Ilchenko Mikhail
The article analyzes the influence of Saskia Sassen’s urban research on the globalization studies. The author argues that the major advantage of the global city concept can be seen in the methodological shift towards the analysis of global tendencies through the lens of urban practices. Sassen considers globalization as a complicated process, which leads to the restructuring of the global political geography. On the one hand, such a view allows to define the global city as a key site of this geography; on the other hand, it transforms the global city into unique research site for examination of the global trends. The global appears to be placed in the local forms, which constitute a sort of globalization “microenvironment”. In this regard, today’s major cities can be considered not just as a place where global process occur, but also as a place where they are “produced”.
Keywords: urban studies, global city, globalization processes, localities, “microenvironment” of globalization.