The city has long been a privileged site for critical social inquiry given its undisputed centrality for human life in the modern era. More recently, there has been a surge of interest in the postmodern city, the exemplar being usually Los Angeles. We also hear much of the ‘global city’ – the New Yorks, Londons and Tokyos of the world – linked together through the flows of finance. Yet somewhere like Liverpool – arguably neither postmodern nor global – is studied mainly in relation to its social problems and the perennial schemes for urban regeneration it has been subjected to over recent decades. This volume seeks to redress the balance by making Liverpool its focus but with a purpose that is firmly comparative and general. This introductory chapter sets the scene for the various contributions by re-examining the postmodern global city thesis, surveying the various attempts at regenerating cities like Liverpool, exploring the diverse connections between the local and the global in the city, studying various forms of (re)presenting the city discursively, and, last but not least, critically examining attempts and prospects for transforming the city.

The Postmodern Global City

Peter Hall, in his influential study The World Cities, argued some time ago that ‘there are certain great cities, in which a disproportionate share of the world's most important business is conducted’ (Hall, 1966: 7). These world cities are the seats of national government, crucial nodes in the flow of trade and finance and cultural powerhouses. With globalisation – a qualitative advance of economic internationalisation since the mid-1980s – the importance of these global cities has, if anything, increased. In the new dynamic international system we call globalisation, the great cities play a pivotal role in its variable configuration. As Saskia Sassen shows in The Global City, ‘a combination of spatial dispersion and global integration has created a new strategic role for major cities’ (Sassen, 1991: 3). This includes, preeminently, being a command point in the organisation and reproduction of the global economic system, a key location for finance, which has now replaced manufacturing as the leading economic sector, and a major site for the production and consumption of the goods, services and innovations being produced by the new capitalism.

In the literature on the city and globalisation we can detect two broad positions, albeit ones that might be complementary.