Former Soviet cities in globalization: an intraregional perspective on interurban relations through networks of global service firms

This paper presents an empirical study of the globalizing urban landscape in the post-Soviet region. In order to understand the position of cities in relation to each other in the context of economic globalization, the study considers the transnational city network in the post-Soviet region. At the center of analysis are the locational strategies of global service firms operating in the former Soviet cities. We adapt the interlocking network model proposed by the Globalization and World Cities research (GaWC) network to the regional level to uncover the interurban relations. Unlike the classical studies of the GaWC, this study focuses on the analysis of intraregional spatial patterns of globalization. The research shows that the globalizing regional city system is in the midst of substantial restructuring and that the state of former Soviet Union (FSU) cities in relation to Moscow is altering. The integration of FSU cities into the global economy mostly occurs through capital cities. However, under the current political and economic circumstances, the position of each capital city within the region has become diversified. The analysis indicates that the globalization of cities within a particular region reproduces similar processes on a world scale, which are characterized by spatial concentration and hierarchical relations. However, our research has shown that patterns of urban globalization at the regional level significantly depend on the historical context and national economic and political tendencies, thus creating conditions for the penetration of the world economy into cities.     

世界城市跨国空间研究的分野与合流

世界城市内部多种跨国要素作用形成的跨国空间已经成为一类新空间类型和客观存在。在跨国经济、跨国社会、跨国文化、跨国主义生活方式等跨国要素的交互作用下,跨国空间的形成发展、演绎逻辑表现出多样化分野。具体表现为：跨国空间在不同历史时期的分化、不同类型的差异以及全球化时代"资本"和"生活"的博弈,地方和空间的割裂与相互渗透等。在此基础上,对跨国空间的研究理念、形成机制和价值体系三方面却存在着合流的趋向,共同指向了全球化时代国家管治模式、自由主义生活方式以及软性制度的改革。     

新世纪以来中德世界城市全球化模式对比分析

城市全球化逐渐从跨国资本主导下的单一化模式向国家特性作用下的多元化发展转变。本文对比分析了新世纪以来中国和德国世界城市全球化的过程、格局、规模、产业和动力,揭示出国家特性作用下的差异化城市全球化模式。结果表明：①中国城市全球化起步较晚但发展迅速。②中国世界城市呈现“大分散,小集聚”的格局,全球化要素具有分散化趋势。③中国世界城市经济的总量大但平均规模小,企业总部集中分布于北京。④中国世界城市一、二次产业产值比重大,金融地产、社会公共服务业和总部经济发展滞后。⑤中国城市全球化是国家政府主导下依托跨国投资生产并出口初级工业品的被动全球化,未来须发挥高级生产者服务、研发服务和社会服务的动力作用。     

论全球化时代的人地关系与政策调整

本文的主题是讨论经济全球化对人地关系的影响。首先,认为全球化强化了人地关系的重要性。在全球化推动现代性区域的空间范围不断扩大的同时,外化的空间及可能性在递减。全球性经济活动受到了地理环境的更大程度的制约。同时,经济全球化不会改变人类活动的基本空间型式和相互联系,也不意味着人类会自觉减轻对地理环境的巨大压力。其次,分析了全球化给人地关系带来的新变化。全球化条件下的人地关系呈现出从区域扩展为全球、从静态走向动态、从孤立化走向网络化三个新特点。最后,提出了全球化条件下优化人地关系的政策调整的新思路。一是倡导全球化条件下的先行性的人地关系伦理,二是要建立优化人地关系的全球性评估网络和政策网络。     

西方高端人才跨国流动研究述评

基于文献分析法,对西方高端人才跨国流动研究进行述评,探讨其跨国流动的空间特征、动力机制和社会影响。跨国人才主要的流动方向为发展中国家流向发达国家,发达国家之间进行人才交换,以及发达国家向新兴工业化国家回流,在空间上高度集中在发达国家和新兴工业化国家的世界城市。其流动机制包括全球政治经济与文化转型、跨国流动渠道、政府管制以及流动者个体决策。其为流出地带来人才流失的困扰以及人才回流的红利,为流入地带来社会分化、居住隔离和种族排斥等社会问题。最后,就国内学者开展相关研究提出一些建议。     

Local politics and foreign ventures in China's transitional economy: the political economy of Singaporean investments in China

