Teaching the Cultural Politics and Economy of Global Cities in the Periphery

Abstract

One of the ways panelists were asked to reflect upon "The state of urban geography: what is it and where is it going?" was to consider "the everyday experience of doing urban geography." Most obviously, doing urban geography is about the research we produce as scholars of the city: the methods we use, the theories we invoke, and the policies or practices we hope to influence by what we publish. But at another more prosaic, indeed everyday level, doing urban geography is what we, as teachers, do in hundreds if not thousands of classrooms day in and day out at schools, colleges, and universities around the country. In the classroom, doing urban geography is fundamentally about translating and amplifying the very best and most significant research so that our students can learn the why and wherefore of cities. Idealistically, urban geography pedagogy is also about preparing our students to comprehend and inherit-practically, culturally, economically, and socially-cities as informed and engaged citizens. And increasingly, it is not just the cities of the United States that our students will be heir to but, rather, all cities everywhere as the world becomes increasingly interconnected and interdependent. For us, then, doing urban geography has recently meant trying to link globalization and urbanization in the classroom in a way that capitalizes on the best that urban geography has to offer while we reach beyond the subdiscipline to explore urban practices and processes that have not yet received the scholarly attention they merit.In this short piece, we want to discuss a course we have developed that attempts to extend the pedagogy about globalization and urbanization by paying more substantive attention to the cultural flows, practices, and processes that are involved in global cities, particularly global cities that have tended to receive less attention in a scholarly literature that is largely dominated by cities in the capitalist core. 2 Our aim, consonant with one of the points made by Win Curran in her piece (this issue), is to explore some key peripheral cities as sites for teaching and learning about how the cultural aspects of globalization are shaping peripheral urban spaces, how peripheral urban spaces are contributing to cultural