URBAN DYNAMICS & HOUSING CHANGE - Crossing into the 2 nd Decade of the 3 rd Millennium ENHR 2010, 4-7 July, ISTANBUL 22 nd International Housing Research Conference Spatial Segregation in Global Cities: Global Pressures and Local Changes in Housing Market Ayat ISMAIL Centre for Urban Research, COSMOPOLIS - City, Culture & Society, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium e-mail: ayat.ism@gmail.com Abstract Urban, Social, and cultural impacts of globalization are strongly experienced since the 1980s. Economic global integration is associated with increased dualization and exclusion based on race, class, and income. Accordingly, cities’ spatial configuration is reforming due to the new accumulation regime; segregation, ethnic enclaves, deprived neighborhoods… etc. are materializing in cities’ global network. This global/local dynamics of actions and reactions are taking place through several intersecting process, and the housing market is a key factor in understanding this scheme. Since the local housing market is affected directly and indirectly by global trends such as; deindustrialization, information technology, privatization, gentrification, cultural heterogeneity…etc. And as a result, existing forms of spatial segregation are reinforced and growing to be strongly irreversible. Directly, Globalization affected the role of the state in governing local markets. Consequently, deregulation, subsidize cuts, and investors oriented housing market led to sustain and fortify the bidding powers of money. As a result, different form of spatial segregation based on income and class are realized. The social impact of globalization has also indirect pressures on housing market; increased ethnic/cultural heterogeneity, dualization, shrinkage of the middle class, and the increased gap in income between high-skilled professionals and low-skilled workers in global cities have drastically magnified the resulted spatial segregation by race and class. Keywords: Globalization, Housing Market, Spatial Segregation Introduction The contested term of ‘globalization’ lacks a precise definition. However, it refers to several and divergent sets of processes; economic, social, cultural and even spatial shifts are recognized in cities around the globe, national borders are losing ground by the extensive cross-borders economic integration supported by information technology and communication networks. Mobility of capital is accompanied by mobility of labor and changes in the international labor markets as a whole, new technologies of communication and transport promote increased flows of goods, raw material, and information. Over and above, the most influential economic trend associated with the contemporary wave of globalization is the massive economic ‘restructuring’; the decline of manufacturing in the 1970s along with the rise of service industries, transnational corporation and financial institutions (Friedmann, 1995 [1986]; Sassen, 2001 [1988]; Van Kampen, 2005; Castles, 2002; Kazepov, 2005; Mingione, 2005; Kasteloot, 2005). The specialized literature focuses on the fact that the new structure of economic activities is associated with a new spatial order; a new urban hierarchy that is no longer based on territorial or national