Analysis of Doel and Hubbard's (2002) Taking World Cities Literally

World cities are defined as cities that perform key functions in the global economy that in the process of competition with other urban locations for capital accumulation obtain competitive advantage not from their indiginous infrastructure but from their strategic positions in the networks of flows. The attempts at introduction of entreprneurial urban strategies (Jessop 1998) oriented at improving the image of the city by reflexive design of urban spaces through the means of their association with emotion, art, and spectacle frequently leave the task of theoretical discourse, policy-making, and urban design to define the characteristics of world city unfulfilled (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 351; Harvey 1989; Leitner and Sheppard 1999) especially when it is set in contexts of greater role of translocal economic relations on global scale (Amin and Thrift 2002). Place promotion and urban policy that seek to be effective on a global stage have to change their orientation from the local-bounded essentialist perspective counterposing city to the world as an object or a flow to the world-bounded relational approach to city as distributed across performances, clusters, and scales (Brenner 1999; Law 2000) that in their sum achieve various degrees of urban existence as world-city (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 352).

Considered from the poststructural perspective (Gibson-Graham 2000), world-cities fall short of requirements for turning their concept into an empirically specifiable phenomenon (Markusen 1999) which leads to greater stress on the self-reflexive impact of theoretical construction of world-cities on policy-making that has to become multi-scalar, context-sensitive, and process-oriented correspondingly (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 352). Since the central tenet of poststructuralism is phenomenological attentiveness to the complexity level any given research subject exhibits (Derrida 1988: 118), a theorization attempt commensurate with the poststructuralist approach has to translate the complexity of the phenomenal world into its concepts. First coined in 1915, the notion of world city (Geddes 1915) has remained shaped by its original definition as a place "where a disproportionate amount of the world's business was conducted" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 352) despite its subsequent qualifications, abstractions, applications, and quantifications. Even though the operational definition of world cities can require large-scale empirical support (Short et al. 1996: 698), the commonly used world city attributes are transnational corporation (TNC) headquarters presence, service-sector employee numbers, foreign residents proportion, and equity market capitalization (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 353) whereas the more comprehensive rankings are based on financial assets, transportation infrastructure, population size, business services, manufacture output, TNC headquaters, and international institutions presence (Friedmann 1986) while the point esimates take the presence of internet doman names (Townsend 2001), public-private partnerships (Kresl 1995), and cultural vitality (Smith and Timberlake 1995) as indicators.

Due to the epistemological, ontological, and methodological weakness of the notion of world cities (Markusen 1999), the leading criteria for ordering their hierarchy have experienced shift from economic and financial orientation to focus on advanced producer services, credit ratings, multi-jurisdiction law, and risk management (Beaverstock et al. 1997; Friedmann 1986; Short and Kim 1998; Taylor 1997) such definitional flexibility following from irreducible polysemy of urban discourse, multiple urban contradictions and complex factor correlations of city life, and discontinuous, dispersed, and abstract character of constitutive urban phenomena (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 353-354). From the relational perspective, world cities are conceptually assembled via "distanciated social relations" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 354) in order to countervail the tradition of theorization of cities as fixed and bounded phenomena that emphasizes "clustering, agglomeration and localization" (Amin and Thrift 2002: 51) belying the structural underpinnings of such approach. Based on dependency and world-systems theories, the analysis of world economy that highlights its structure makes the function and composition of economic activities on different scales more important in explanatory terms to undertanding how world cities operate as a global system affected in its turn by the stages of world capitalism (Storper and Walker 1989), while such form of structural analysis is open to the charges of excessive macro bias, decontextualized functionalism, and teleological essentialism (Guattari 2000).

To understand the world importance of certain cities taking over command and control functions an epistemological "shift from atomism to structural functionalism" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 354) is necessary under the influence of temporal and spatial dispersion of relations, time-space compression via media and communication, and globalization of capital, migration, and knowledge (Harvey 1989; Virilio 1997). Arguing that globalization changes the structure of translocal flows, Castells (2000a) gives priority to global networks at the basis of the novel organizing principles of the capitalism that while being built on information significantly alter the relationships among commodities, individuals and institutions as they become complexly embedded into a networked space of flows. As capitalism acquires increasingly abstract and distributed qualities (Barnes 2001; Buck-Morss 1995; Gibson-Graham 1996), Castells (2000a, 2000b, 2000c) offers diagrammatic representations of the structural relations among world cities constituted through the global flows linking urban cores and peripheries into nodes of multiple networks that remain in need of further research on their nature (Bromley 1999), on their relation to the developmental stages of global capitalism (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 355), and on their definition (Friedmann 1986).

