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David Ley
This paper discusses some of the limitations of the global city hypothesis, in particular
its economistic tendencies, the suppression of political and cultural domains, and the
underdevelopment of human agency and everyday life. It tries to establish more fully
the identities of global subjects. Examining two sets of global actors, transnational
businessmen and cosmopolitan professionals, it argues that the expansive reach and mastery
imputed to global subjects, their flight from the particular and the partisan, their
dominance and freedom from vulnerability, are far from complete. The separation of the
global and the local and the ascription of mobility and universalism to the global and
stasis and parochialism to the local is an oversimplification, for an optic of transnational
global spaces should not conceal the intersecting reality of circumscribed everyday lives.
Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2
email: dley@geog.ubc.ca