urbanism
Kim Dovey and the built environment
C. Greig Crysler
Gender Space Architecture
An Interdisciplinary introduction Drifting – Migrancy and
Edited by Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner Architecture
and Iain Borden Edited by Stephen Cairns
Behind the Postcolonial Beyond Description
Architecture, urban space and political Singapore, space, historicity
cultures in Indonesia Edited by Ryan Bishop, John Phillips
Abidin Kusno and Wei-Wei Yeo
The Architecture of Oppression Spaces of Global Cultures
The SS, forced labor and the Nazi Architecture urbanism identity
monumental building economy Anthony D. King
Paul Jaskot
Indigenous Modernities
Words Between the Spaces Negotiating architecture and
Buildings and language urbanism
Thomas A. Markus and Jyoti Hosagrahar
Deborah Cameron
Moderns Abroad
Embodied Utopias Architecture, cities and Italian
Gender, social change and the modern imperialism
metropolis Mia Fuller
Rebeccah Zorach, Lise Sanders and
Amy Bingaman
Colonial Modernities Stadium Worlds
Building, dwelling and architecture in Football, space and the built environment
British India and Ceylon Edited by Sybille Frank and Silke Steets
Edited by Peter Scriver and
Building the State
Vikram Prakash
Architecture, politics, and state
Desire Lines formation in postwar Central Europe
Space, memory and identity in Virag Molner
the post­apartheid city
City Halls and Civic Materialism
Edited by Noëleen Murray,
Towards a global history of urban
Nick Shepherd and Martin Hall
public space
Visualizing the City Edited by Swati Chattopadhyay and
Edited by Alan Marcus and Jeremy White
Dietrich Neumann
Ethno-Architecture and the
Framing Places, second edition Politics of Migration
Mediating power in built form Edited by Mirjana Lozanovska
Kim Dovey
Writing the Global City
Re-Shaping Cities Globalisation, postcolonialism and
How global mobility transforms the urban
architecture and urban form Anthony D. King
Edited by Michael Guggenheim and
A Genealogy of Tropical
Ola Söderström
Architecture
Bauhaus Dream-house Colonial networks, nature and
Modernity and globalization technoscience
Katerina Rüedi-Ray Jiat-Hwee Chang
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Anthony D. King
Writing the Global City
Globalisation, postcolonialism
and the urban
First edition published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 Anthony D. King
The right of Anthony D. King to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by
him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright­holders. Please advise the publisher of any
errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: King, Anthony D., author.
Title: Writing the global city : globalisation, postcolonialism and the urban
/ Anthony D. King.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, [2016] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015041863 | ISBN 9781138949560 (hardback : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781138949584 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315668970 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Urbanization. | Urban economics. | Sociology, Urban. | Postcolonialism. |
Globalization.
Classification: LCC HT361 .K5673 2016 | DDC 307.76­­dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041863
ISBN: 978­1­138­94956­0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978­1­138­94958­4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978­1­315­66897­0 (ebk)
Typeset in Frutiger
by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby
To Ursula, the family,
and
friends, colleagues and graduate students
at Binghamton University 1988–2005,
and remembering
Barbara Abou­El­Haj
(1943–2015)
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Contents
Illustrations xi
Preface xiii
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction 1
Re-theorising the city: globalisation, colonialism, postcolonialism
1 Architecture, capital and the globalisation of culture 13
2 Colonialism, urbanism and the capitalist world economy 25
3 Writing colonial space: a review article 39
4 Re­presenting world cities: cultural theory/social practice 53
5 Postcolonialism, representation and the city 66
6 Cities: contradictory utopias 75
Methodologies: case studies in globalisation and imperialism
7 Actually existing postcolonialisms: colonial urbanism and architecture
after the postcolonial turn 91
8 Internationalism, imperialism, postcolonialism, globalisation: framing
vernacular architecture 103
9 Postcolonial cities, postcolonial critiques 117
10 Notes towards a global historical sociology of building types 129
11 Imperialism and world cities 138
12 Imperialism and the Grand Hotel: case studies of colonial
modernities 148
13 Globalisation and homogenisation: the state of play 164