Introduction

¹ In no uncertain terms, globalization is concomitant with urbanization. As nodes in the ­intensified financial, commercial, technological, social, cultural, and discursive flows that characterize postmodernity, cities are fundamental to the processes that drive globalization. Saskia Sassen affirms in her groundbreaking article that “global cities” constitute

a strategic site not only for global capital, but also for the transnationalization of labor and the formation of translocal communities and identities. In this regard, cities are a site for new types of political operations and for a whole range of new ‘cultural’ and subjective operations.

(2005, p. 38)