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Looking at Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia in terms of Saskia Sassen's The Global City, I argue that the dynamic between functionality and dysfunctionality of the infrastructure (Larkin) of postcolonial cities in global economies constitutes, in part, the city-as-oeuvre of its citizens (Lefebvre).
Move to the city!" (3). This first directive, given to the ambitious protagonist of Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, not only establishes the city as the space of possibility for economic prosperity, but also dismisses other spaces and effectively reinforces the dichotomy between rurality and urbanity. Although this directive is ironic-because hardly anyone will prosper, let alone become filthy rich-the city is still posited as the space required for all other steps the protagonist needs to take to become wealthy: university education, working/slaving for a master, starting a company, expanding the business, and destroying the competition. While urban space is suggested to be more conducive to business, not any city will do. To become filthy rich requires at least a metropolis, which has the potential to become a global city. This metropolis is at once the space of specific modes of production and culture and a metonym for economic globalization. As Saskia Sassen explains in Cities in a World Economy, since the world economy "has always had more or less clearly defined boundaries" (30), rather than being "a planetary event," cities did not stop being centres of power. In fact, while much industry may be situated in rural areas, cities give access to the processes of economic globalization. Foiling predictions by many politicians and analysts, global cities like New York, London, and Tokyo have become major strategic centres due to "the accelerated industrialization of several Third World countries" and "the rapid internationalization of the financial industry into a worldwide network of transactions" (3). While "the term global city may be reductive and misleading if it suggests that cities are mere outcomes of a global economic machine" (4), the truth is that "top-level control and management of the industry has become concentrated in a few leading financial centers" because "the more globalized the economy becomes, the higher the agglomeration of central functions in a relatively few sites" (5).
Bill Ashcroft has recently...