The poor and the shop window: globalisation, a local political instrument in the South African city?

A spectre is haunting cities around the world: the spectre of globalization. The fear is of convergence on an undesired United States model of urban spatial form and social content, involving increased segregation, shrinkage of public amenities, commercialisation of civic life, decline of central cities, and social polarization. (.) We may call this model the 'partitioned city'. It is accompanied by the ideological belief that states as well as cities are helpless to do anything but ameliorate, at the margin, some of the negative aspects of this partitioning. History, geography, culture, local agency, resistance, are all ultimately irrelevant; under the relentless pressure to compete, urban leaders have no choice but to move even faster in the direction all the others are going, each seeking their own bit of competitive advantage over each of the others.