World Cities

Featherstone: “One important site where the various flows of people, goods, technology, information and images cross and intermingle is the world city. World cities are the sites in which we find the juxtaposition of the rich and the poor, the new middle-class professionals and the homeless, and a variety of other ethnic, class and traditional identifications . . . . Yet many of the cultural forces associated with this process – the postmodern emphasis upon the mixing of codes, pastiche, fragmentation, incoherence, disjunction and syncretism – were characteristics of cities in colonial societies decades or even centuries before they appeared in the West. From this perspective the first multi-cultural city was not London or Los Angeles but probably Rio de Janeiro or Calcutta, or Singapore.”

Plus, to suggest that the cultural patterns of these world cities portend a new epoch of history assumes that eventually the rest of the world will follow them, a development that is of course not certain at all.