Role of Popular Culture in Global City Formation Lim Su-Yi
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Role of Popular Culture in Global City Formation Lim Su-Yi (A0142413W) UIS3911GL: Independent Study Module National University of Singapore Semester 2, AY 16/17 Synopsis: Popular culture and its accompanying messages have inundated our lives through the Internet and the globalization of information, media and technology. This paper aims to research popular culture as an alternative means of measuring what defines and constitutes a global city beyond the widely accepted provision of Advanced Producer Services. Through film, music and architecture, we see popular culture challenge existing urban discourses on global cities by providing an alternative lens and new means of contestations. This can prevent an overly biased Anglo-American, ethnocentric understanding and labeling of emerging cities, especially for emerging Asian cities. 2 Introduction With the advent of the Internet and the globalization of information, media and technology that kicked off from the late 20th century, popular culture and its accompanying messages has inundated our lives through film, literature, architecture and music, to name a few avenues. As globalization perpetuates the flow of values, ideology, and people across transnational borders, it produces and proliferates cultural identity both nationally and transnationally (Tomlinson, 2003). Oftentimes, popular culture helps influence and educates us on how the media defines global cities. This provides an alternative lens from the usual rhetoric on how we understand and characterize global cities. This paper aims to further research the potential of using popular culture as an alternative means of defining a global city beyond the widely accepted provision of Advanced Producer Services (APS) as theorized by Saskia Sassen. Through architecture, film, and song, this paper seeks to investigate the role of popular culture in global city formation in two ways. Firstly, popular culture can redefine global cities, and secondly, also work in tandem alongside APS to define global cities, as will be discussed further below. Existing Literature on Global City Concepts The limitations of prevailing urban studies and discourses lie in their discounting of cities that are unable to imitate the idea of “developmentalism” (Robinson, 2002). A shift towards a city-centered formation of global capitalism has been attributed to a burgeoning New International Division of Labour dominated by Transnational Corporations in the production and exchange of commodities (Lai, 2009). This privileges capitalist economic globalization, where specific economic trajectories and industries are prioritized over others. In this respect, cities that provide APS –with a focus on specialized services of accounting, advertising, legal, financial and economic forecasting services- provide infrastructures for global capital and immigrant labour inflow (Sassen, 1996). APS can be “reasonably interpreted as a contemporary ‘indicator sector’ in the world economy”, and in their increasingly global reach, APS firms have a crucial role in enabling economic globalization (Taylor, Derudder, Hoyler, & Witlox, 2012, p. 136). By focusing on major cities that have the necessary infrastructure to attract APS firms, Sassen proposes an emphasis on the functional centrality of cities in the global economy, privileging cities like New York, London and Hong Kong. This is because they emerge as frontrunners and “derive their importance from a privileged position in transnational networks of capital, information and people” (Derudder, De Vos, & Witlox, Global city/ world city, 2012, p. 73). APS are highly sought after for the organization of advanced economies. When a city has anchored its main economic industry on APS, it signals its intent to climb the global ranks by being an important “command and control centers of the global economy” which would necessitate the disproportionate concentration of such high-end services (Sassen, 1991). Reimagining the Global City Discourse This organizational definition is problematical as it propagates and presupposes that all cities should pursue this one economic developmental trajectory, or that the only means of measuring global city status is by analyzing the APS success of a city. A select few cities have become valorized as “critical nodes and vital powerhouses of the global economy” (Yeoh, 2005, p. 945) By solely relying on analyzing data related to APS, we 3 lose out on seeing socio-cultural facets of global city societies that are hard to glean from simply looking at the number of law firms or the types of financial services offered in a city. After all, it is the “cultures of urban spaces that (are) most immediately and directly influenced by globalization and equally it is urban cultures which largely constitute so- called globalization” (Yeoh, 2005, p. 945). A cultural aspect of defining cities have persisted for decades, but remains overshadowed by the perceived superiority of APA in defining global cities. I propose the use of popular culture representation of and production in cities as an alternative marker of global city definition in two ways. Firstly, if popular culture portrays a city’s cultural dominancy in certain creative industries through film, music and architecture, the city should be considered as a global city. Secondly, cities that have their own alternative and unique hybrid culture should be considered as a potential global city as well for their contribution to a new unique global rhetoric. It is pertinent to consider these alternative lenses, as cities with global aspirations would “require particular forms of cultural capital” (Kong, 2007, p. 383). Kim (2001) promotes cultural capital development as a three-fold strategy: people-oriented, place-oriented, and product-oriented. As Kong explains: “A people-oriented strategy focuses on human development, cultivating cultural producers and consumers for the global city. A product-oriented strategy emphasises the creation of cultural products. A place-oriented strategy involves infrastructure and property development” (Kong, 2007, p. 384) Popular culture and mass media are able to propagate cultural capital through this 3-fold strategy, introducing a more nuanced understanding of global city making strategies. This moves away from traditional global city definitions if we are able to combine APS with culture to gain a non-exclusive and more comprehensive way of defining global cities. The creation of global cities hinges on the marriage of these strategies that encourages the “integration of economic and cultural activity around the production and consumption of the arts, architecture, fashion and design, media, food and entertainment” (Yeoh, 2005, p. 946). As economy and culture collide, a question come too to mind: since the economic trajectory of global cities are homogenous, does this extend to the culture of global cities, and the messages and themes portrayed through popular culture? To answer this question, I first define what constitutes popular culture and cultural imperialism, homogeneity and hybridization. Definition of Popular Culture One definition of popular culture is that it is the residual cultural form leftover after distinguishing what constitutes high culture (Storey, 2012, p. 6). Much of the distinction between “high” and “popular” culture were cultivated during the Enlightenment (Crothers, 2010, p. 11), where only the educated elite were trained in the “real” beauty, and everything else became “case, common, and popular” (Crothers, 2010, p. 12). Popular culture is also defined as mass culture (Storey, 2012, p. 8). As Storey theorizes, mass culture is not just an imposed and impoverished culture; it is in a clear identifiable sense an imported American culture (2012, p. 8), or “Americanization”. This raises the concern that cultural homogenization –vis-à-vis Americanization- will occur. As Crothers expounds: “Those critics concerned with the concept of cultural homogenization agree that 4 American popular culture may well dominate the world… The fear is that in time everyone everywhere will end up eating the same thing, reading the same thing and wearing the same thing. Under such circumstances, cultural diversity would be lost forever” (2010:28) Mass media and popular culture thus appears as a tool that can shape cultural discourses of global city by perpetuating a common culture and associated features across different cities. As cultural studies become increasingly entrenched within the discourse of globalization, attention has become directed towards the “process of transculturation, the interchange of cultural elements and the breaking down of distinctive cultural identities, and the loss of national sovereignty” (Mahtani & Salmon, 2001, p. 165). Cultural Imperialism, Homogenization and Hybridity In the concluding chapter of Big Sounds from Small Peoples, Wallis and Malm suggests that music culture would either convene towards an Anglo-American homogeny, or new local music of different culture and influence that interact would emerge (1984, pp. 312-313). Cultural imperialism suggests that in a struggle amongst a few cultures, one dominant culture would eventually take root as the culturally superior one (Crothers, 2010, p. 27). This is linked in part to cultural homogenization, where the dominant culture imposes its values on local population, aided by the rapid spread and accessibility of information and mass media today. Despite the prominence and pervasiveness of American popular culture and cultural commodities