The Global City-Whose Social Construct is it Anyway?

Debates on "the global city " have begun to take on a recognizable, if not formulaic, character-- poised somewhere on a conceptual and epistemological borderland where positivism, structuralism, and essentialism meet. The effort by James W. White to position himself within this borderland, while lively and engaging, fails to move beyond the prevailing parameters of these debates. In considering White's effort to distinguish his approach to "global city " formation and its consequences from the prevailing view articulated most fully by John Friedmann ( 1986, 1995) and Saskia Sassen (1991), I will try to show (a) how similar these approaches are to each other at a meta-theoretical level and (b) how their shared tendency to focus the debate around positivist taxonomies, urban hierarchies constructed on the basis of these taxonomies, and empirical efforts to "map" (or in White's case even to formally "model") the "real " causes and consequences of "global cities " leads to both sides in this debate overlooking the fact that the world cities debate takes place within a wider public discourse on "globalization, " which is itself a political project of powerful social forces-- not something to be measured by the scientific tools of objective social scientists.