The City as Conduit For Global Flows - Presentation at Global Cultural Flows Workshop

Abstract

Within the world of current global cultural studies, Arjun Appadurai’s framework for the five dimensions of global cultural flows is particularly relevant to an examination of cities. Appadurai has characterized contemporary global cultural flows as having five dimensions: 1) Ethnoscapes - the “landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers and other moving groups and persons”; 2) Technoscapes - the “global configuration ... of technology, ... both high and low, both mechanical and informational, [that] now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries”; 3) Finanscapes - the disposition of global capital, which flows through the technoscape at the speed of light and in unimaginable volumes; 4) Mediascapes - the “distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information ... and ... the images of the world created by these media”; 5) Ideoscapes - the ideological landscape composed of political ideas, terms and images (both of states and movements opposed to states). Appadurai’s central thesis with regard to this framework is that global cultural flows occur at different speeds and often (though not always) through different channels. The disjuncture between these flows, in his view, is the dominant issue in the politics of global culture.