Deconstructing the Global City: Unravelling the Linkages that Underlie Hong Kong's World City Status

Abstract

This paper questions the hyper-globalist orientation among some leading analysts of the global city and their tendency to define it in functional terms, accounting for its presence by the agglomeration of talents and therefore to underexamine the global city's actual linkages. It argues that an examination of the linkages (geographical scope as well as capital, knowledge and labour-mediated) will alert one to the changing configurations of a global city. It will also facilitate an exploration into factors other than the agglomeration of talents that have made for the changes. The paper examines Hong Kong's changing configuration as a global city from the mid 1980s to the early 2000s. It starts with an overview of three sets of trend data and goes on to examine the capital, knowledge and labour mediated by two types of producer service and the circuits they support.