Visually Exploring Globalizing Cities: From Data Visualizations to ‘In Situ’ Approaches

Abstract

Globalization, the ever-increasing worldwide flow of ideas, practices, and material objects resulting in increasing interdependency between people and nations across the globe, has numerous interrelated economic, political, cultural, ideological, environmental, and technological facets.

In an effort to make the elusive and multifaceted concept of globalization more tangible and measurable, different instruments have been developed, usually in the form of “indexes” based on quantitative data. These indexes mainly result in rankings of individual cities as well as whole countries with respect to their supposed level of globalization. Some items of the existing indexes to measure the level of globalization of nation states or cities refer to phenomena that are to some extent visually observable, but many aspects and manifestations of globalization escape these rather crude operationalizations.

Visual approaches to globalization help to enrich and complement the more abstract and mainly quantitatively supported discourses around this multifaceted phenomenon. They may provide valid and unobtrusive ways to assess and understand the impact of culture and cultural exchange in the daily lives of inhabitants of cities around the world and add a unique “localized,” cross-cultural empirical perspective to the many divergent views and discussions about the presumed beneficial or detrimental nature of these processes. An ‘in situ’ visual approach to globalization may help to uncover the “real life” impact and the specific contexts of these processes at different locations. This chapter discusses different options for researching globalization and cultural change in cities.

Citation

Pauwels, L. (2023), "Visually Exploring Globalizing Cities: From Data Visualizations to ‘In Situ’ Approaches", Pauwels, L. (Ed.) Visual and Multimodal Urban Sociology, Part B (Research in Urban Sociology, Vol. 18B), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 7-38. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1047-00422023000018B001