Urban Political Economy Beyond the ‘Global City’

This paper examines the relationship between urbanisation and globalisation beyond the so-called global cities that have been the focus of so much contemporary urban research. The paper argues that there is a problematic polarisation in urban studies between research on ‘global’ cities and work on presumably ‘non-global’ cities. The existing geographical literature on scale, place and uneven development offers a more complex and process-based view of contemporary urbanism. It allows the globalisation–urbanisation nexus to be studied in and through a diverse range of cities. This argument is developed via a case study of key moments in the economic development of Lexington, Kentucky, a city that, like most others, is forgotten or overlooked by global cities researchers.