and as important staging posts for the oper-
ations of multinational corporations’. Sassen’s
work on the global city has also strongly
emphasized the social and political aspects of
global city formation as she has consistently
asked ‘whose city’ the global city is: Will the
constant pressure for commodified and gentri-
fied (seegentrification) elite space or new
citizenship claims by the ‘Othered’ majorities
of the immigrant labour forces of the typical
city prevail (Sassen, 1996)?
Proponents of the world city thesis have
often been criticized for not providing conclu-
sive data on the existence of a distinct set of
global cities. The GaWC (Globalization and
World Cities) research group at Loughbor-
ough University was set up in the late 1990s
to rectify this deficit and to produce systematic
empirical research on global city interconnect-
edness. On the basis of this research, Peter
Taylor has recently provided the synthetic
World city network(2004), in which he pains-
takingly prepares a massive pool of quantita-
tive data to produce the first comprehensively
researched and thoroughly theorized study of
the network of global cities from a large variety
of methodological angles. As Taylor (2004b,
p. 21) argues, ‘The world city literature as a
cumulative and collective enterprise begins
only when the economic restructuring of the
world-economy makes the idea of a mosaic of
separate urban systems appear anachronistic
and frankly irrelevant.’
The world city literature is not without its
detractors. On the one hand, a group of sea-
soned urban theorists have criticized the
exclusiveness of the global city hypothesis,
which ostensibly seems to pay too little atten-
tion to the ‘ordinary cities’ (Amin and Thrift,
2002) that continue to be the majority of
urban places. Michael Peter Smith (2001a)
has denounced the structuralist bias of the
world city debate and has instead proposed
the notion of ‘transnational urbanism’, which
explicitly includes reference to the grassroots
processes that constitute the global city. Peter
Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen have criti-
cized the apodictic assumptions of global city
research, which allegedly expects similarly
polarizing socio-spatial effects everywhere,
and have instead proposed a multidimensional
and more diversified view of ‘globalizing cities’
of all sorts (2000, 2003). A younger group of
post-structuralist geographers have meanwhile
critiqued the global cities literature from the
point of view of globalizedculture(Flusty,
2003) and agency (R.G. Smith, 2003d). Writ-
ing from a standpoint of urbanization in the
globalsouth, Jennifer Robinson (2002) has
pointed out that the literature on world cities
has a clear bias towards Western standards:
‘The world city approach assumes that cities
occupy similar placings with similar capacity
to progress up or fall down the ranks. ...
A view of the world of cities thus emerges
where millions of people and hundreds of cit-
ies are dropped off the map of much research
in urban studies, to service one particular
and very restricted view of significance or
(ir)relevance to certain sections of the global
economy’ (Robinson, 2002). Despite these
critiques, global city research is alive and
well, and continues to produce a rich output
of empirical work and theoretical insights.
The breadth of the work produced under this
banner has recently been published in a reader
(Brenner and Keil, 2006). rkSuggested reading
Brenner and Keil (2006); Friedmann (2002);
Sassen (1999, 2002). The GaWC (Globalization
and World Cities) website (http:www.lboro.ac.
uk/gawc/) presents a wide variety of bibliograph-
ies, research bulletins, project descriptions, data
sets and web links related to research on global
and world cities.global commons This concept emerges
from the traditional commons used by a local
community (seecommon property regimes),
but also includes elements of free market
environmentalism(Rose, 1999a). The no-
tion of ‘commons’ is expanded to the global
scaleto address concerns about the environ-
mental destruction of the oceans, atmos-
phere, forests, Antarctica andbiodiversity
caused primarily by open access beyond the
jurisdiction of nation-states. In essence,
the concept seeks to make modern humans,
like traditional villagers, responsible for the
commons so that it does not deteriorate due
to neglect or exploitation. The concept has
been applied to the oceans to prevent over-
fishing, to Antarctica and to outer space,
which recognize these locations as the ‘com-
mon heritage of (hu)mankind (CHM)’ (in
Whatmore, 2002a, p. 104). Since the emer-
gence of issues such as ozone depletion and
global warming (seeglobal warming), the
concept is also applicable to the atmosphere.
Attempts have been made to construct the
world’sbiodiversity, including gene pools,
as global commons. This can be understood
as an attempt to preserve originalnature
against theenclosuresthat enableproperty
rights to be exercised, but with geneticGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_G Final Proof page 306 2.4.2009 6:30pmGLOBAL COMMONS