1988; but see Peach, 1996ab, for an alternate
view).
Current attempts by various authorities in
Italy to create separate, gated ‘camps’ for
Roma (Gypsy) people constitute one of the
clearest examples of ghettoization today. Gov-
ernments justify this policy of segregation on
two grounds: that Roma people are nomadic
and ill-adapted to ‘regular’ urban environ-
ments, and that they need to be protected
from racist incidents in the wider society
(there have been a number of violent attacks
on housing occupied by Roma people). In-
evitably, though, by separating Roma from
other groups, this policy further racializes the
population and severely limits their opportun-
ities for integration (Sigona, 2005).
As in the original Venetian case, though,
ghettos, once formed, may provide a context
for the maintenance and development of mi-
nority cultures: ironically, these cultural forms
are sometimes embraced by the dominant cul-
ture (e.g. the many types of music pioneered
by African-Americans). dh
Suggested reading
Peach (1996ab); Sigona (2005); Thabit (2003);
Wacquant (2001).
GIS Seegeographic information systems.
global cities/world cities Major nodes in
the organization of the global economy: hubs
of economic control, production and trade, of
information circulation and cultural transmis-
sion, and of political power. They are often
represented in a hierarchically orderednet-
workformation that spans the globe (for sev-
eral representations, see Taylor, 2004). Peter
Hall has credited Scottish urbanist Patrick
Geddes (1854–1932; see Geddes, 1915) with
introducing the term – although German liter-
ary giant Johann Wolfgang Goethe employed
it as far back as the early nineteenth century, in
reference to Paris. In Hall’s groundbreaking
bookThe world cities([1984] 1966), six urban
regionswere analysed under this title. In this
first systematic examination, Hall treats the
world cities predominantly as internationally
oriented national metropolitan centres of the
industrial age. It was only during the 1980s
that world cities began to be seen in a different
light. Based on historical work from the
annales school, theoretical insights derived
from world-systems analysis and explor-
ations of thenew international division of
labour(nidl) (Fro ̈bel, Heinrichs and Kreye,
1980), a new generation of urban theorists
began to think of global cities as articulators
of international and global economies.
Accordingly, Michael Timberlake (1985,
p. 3) explained that ‘processes such as urban-
ization can be more fully understood by begin-
ning to examine the many ways in which they
articulate with the broader currents of the
world-economy that penetrate spatial barriers,
transcend limited time boundaries and influ-
ence social relations at many different levels’.
Work on historical tendencies of globalurban-
izationhad laid the groundwork for under-
standing city systems as global and subject to
long-term and macro-geographical shifts in
the capitalist accumulation process. Writing
in this tradition, Christopher Chase-Dunn
examined the relationships between the
expanding boundaries of the world system
and the system of cities sincead800 (Chase-
Dunn, 1985). In a related fashion, some global
city researchers have pointed to the complex
colonial and post-colonial histories as well as
the long trajectories of world city formation.
Economic specialization has long been known
to be the basis of world market-oriented ur-
banization, which propelled financial nodes
such as Amsterdam, London or New York or
industrial centres such as Leiden, Manchester,
and Houston into the rank of leading world
cities in subsequent historical periods (Nestor
and Rodriguez, 1986). Defying any tendency
to see global cities as a product of recent shifts
in the world economy, Janet Abu-Lughod, for
example, has argued that New York City has
been a global city from its very inception as
Dutch, and later English colonial outpost,
and certainly as an industrial and financial
powerhouse of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries (Abu-Lughod, 1999). Similarly,
Anthony King (1990) has presented the global
city formation of London as a complex process
of the city’s history as a colonial centre.
Still, the case can be, and has been, made to
see global cities in their current form as a prod-
uct of today’s period ofglobalization. Bren-
ner and Keil have suggested that one could see
the emergence of a New International Division
of Labour and the crisis of Atlanticfordismin
the 1970s and 1980s as the starting points for
this round of world city formation (Brenner
and Keil, 2006, pp. 8–10). At the outset of
this line of reasoning was the publication of
John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff’s seminal
article in 1982 under the title ‘World City For-
mation: An Agenda for Research and Action’.
In this influential piece, which arguably laid
the foundation for an entire industry of global
cities research, Friedmann and Wolff pointedGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_G Final Proof page 304 2.4.2009 6:30pmGIS