Due to Castells' (2000b) insufficient attention to the performative, contingent, and material aspects of the world cities (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 355), the attention should be shifted from the formal structure of global flows to its production and reproduction that the discourses on global capitalism (Gibson-Graham 1996; Thrift 2000), institutional, entrepreneurial, and organizational action (Amin and Thrift 2002), and interaction between global networks and urban hierarchies contribute to. To reconcile between the principles of contingency and invariance that derive structure out of the network of world cities a redefinition of the structure in action-terms is in order should its emergent, process-dependent, and dynamic properties be accounted for. From this perspective, Castells (2000b: 10) theorization of network as integrated unit of global operation not reducible to the scale of cities comprising it makes important contribution to the structural functionalist understanding of the global space of flows (Taylor 1997) which stresses within a global inter-urban network the functions of world cities that follow from their connectivity (Storper 1997), centrality, and nodality (Beaverstock et al. 1999; Taylor 2000).

While, exhibiting greatest connectivity, London, New York, Paris and Tokyo claim dominant positions in the global urban hierarchy, the structuring effects of connectivity as an ordering principle in the world economy promulgate themselves throughout the urban networks to produce markedly different regional variations in concentration (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 356) that within the geography of unequal globalization (Castells 200b: 10) allow for a wider number of cities to play significant roles in national, regional, and global economies precisely because they are parts of the network of global flows. In contrast to Castells' (2000b) presupposition of a set structure of the global economy where financial flows connect its nodes into a novel network, the formulation of the structure of relations among actors active at different institutional, political, and territorial scales has to take critical account of the processes, contexts, and concepts that constitute world cities (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 357). From the poststructural perspective, the global economy is emergently constituted in the movement of heterogeneous assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 1984), in the configuration of carrying forces (Doel 1995), in the relational dynamics of flows among spaces (Doel 1999), in the becoming, mutability, and dissemination (Law 2000), and in the contradictions of network formation (Doel 1999).

As relational properties of global networks receive greater attention the heterogeneity of their constitution via the processes of production of images, discourses, and organizations (Sayer 1994; Thrift 2000) the corresponding parameters in which global spaces can be reconstructed also multiply (Amin and Thrift 2002: 61) so that an overarching conception of globalization is replaced with an emphasis on its unstable geography emerging with the help of institutional reflexivity (Amin and Thrift 2002), fragmented practices, and relational performances (Rose 1999: 248). With the practices of everyday life coming to the forefront of structural analysis of globalization, the interpetation of world cities becomes attuned to the interruptions and fluidities of their constitution (Gibson-Graham 1996; Guattari 2000), the movements of displacement, intensities, and human and non-human actors (Amin and Thrift 2002; Brenner 1998; Murdoch 1997; Thrift 2000), the spatial heterogeneities of global networks (Taylor 1997), the irreducibility and incalculability of spatial practice (de Certeau 1984; Lefebvre 1991), and financial and legal service as translation practices (Beaverstock and Doel 2001). After the poststructuralist departure from excessive emphasis on the macro theoretical factors (Thrift 1997: 143), the conceptualization of world cities gives equal weight to the microsociological reconstruction of urban phenomena from multi-sited perspective (Thrift 1997: 143) which together with the institutional approach to network formation and reproduction (Beaverstock and Doel 2001; Bingham 1996) and relational mapping of translocal assemblages (Amin and Thrift 2002: 52) avoids the reductive pitfalls of both atomistic and structuralist urban studies.

Urban agglomeration of know how and capital being the dominant approach to competitiveness of world cities (Amin and Thrift 2002) the majority of urban scholarship concentrates upon enterpreneurial strategies on the local level aimed to gain competive advantage (Kresl 1995; Porter 1998) not only decoupling the notion of the world city from international competitiveness but also treating connectivity with regard to global networks and economic competitiveness separately. Urban competitive success is widely accepted to derive from internal characteristics (Duffy 1995; Oatley 1998) while among the factors decisive for competitiveness are initial local conditions and individual entrepreurial strategies (Deas and Giordano 2001: 1413), strategic economic complementarity (Krugman 1995: 28), untraded interdependence (Boddy 1999; Storper 1997), and entrepreneurial governance of city asset bases (Jessop 1998; Swyngedouw 1997). World cities serving as arenas for individual and collective action that localize, cluster, and agglomerate urban economy that calls for such entrepreneurial strategies as growth coalitions between urban administrations and business communities (Hubbard et al. 2002), urban elites coalitions among business, real-estate, and political sectors (Logan and Molotch 1987), negotiated power clusters among dispersed urban spheres (Stone 1989), and non-hierarchical co-operation between governmental and non-governmental actors (Stoker 1995).

