Global cities and urban theory / Donald McNeill.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 157-177) and index.

Machine generated contents note: Bright lights, global cities -- Cultural and political economies -- Material turns -- The organization of the book -- 1. Centrality -- Caput Mundi: capital of the world -- The `original globalizer'? Cities and territorialized religion -- The cathedral and the global city -- Theological centrality -- Popemobile: universality and visibility -- Creative globalization? Pilgrimage practices -- The Bible and the global South -- 2. Flat Cities -- Actor-networks and political economies -- A Paris journey; or, the problem of the `zoom' -- How big is the city? -- World's Fairs -- Centre of calculation -- The objects that hold Paris together -- Small Paris: recomposition -- A rumour of cities -- 3. Global Urban Order(Ing) -- Metageographies -- Global rankings -- The `ordinary city' debates -- Ontologies of big cities -- Standard cities -- Global standards I: hotels -- Global standards II: air conditioning -- 4. Logistical Territories -- Circumferential and surface geographies -- Logistical territories -- Port ontologies -- A ship-centric ontology of the urban? -- Airport territories -- The production of Hong Kong International Airport -- 5. Centres of Calculation -- CBD: the central business district as a `centre of calculation' -- Office geographies -- Bodies and work -- Saskia Sassen's financial centres -- Metrologies of centrality: critical accounting -- Calculable city space -- Global cities and the `super-rich' -- Moral geographies -- Forensic urban geography -- 6. World-Making -- Models, experts and consultants -- Actualization -- The selling of the Silicon Valley model -- Management consultancy as worlding practice -- Co-presence and business travel -- Gurus and urbanologists -- San Francisco and the global expansion of Uber -- Testbeds and experimentation -- Urban laboratories: New Songdo and Masdar City -- CONCLUSIONS -- Distance and panorama -- Global cities are miscellaneous concentrations of firms -- Calculated territories -- Power and cities -- Ethnographic sensitivities.