Cultural Production vs. Cultural Accumulation in Global Cities

What the current financial crisis shows is that global cities as centers of command and control do not perform their function as their common definition would have it. Apparently as the international interdependence betweeen the processes that make up what is conventionally called globalization grows, a congeries of interrelations that remain largely the same in their definition become unpredictably different in their dynamic effects. It would be difficult to argue that the global financial system has remained the same after the last financial crisis, whatever fuit bear the efforts to regulate its national or international components. Moreover, global cities do not appear to lose their importance even after the crisis that has as its epicenter at least one of them - New York. Not only alternative centers of economic accumulation arguably have a better chance at staking their place in the system of international financial relations, as these of the BRIC countries do, but also Manhattan's Wall Street may be ready for another come-back as a most proficient manager of the post-crisis imbroglio of the old and the new elements of the international economy that the less publicized regulatory measures in the US and elsewhere introduce in their wake. The cultural side of this process of accumulation resides, of course, in the decisions that are made around the world vis-a-vis what essentially is a common and global crisis. While most everything else becomes produced and consumed in an increasingly place-independent way, it is cities, and overwehlmingly for the global economic, cultural, political and social affairs world-important ones among them, that become true difference-makers in times of crisis because of their distinct cultures that they bring to bear on local and translocal decisions made in the past and present.