Global city? Everything about the term makes me mad. Of course, there's bulls--t everywhere these days – so much that the University of Washington offers an analytical course titled Calling Bulls--t. Global city-ism should occupy an entire lecture. Global city-ism is not just bulls--t. It's retrograde, boring, environment-trashing, last-century bulls--t; dull, demeaning and reductivist. Worse, it undermines the Sydney we love.

Most of us think cities are too dull and technical to engage with. This suits the global corporates very well, much as, a century ago, it suited the local corporates to quarantine a "central business district" and send the women and children – the "fluffy slippers" – scurrying to the burbs. It suits the suits because it leaves them in charge.

But let's be clear. A city is not a product. Government is not a business, a building is not a phallic trophy and your life is not a reality show to be ranked, branded, advertised and sold into an insatiable, screen-saturated global market. It's not a competition, stupid. And thinking it is will reduce this beautiful, gnarly, textured, voluptuous and vividly particular city of ours to a bland business playpen.

For three decades globalisation and neo-liberalism have worked hand-in-hand to prove that planetary plunder was a noble and necessary pursuit. In that time they have signally failed to achieve the one thing that would actually have been useful, global consensus – on anything, but especially on climate change.