The major objective of the world city promotion strategies is creation of "favourable environment for business and commerce" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 360) that comes to expression in new localism policies (Hall and Hubbard 1996; Valler et al. 2000), entrepreneurial place promotion (Gold and Ward 1994), communicational urban image marketing (Rutheiser 1996), and mixed-use urban quarters construction (Olds 1995), which while meeting with criticism for deliberate commodification of urban representations seek to reinvent cities as centers of innovation, creativity, and exchange. In spite of charges of standardization, polarization, and deleteriousness (Harvey 1989), staging of international cultural, exposition, and sports events is geared to urban transition towards post-industrial development by means of the transformation of city infrastructure (Short 1999) and strategic urban investment even though without guaranteered success (Fainstein 1994; Leitner and Sheppard 1999; Loftman and Nevin 1996). To integrate the perspectives on world cities as either self-contained economic engines or innovation hubs in a space of flows an institutional perspective is needed since it allows to show how informational, analytic, and legal translation among incommensurate networks, division of labor among human and non-human actors, and place-based constellation of distantiated practices is implemented (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 361).

Understanding global economy as a single institution where world cities mediate heterogeneous flows rather than as a hierarchical order of cities vying for access to economic gain (Amin and Thrift 2002) opens crucial possibility for structural functionalist conceptualization of urban economy within the framework of collaboration and division of institutional labor where every participating urban center enhances its global positioning, where global structural transformation brings greater urban network centrality than national economy, and where integration into global economy is facilitated by proximity to world cities (Sassen 1991). The synergies obtainable among world cities do not obviate the competition among them to the extent that the entrepreneurial strategies reflective of urban agency resulting from alliances between public and private agents (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 362) affect the relative standing of cities in the global economy in accordance to their success (Dicken 1992; Taylor 1997). The notion of urban agency depends on the structural functionalist decoupling of the place of world cities in the global structure of heterogeneous flows from the function of integration of an assemblage of mediating practices with agents, objects, and relations making part of the translocal circulation within the networks participating in construction of a world city's positioning such as local stakeholders (Stone 1989), urban institutions and agencies (Newman and Thornley 1997), globetrotting individuals and groups (Cox and Mair 1988), and practice-inventing highly mobile subjets (Thrift 2000).

Despite being embedded into global networks, world cities possess capabilities of urban agency that via connective, performative, and translative strategies can improve the relative standing the city has in these networks (Thrift 2000). Over alternative attempts to either reinforce the globality of the world versus the locality of cities or collapse the difference between the two (Massey 1999: 191), the place-based conceptions of the world cities have to be corrected with the flow-based approach (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 363) that in its emphasis on contingency and context-dependency shows a way to go beyond infrastructure projects, multi-media spectacles, and local asset base investment towards network-oriented urban policy of global extension of its translation capabilities in heterogeneous environments. To build global networks a corresponding investment into translocal projects sited outside of the world cities is necessary since only non-hierarchical, non-bounded, and non-deterministic urban policy is able to deliver benefits unrestricted to narrow segments of urban popublation, evenly distributed across global networks, and propagating "their city networks into a multiplicity of sites" (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 364).

The adoption of the flow-oriented model of urban agency opens possibilities for mutually enhancing urban identities, growth promotion within an urban network as a whole, and knowledge transfer facilitation among cities by means of pursuing regional urban growth models (Terhorst and Van de Ven 1995), innovating transnational networking (Phelps 1998), and translocal involvement of policy-making (Church and Reid 1996). While it remains to be seen whether highly conditional model of national-scale place promotion or forstering of transnationally collaborative and coalition supportive networks will prove more successful in improving relative positions of world cities, the risks attendant to excessive dependence on a small number of world cities as financial, industrial, or cultural centers need to be mitigated by the balance between both structural effects of network development and functional implications of infrastructure investment so that flexible hierarchies of world cities can appear (Doel and Hubbard 2002: 365). As established relationships among world cities undergo change, theoretical attention towards networked nature of cities can more adequately secure gain in urban competitiveness not by overly stressing their structural position in existing global hierarchies or by narrowly restricting the possibilities of their functional differentiation but by structural functionalist emphasis on enterpreneurial strategies oriented towards reflexive functions of translating among heterogeneous flows, mediating between wide-spanning networks, and multi-sited performance of globally open city.