The re-articulation of China into the global economy since December 1978 has led to a tremendous influx of foreign capital during the past two decades. Constrained by the limited domestic market and encouraged by home-country government, transnational corporations from Singapore are regionalising increasingly into the Asia Pacific region. To date, a significant amount of Singaporean investments abroad has gone to China. Based on personal interviews with parent companies in Singapore and their subsidiaries and/or affiliates in China, this paper aims to examine the political economy of Singaporean investments in China. Specifically, I argue that successful cross-border operations of Singaporean firms are embedded in dense networks of social and political relationships. These relationships provide the political leverage and strategic resources to enable the establishment of Singaporean firms in China. This establishment, however, is contingent on blending with local politics in China through which foreign firms use leverage on the partnership advantage of local governments (difang zhengfu), their enterprises, and business activities. This rise of local corporatism is a key institutional consequence of the recent rescaling of China's political economy. Case studies of ventures by Singaporean firms in China are presented to support my arguments. Taken together, these empirical materials shed light on the importance of understanding the role of politics at different spatial scales in influencing transnational corporations and their international business operations.     

Global Public Policy,Transnational Policy Communities,and Their Networks

Public policy has been a prisoner of the word “state.” Yet, the state is reconfigured by globalization. Through “global public–private partnerships” and “transnational executive networks,” new forms of authority are emerging through global and regional policy processes that coexist alongside nation‐state policy processes. Accordingly, this article asks what is “global public policy”? The first part of the article identifies new public spaces where global policies occur. These spaces are multiple in character and variety and will be collectively referred to as the “global agora.” The second section adapts the conventional policy cycle heuristic by conceptually stretching it to the global and regional levels to reveal the higher degree of pluralization of actors and multiple‐authority structures than is the case at national levels. The third section asks: who is involved in the delivery of global public policy? The focus is on transnational policy communities. The global agora is a public space of policymaking and administration, although it is one where authority is more diffuse, decision making is dispersed and sovereignty muddled. Trapped by methodological nationalism and an intellectual agoraphobia of globalization, public policy scholars have yet to examine fully global policy processes and new managerial modes of transnational public administration.     

New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy

This paper uses several events in New York in the late 1990s to launch two central arguments about the changing relationship between neoliberal urbanism and so–called globalization. First, much as the neoliberal state becomes a consummate agent of—rather than a regulator of—the market, the new revanchist urbanism that replaces liberal urban policy in cities of the advanced capitalist world increasingly expresses the impulses of capitalist production rather than social reproduction. As globalization bespeaks a rescaling of the global, the scale of the urban is recast. The true global cities may be the rapidly growing metropolitan economies of Asia, Latin America, and (to a lesser extent) Africa, as much as the command centers of Europe, North America and Japan. Second, the process of gentrification, which initially emerged as a sporadic, quaint, and local anomaly in the housing markets of some command–center cities, is now thoroughly generalized as an urban strategy that takes over from liberal urban policy. No longer isolated or restricted to Europe, North America, or Oceania, the impulse behind gentrification is now generalized; its incidence is global, and it is densely connected into the circuits of global capital and cultural circulation. What connects these two arguments is the shift from an urban scale defined according to the conditions of social reproduction to one in which the investment of productive capital holds definitive precedence.     

尺度重组与地域重构:城市与区域重构的政治经济学分析

尺度重组和地域重构理论是当前从政治经济学视角研究全球化时代城市与区域空间重构和治理重构的热点理论。本文运用马克思主义地理学的研究方法,结合对当代资本主义运行方式的分析,对尺度重组和地域重构理论进行了深入的解析,并阐明了它们之间内在的、本质的联系。研究认为,尺度重组和地域重构是一个一体两面的过程,当资本为了克服危机而在地域组织上进行去地域化与再地域化时,地域组织(城市和国家)也同时发生了尺度重组,它们描述的是同一个资本转型的过程。     

联合跨界合作演进特征及驱动机制研究

区域经济一体化发展背景下,为改善地区间贸易开放程度,提升整体竞争力和促进跨行政边界生产要素流动,欧洲、北美和东亚地区已形成多个联合跨界合作区域。传统区位理论认为边界地区不利于形成产业集聚,但联合跨界合作区域受行政边界渗透和隔绝效应的共同影响,面临"市场潜力"和"市场竞争"间博弈,因地制宜形成独特发展模式。从联合跨界合作的动因出发,对影响要素进行研究,总结了典型模式及其驱动机制。研究表明联合跨界合作需因地制宜,全面分析地区投入产出关系,根据实际情况选择适宜的空间管治模式。     

