The Cultural Dimension

Abstract

As Raymond Williams argued, ‘culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ (Williams, 1985, 87), and I would argue that perhaps ‘city’ is one of the other words. Therefore, to attempt to describe the relationship between culture and the city is to open a Pandora’s box of experiences, emotions, practices, places, memories and moments. From the theatre districts of Broadway in New York and the West End in London, via the mosques of Istanbul to the subcultural activities of graffiti artists or underground raves in Shanghai, culture has a very intangible, tacit and complex affiliation with urbanity. From Saskia Sassen’s original articulation of global cities, academic literature has focused almost exclusively on the political economic functions of these cities, and how they exert hegemonic power globally. The work of the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) group based at Loughborough University in the UK, under the directorship of Peter Taylor (see Taylor, 2004b), has also done much to forward the rhetoric of global cities as existing within, and the creators of, a world-wide network of advanced producer service (APS) firms, which are often used as a means to quantify how ‘global’ a global city is. In counterbalance to this, critiques of the global (and world) city concept have focused on how there is a Global North bias to those cities which are considered ‘Global’, with other cities being framed in the ‘development’ debate (Robinson, 2002; Watson, this collection).