Product Description

Cities around the world are striving to be global. This book tells the story of one of them, and in so doing raises questions which are essential for all cities. These questions concern identity, place, and political responsibility in the changing geographies of our times. The book also tells the story of the rise of a new class, of deepening inequality, and of the geographical imaginations that are mobilised to legitimate the increasing dominance of these powerful metropoles. In so doing, it sets the global city in its wider geographical and political context.

World City focuses its account on London, one of the greatest of these global cities. London is a city of delight and of creativity, of the generation of vast wealth and of acute poverty. It also presides over a country increasingly divided between North and South and over a neo–liberal form of globalisation the deregulation, financialisation and commercialisation of all aspects of life that results in an evermore unequal world.

World City explores how we can understand this complex narrative and asks a question that should be asked of any city: what does this place stand for?

This book will appeal to students of human geography, politics and sociology as well as to the general reader.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #140778 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Review
"World City is that rarest of commodities: a geographic text that is, at one and the same time, both theoretically astute, politically insistent and publicly accessible."
Phil Hubbard, Area book review forum

"A brave and worthwhile attempt at creating a ′public geography′, an effort to take insights developed during a career in our discipline to wider audiences. The book is written in a wonderfully open and accessible manner, using language that is neither wilfully exclusionary nor obscure."
Sarah Holloway, Phil Hubbard, Heike Jons, Liz Mavroudi and Pat Noxolo, Area book review forum

"A fascinating insight into London and the politics of place, highlighting not only the social and economic geographies which result but also the questions of moral responsibility world city status implies."
New Zealand Geographer

"A fascinating read. Through her distinctive analytical lens, Massey has produced a masterpiece on the politics of what it means to be a ′world city′."
Economic Geography Research Group

"World City is well worth pondering, beyond even the question of equity or, more succinctly, of growth with social justice. The time has come for a new politics of development based on a logic other than the logic of markets and unlimited accumulation, in short, for a human and Earth–centred development in which the quality of life and of the Earth′s eco–systems move to centre stage."
John Friedmann, Urban Studies

"There are more than seven million Londoners now, and more to come. Massey′s work suggests that there is also more than one London."
Fran Tonkiss, British Journal of Sociology

"An important intervention into the rich literature on globalization and cities, a dimension of global social relations to which International Relations scholars would do well to pay much greater attention."
International Studies Review

"Written in an accessible style, free of academic jargon ... a text that students should read."
Geography

From the Back Cover
Cities around the world are striving to be global. This book tells the story of one of them, and in so doing raises questions which are essential for all cities. These questions concern identity, place, and political responsibility in the changing geographies of our times. The book also tells the story of the rise of a new class, of deepening inequality, and of the geographical imaginations that are mobilised to legitimate the increasing dominance of these powerful metropoles. In so doing, it sets the global city in its wider geographical and political context.

World City focuses its account on London, one of the greatest of these global cities. London is a city of delight and of creativity, of the generation of vast wealth and of acute poverty. It also presides over a country increasingly divided between North and South and over a neo–liberal form of globalisation the deregulation, financialisation and commercialisation of all aspects of life that results in an evermore unequal world.

World City explores how we can understand this complex narrative and asks a question that should be asked of any city: what does this place stand for?

This book will appeal to students of human geography, politics and sociology as well as to the general reader.

About the Author
Doreen Massey is Professor of Geography at the Open University.

Customer Reviews

Brilliant study of Britain's capital city
Doreen Massey, Professor of Geography at the Open University, has written a brilliant study of London. It is a city of workers, and still of manufacturing industry, claimed by a minority for finance capital.

London's economy is still closely tied into Britain's economy. London's main export market is not abroad, but the rest of Britain: 28.5% of all London's exports go to the rest of Britain, 12.33% go abroad; 39.88% of financial services go to the rest of Britain, 31.46% abroad; and 32.89% of business services go to the rest of Britain, just 12.08% abroad.

Yet the City of London is a key base of class power, of command and control, where finance capital rules. The City's dominance was a class victory for Thatcherism, and has led to growing exploitation and so to growing inequality and poverty both here and abroad. As Massey writes, `a new imperial order has taken hold'.

The Labour government embraced the Thatcher counter-revolution and spread it to the regions, trying to incorporate the whole of Britain into Thatcherism, by urging the regions to embrace finance, destroy industry and compete to attract capital and labour. So the Treasury blames regional inequality on regions' `market failures', not on the failure of the whole market model.

Finance capital demands the free movement of capital and labour. So in 2004, the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry welcomed the increased immigration into London from the new EU members. Later, governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King admitted, "Without this influx to fill the skills gap in a tight labour market it is likely that earnings would have risen at a faster rate." Massey too notes immigration's `depressive effect on wages at the lower end'.

She also points out that commitment to immigration conflicts with commitment to equality between nations, writing, "Unrestricted immigration can result in increased inequality between countries." Immigrant workers, for instance nurses from Ghana, are subsidising London, `a perverse subsidy, flowing from poor to rich'. Voices from the South, including Nelson Mandela, have called for these flows of labour to be constrained or stopped.

`London-as-global-city' is hospitable both to immigration and to finance capital. But London as Britain's capital city needs neither immigration nor finance capital; it needs to be first and foremost a city for Britain.

World City
A post 7 July 2005 analysis of the poltical, economic and social conditions of London. The central analysis of the book is whether London's claim to be a World City can be sustained. It is a pity that Massey seems to hanker after the pre-New Labour era of left-wing values when even Ken Livingstone before he was elected out of office in 2008 recognised the need to embrace the new political environment.