World cities and peripheral development: The interplay of gateways and subordinate places in Argentina and Ghana’s upstream oil and gas sector

Serving as “gateways”, some world cities tie their wider hinterlands to global networks. The article revisits gateway–hinterland relations against the backdrop of assessments that lead to opposed conclusions on the benefits and shortcomings of integration into the world economy. Referring to the oil and gas sector in Argentina and Ghana, it answers the question of how gateways interact with subordinate places and also uncovers obstacles to peripheral development. The author finds that Accra and Buenos Aires concentrate corporate control. Argentina's capital serves as a gateway for knowledge generation and logistics too. Opportunities for peripheral development in both countries are considerable, albeit largely limited to generic services. Besides a certain concentration of business activities in the gateway cities, more important challenges to peripheral development are typical for small and medium enterprises (insufficient finance and management capabilities, unawareness of business opportunities, and the like). They include rent seeking and subcontracting. The latter leaves local companies in a particularly weak position vis‐à‐vis lead firms. The author argues that while integration into the world economy allows for peripheral development, the corresponding outcomes may not meet everyone's expectations. Related expectations must, therefore, be more down‐to‐earth than overly optimistic statements frequently made by politicians

Locating the global financial crisis: variegated neoliberalization in four European cities

Locating the global financial crisis: variegated neoliberalization in four European cities. Territory, Politics, Governance. This paper looks at the variegated impact of the 2008 global financial crisis and the different ways in which local strategic actors imagined and responded to it through a comparative study of Barcelona, Brussels, Leeds and Turin. Drawing on cultural political economy, we see crisis moments as fertile territory for the analysis of variegation in urban neoliberalization processes as they can break path dependencies and open up alternatives. Inspired by the comparative turn in critical urban studies, our case studies are not offered as representative samples but as dense sites to explore the various interpretations and uses of the crisis, particularly at the elite level. This analysis suggests considerable variegation in how the crisis was both felt and interpreted locally across the four cities. The local elites did not regard this as a crisis of or in their own urban growth models, but as something external. However, as the global financial crisis morphed into national sovereign debt crises and austerity programmes, the experience in each city has been relatively similar. The paper concludes by emphasizing the continuity function of specific local actors through the processes of meaning-making in which they engage, something that existing work on variegated neoliberalization has so far overlooked

Development dynamics of port-cities interface in the Arab Middle Eastern world - The case of Dubai global hub port-city

Many scholars in the field of architecture, urban planning, transportation, geography, economics and sociology have studied port-cities from different perspectives. Yet, the majority of literature on this topic is concerned about the Developed Western and East Asian World. With the aim to contribute to the existing studies and to fill this gap in the literature, this paper makes an attempt to study an example in the fast-developing Arab States in the Middle East, which has recently drawn a particular attention among the scholars. Dubai provides an interesting case study, as it currently hosts the major transhipment hubport of the region. Centred on a single case-study approach, a four-phase model is hypothesized as a tool to investigate the changing spatial and functional dynamics at the port-city interface from the 1900s to the 2010s. The argument is based on a reciprocal relationship between the port and the city, since the advent of a free port. Historically the port has been the economic backbone. Consequently the Creek dredging and newly constructed ports integrated with ancillary infrastructures (such as FTZs) have played an important role in boosting the growth. Some concluding remarks underline the main trends in Dubai's port-city development, compared to the existing European and Asian models. This dynamic evolution is influenced by internal factors, such as oil revenues and governmental strategies, as well as external ones, like the regional and global forces. Despite sharing common features with the Asian consolidation model, this study suggests that Dubai may demonstrate a particular pattern of port-city development