Living the Global City

Book excerpt: Politicians and academics alike have made globalization the key reference point for interpreting the 1990s. For many, globalization threatens both community and the nation-state. It appears to represent forces beyond human control. Living the Global City documents globalization's impact on everyday lives by drawing on research rather than rhetoric and arrives at a very different perspective. Living the Global City offers an analysis of globalization and global/local processes by focussing on specific issues and themes which include community, culture, milieu, socioscapes and sociospheres, microglobalization, poverty, ethnic identity and carnival. By advancing the debates which surround these issues through a redefinition of the terms in which they have been developed and engagement with the everyday lives of people in a global city, this book reveals how such key concepts as community, culture, class, poverty and identity can be reconceptualized in the context of global/local processes.