Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper takes as its starting point the emergence of common patterns of land use, built forms, and social exclusion in cities all over the world, often manifest in high centrations of upper-end real estate developments and urban mega-projects in the midst of poverty. Many scholars, among them Saskia Sassen, have traced these new-found patterns of urban development to globalization: which not only brings rapid and accelerating flows of global capital in search of new forms of investment, but also leads the shift from manufacturing to service and information economies.

The main posed in this paper is whether we are really seeing a commonality of urban patterns world-wide, particularly among the major cities of the world (capital cities or the most economically prosperous ones, even in developing countries). Stated differently, we debated whether these common visual forms and metropolitan land use patterns signified some type of global convergence in urban dynamics, marking a new global urban era; or whether these similarities merely masked fundamental differences that still separated key world cities into distinct types. And if so, what might be the basis for distinction, and how might we understand its origins.