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New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities, by Janet L Abu-Lughod. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 580 pp. $39.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-8166-33355.
Globalization has been the buzzword of the last decade, defining, as it does, how scholars, politicians, corporations, and almost anyone else with an opinion about how things are or should be changing, identifies the world around them. It is used to justify asking for wage concessions, as employees are warned, with globalization on the horizon, that others can do the same job for less. It is offered by companies as the basis for asking cities for various accommodations or abatements of local ordinances and taxes, on the grounds that there are communities down the road, or across the ocean, who will gladly make the same or better offer. It is used to explain how a family on vacation, almost anywhere in the advanced capitalist world (and in some not so advanced countries as well), can find almost the same set of shops in ubiquitous malls. But is this so new? Are these processes signifiers of new social arrangements? And do select cities qualify as the global cities in which the new trends are strikingly manifest as harbingers of what is to come to all one day?
In this excellent analysis of the emergence of what Abu-Lughod calls America's global cities, she takes us...