Abstract

Literature defines global city-regions as assemblages of economy and society looking for representation. The ontology of the global city-region is a "web of contracts" different and wider than in the national epoch, including global enterprises, services and networks. Their contracts (both written and implicit) are about flows: material (people, goods) and immaterial (services, knowledge). Any principal-agent theory is silent here; any State space theory is challenged. Forming boundless functional spaces the relational economy of flows has critical impacts on the political space: a new theory of multilevel relational contracting is needed.