Global Port Cities in North America

<p>As the material anchors of globalization North America’s global port cities channel flows of commodities capital and tourists. This book explores how economic globalization processes have shaped these cities' political institutions social structures and urban identities since the mid-1970s. Although the impacts of financialization on global cities have been widely discussed it is curious that how the global integration of commodity chains actually happens spatially — creating a quantitatively new global organization of production distribution and consumption processes — remains understudied. The book uses New York City Los Angeles Vancouver and Montreal as case studies of how once-redundant spaces have been reorganized and crucially reinterpreted so as to accommodate new flows of goods and people — and how in these processes social environmental and security costs of global production networks have been shifted to the public. </p>