地方发展变迁与居民地方感关系研究——以广州荔枝湾涌历史文化街区为例

本文以广州荔枝湾涌历史文化街区为例,运用扎根理论研究荔枝湾涌1940年代以来地方发展变迁与居民地方感的关系,进而挖掘居民地方感变化机制。研究发现：荔枝湾涌居民的地方感主要受生态环境、建筑与配套服务、集体记忆、活动类型、人际关系等因素的影响,其中生态环境起主导性作用;积极地方感主要来源于集体记忆的保留与延续;消极地方感主要来源于破旧的居住环境及落后的配套服务;此外,文章提出内向型地方感和外向型地方感的概念,认为随着城市发展,在地方发展变迁过程中,地方感由内向型地方感转变为内向型和外向型相结合的地方感。两种地方感相互作用,互相调节,更有利于地方稳定、开放、包容地发展。     

Global Media Cities in a World-wide Urban Network

This article examines the link between cities and culture from the point of view of the production of cultural goods, including media products. It focuses on the institutional structure of present-day cultural production and the media industry and on their geographical organization at the local and global levels. The cultural economy is a prime mover for globalization processes in the urban system, in which cultural production clusters act as local nodes in the global networks of the large media groups. The models frequently used to analyse the global city system will be supplemented and partially modified by an empirical analysis of the 'world media cities'. The analysis of the world media cities enables those locations to be identified, from which globalization in the spheres of culture and the media proceeds and is 'produced' in practical terms. Global city research has predominantly emphasized the role of advanced producer services—in contrast this article concludes that for the process of globalization the globally operating media firms are at least as influential as the global providers of corporate services, because they create a cultural market space of global dimensions, on the basis of which the specialized global service providers can ensure the practical management of global production and market networks.     

Migration,Geographies of Marginality and Informality—Impacts on Upper and Lower Ends of Urban Systems in the North and South

Since the onset of post-industrialism, the research focus in the developed world has increasingly shifted to the role of the information and communication technology, knowledge workers and the creative sector in the global economy. It has led to what could be described as an iceberg approach to economic research. In this approach, the focus is primarily on what happens in the part of the global economic iceberg above the waterline—the “clean”, “fast-moving”, “technologically advanced” elements of the global economy. However another element of the global economy, the informal sector, is growing at an alarming rate in cities in both the developed and developing worlds. These activities are unobtrusively operating in a part of the iceberg below the waterline that receives relatively little attention from the research community. The purposes of this paper are to demonstrate how the information networks created in the iceberg above the waterline are being used by a growing section of the society in the developing world in order to reach first-world destinations. It shows how informality is changing the urban landscape in first-world cities where large concentrations of non-Western populations occur. The paper then shifts its attention to the overwhelmingly informally driven economies of African cities and outlines the inappropriateness of standard economic measures to accurately portray conditions there.     

Tailored for Panama: Offshore Banking at the Crossroads of the Americas

With the steady integration of a deregulated world of hypermobile capital, offshore banking has become an increasingly significant part of the geography of international finance. Many interpretations tend to treat offshore banking centres as identical sites of investment that can be easily substituted for one another by completely mobile, fungible capital. This paper explores the nature of offshore banking in one largely overlooked centre, Panama. It charts the historic context that led to the creation of Latin America's most important centre of international banking, emphasizing the unique qualities that stand in contrast to hyperglobalist interpretations, including the Canal and the role of the US dollar. Second, it summarizes the regulatory changes initiated in the face of global neoliberalism, including the absence of a central bank and recent reforms designed to attract foreign capital. Using primary and secondary data, the paper maps Panama's growing role as a net capital exporter, charting domestic and foreign loan markets. Finally, it also addresses the trade–offs between confidentiality, and transparency in the context of illicit activities frequently alleged to occur in offshore banking centres, which in Panama revolve around drug trafficking and money laundering. It concludes by noting that even in an ostensibly seamless world, offshore banking exhibits the place–based embeddedness of financial capital within local institutional relations.     

