The Global City: Past and Present

全球城市的概念被广泛认为是理解当代城市形态的核心概念，当然也会继续存在。这个研究网络的目的是研究如何深入挖掘这一现象的历史，从而提高我们对其当今表现形式的理解。全球城市学者将他们的研究对象定义为经济巨人、国际门户、政治和文化中心以及财富严重不平等的地方。然而，许多研究欧洲扩张初期殖民城市的学者，也会用这样的分类来描述他们的研究对象。随着时间的推移，探索这些共同特征如何丰富我们对全球城市进程的理解？经过更深入的调查，这种表面上的相似性能维持多少？当我们意识到今天的全球化城市的问题也是250年前第一批全球化大都市的问题时，它会如何影响政策制定者和社会科学家的思维？这些只是这个研究网络试图通过将历史学家带入关于全球城市的对话来回答的一些问题。自20世纪后期以来，全球城市的概念已经成为社会科学家和政策制定者研究当代城市及其在全球化进程中的作用的核心方式。城市学者通过确定全球力量和城市共同塑造现代城市状况和全球化本身本质的重要方式，对这一焦点做出了贡献。因此，无论是考虑金融投资模式、新城市等级的出现、城市空间形式的转变，还是城市社会政治构成的转变，人们都很清楚，这些地方现实与更广泛的全球交流是错综复杂地联系在一起的。然而，研究城市历史的历史学家却一直缺席这一讨论。虽然他们的作品将这座城市作为探索中世纪、早期现代和19世纪世界全球交流的焦点，但它往往与一个地点的特殊性联系在一起，回避了对更广泛的全球化现象的讨论。然而，将过去的城市理解为全球城市，在全球化的漫长历史中发挥核心作用，有可能丰富当前关于全球化特征和影响的讨论。因此，这个网络的主要目标是激发历史学家之间的讨论，以及历史学家和其他社会科学家之间的讨论，以更好地理解跨越时间和空间的全球城市。历史学家们接受了全球化的概念，并对中世纪以来在世界范围内流通的人员、知识、贸易和文化网络进行了研究。然而，研究这类主题的城市学者大多未能建立超越他们所选择的帝国或地区界限的联系。该研究网络还将通过举办四个关于全球背景下的前现代城市的讲习班，开始将“城市”重新置于现代时代之前的全球进程中的任务。前三次会议将集中讨论城市研究专家通常从事的主要调查领域。这些讲习班将集中讨论空间、城市生活的经济和政治结构以及城市人口的特点。会议将鼓励讨论如何将全球城市的主要特征应用于特定的历史背景，但他们也将寻求在早期现代帝国中确定更广泛的趋势和模式。最后的研讨会将集中在确定全球城市的历史化如何影响我们对当代背景下其形式、功能和问题的理解。

Widely regarded as a central concept to understanding the contemporary urban form, the idea of the global city is certainly here to stay. The aim of this research network is to investigate how digging deeper into the history of the phenomenon can improve our understanding of its present-day manifestations. Global city scholars identify their subjects by their character as economic giants, international gateways, political and cultural hubs, and sites of great wealth inequalities. Yet, many scholars who research the colonial city in the first age of European expansion would also draw on such categories to describe their subjects of investigation. How does exploring these shared characteristics enrich our understanding of the global urban process over time? How much of this apparent similarity can be sustained after closer investigation? How might it impact the thinking of policy-makers and social scientists when we realize that the problems of today's global cities were also the problems of the first globalized metropolises 250 years ago? These are just some of the questions that this research network seeks to answer by bringing historians into the conversation about the global city.Since the late twentieth century, the idea of the global city has become central to the way in which social scientists and policy-makers approach our contemporary cities and their role in the process of globalization. Urban scholars have contributed to this focus by identifying important ways in which global forces and the city have come together to shape both the modern urban condition and the nature of globalization itself. Thus, whether one considers patterns of financial investment, the emergence of new urban hierarchies, shifts in the urban spatial form, or transformations in the sociopolitical make-up of cities, it has become well-understood that these local realities and broader global exchanges are intricately connected. Historians of the urban past, however, have remained absent from this discussion. While their work has approached the city as a focal point from which to explore global exchanges in the medieval, early modern, and nineteenth century world, it often remains tied to the specificities of a location, shying away from discussions of the broader phenomenon of globalization. Understanding cities of the past as global cities, with a core role in the long history of globalization, nevertheless has the potential to enrich current discussions of the character and implications of globalization. Thus, the chief goal of this network is to stimulate discussion amongst historians, and between historians and other social scientists, to reach a better understanding of the global city across time as well as space.Historians have embraced the concept of globalization with recent inquiries into the networks of people, knowledge, trade, and culture that circulated the world from the medieval era onwards. Yet, urban scholars at work on such themes mostly fail to make connections beyond the limits of their chosen empire or region. This research network will also begin the task of putting "urban" back into the global process before the modern era by running four workshops on the pre-modern city in global context. The first three meetings will focus on the main areas of inquiry commonly pursued by urban studies specialists. These workshops will concentrate on space, the economic and political structures of urban life, and the character of the urban population. The meetings will encourage debate about how the main characteristics of the global city might be applied in specific historical contexts but they will also seek to identify broader trends and patterns across early modern empires. The final workshop will then be focused on identifying how historicizing the global city influences our understanding of its form, function, and problems in a contemporary context.