World City [Paperback]

Cities around the world are striving to be global. This book tells the story of one of them, and in so doing raises questions which are essential for all cities. These questions concern identity, place, and political responsibility in the changing geographies of our times. The book also tells the story of the rise of a new class, of deepening inequality, and of the geographical imaginations that are mobilised to legitimate the increasing dominance of these powerful metropoles. In so doing, it sets the global city in its wider geographical and political context.

World City focuses its account on London, one of the greatest of these global cities. London is a city of delight and of creativity, of the generation of vast wealth and of acute poverty. It also presides over a country increasingly divided between North and South and over a neo-liberal form of globalisation the deregulation, financialisation and commercialisation of all aspects of life that results in an evermore unequal world.

World City explores how we can understand this complex narrative and asks a question that should be asked of any city: what does this place stand for?

This book will appeal to students of human geography, politics and sociology as well as to the general reader.

Acknowledgements vii

Preface: After the Crash ix

Introduction: ‘the future of our world’? 1

Part I Inventing a world city 27

1 Capital delight 29

2 ‘A successful city, but . . .’ 54

3 Imagining the city 73

Part II The world city in the country 95

4 The golden goose? 97

5 An alternative regional geography 114

6 Who owes whom? 130

7 Reworking the geographies of allegl3;