Toque una Ranchera, Por Favor

This paper explores the literal spaces of transnational social reproduction for Latinos and Latinas in central North Carolina and the US South. Examining these spaces and circuits of social reproduction can enhance our understanding of globalization by making globalization processes at once less abstract and less indisputable. Attention to social reproduction is important for understanding and theorizing globalization and, more significantly, for imagining and constructing alternative forms of globalization.
Inspired to pursue certain freedoms and immediate goals, transnational migrants live and breath alternative models of globalization in their everyday activities. Responding less to neo-liberal and more to human-centered values, transnational migrants demonstrate that different principles can guide the construction of contemporary globalizations. Ethnographic evidence from Mexican transnational migrants suggests that the intimate and distant social connections that constitute Latinos' translocal way of living help to facilitate the very same globalizing labor markets that entice and propel migrants to seek "greener pastures" in the US South.     

From rural life to transnational wife: agrarian transition,gender mobility,and intimate globalization in transnational marriages in northeast Thailand

Popular and academic discourses of globalization are often gender biased, focusing on formal and impersonal realms of the market, politics, and technologies. This article explores an intimate dimension of globalization by analyzing the transnational marriage trend among women in northeast Thailand (Isan's) villages. The phua farang (foreign husband) phenomenon in Isan epitomizes the intimate link between the global political economy and individuals' desires, aspirations, and imagination in the private realm of personal and marital relationships. The phua farang phenomenon is embedded in a context of spatial and economic inequalities at the local, national, and global levels, and manifests classed and gendered strategies by which marginalized subjects attempt to transcend the limited opportunities for upward social mobility available to these women.     

全球城市的研究脉络、理论论争与前沿领域

全球城市是控制和影响全球政治经济文化的枢纽型城市。系统梳理中外全球城市研究热点、理论争论及研究领域演化,比较东西方全球城市研究视角提出新国际形势下全球城市研究前沿及其可能范式。研究发现：①全球城市被分为超全球城市、新兴全球城市及全球城市国家三类,重点探讨了全球城市的起源与概念、成长机理与类型划分、规模—网络—等级和专业化分工等;②中国学界从引介世界城市概念及其识别指标、形成机制等领域逐渐转向全球城市的功能与作用、比较与评价、培育策略等。③新全球化形势下全球城市研究应关注尺度（政治）与全球城市构建、动力、制度与培育实践导向三层次展望提出世界形势变革背景下全球城市研究重点。     

Organising regional production networks in Southeast Asia: implications for production fragmentation, trade, and rules of origin

The globalisation of economic activities has fundamentally reshapedthe relationships between production and trade. The cross-borderproduction activities of transnational corporations (TNCs) havenot only deepened spatial divisions of labour, but also complicatedour understanding of international trade patterns. The developmentof intricate regional production networks by global corporationshas major implications for production fragmentation, internationaltrade, and rules of origin in the global economy. Empiricallygrounded in a study of regional production networks controlledby Singapore-based TNCs, this paper aims to make a modest contributionto the emerging literature on production fragmentation and rulesof origin. Based on an analysis of empirical data from a surveyof 63 parent Singapore-based manufacturing TNCs that have cross-borderoperations in Southeast Asia, I found that their spatial productionfragmentation is rather limited. Most of their Southeast Asiansubsidiaries cater to local markets, or manufacture components/partsfor the regional production facilities of their major globalcorporation customers. I also consider the implications forbusiness strategies and public policies in relation to productionfragmentation and rules of origin in Southeast Asia.     

重申全球化时代的空间观:后现代地理学的理论与实践

"空间"是人文地理学研究的核心概念。全球化时代,空间概念的内涵与外延都发生了重要变化。本文通过重述后现代主义哲学、当代城市与区域空间重构的社会实践、当代人文地理学前沿理论三者之间相互印证的理念与事实,重申全球化时代的空间观为空间与社会辨证统一的后现代空间观,并阐述了其对当代人文地理学研究的重要意义。     

South–South Cooperation and Neoliberal Hegemony in a Post‐aid World

The current iteration of South–South Cooperation (SSC) differs fundamentally from the first manifestation in the early 1970s, largely because of differences in assumptions about who is cooperating with whom and to what end, in the context of SSC. These differences are significant for the material practice of SSC and the ideological function of SSC rhetoric. In this article, the authors argue that contemporary ideas about SSC do not retrieve the radical potential of the original formulation, but rather expand the hegemonic neoliberal world order into a new phase through a reframed idea of the relationships between North and South and between states and markets. This promotes a new common‐sense understanding of the contemporary international political economy while further depoliticizing the idea of development. It hijacks the critical force of dependency theory, harnessing the terminology of the 1970s and a nostalgia for state‐led development to an ideological fix that in fact shores up the neoliberal world order in the context of a potentially destabilizing shift in the functioning of global capital.