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what makes your city a global city essay brainly

Understanding Society

Daniel Little

The global city — Saskia Sassen

Saskia Sassen is the leading urban theorist of the global world. (Here are several prior posts that intersect with her work.) Her The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (1991) has shaped the concepts and methods that other theorists have used to analyze the role of cities and their networks in the contemporary world. The core ideas in her theory of the global city are presented in a 2005 article, “The Global City: Introducing a Concept” ( link ). This article is a convenient place to gain an understanding of her basic approach to the subject.

Key to Sassen’s concept of the global city is an emphasis on the flow of information and capital. Cities are major nodes in the interconnected systems of information and money, and the wealth that they capture is intimately related to the specialized businesses that facilitate those flows — financial institutions, consulting firms, accounting firms, law firms, and media organizations. Sassen points out that these flows are no longer tightly bound to national boundaries and systems of regulation; so the dynamics of the global city are dramatically different than those of the great cities of the nineteenth century.

Sassen emphasizes the importance of creating new conceptual resources for making sense of urban systems and their global networks — a new conceptual architecture, as she calls it (28). She argues for seven fundamental hypotheses about the modern global city:

The geographic dispersal of economic activities that marks globalization, along with the simultaneous integration of such geographically dispersed activities, is a key factor feeding the growth and importance of central corporate functions.
These central functions become so complex that increasingly the headquarters of large global firms outsource them: they buy a share of their central functions from highly specialized service firms.
Those specialized service firms engaged in the most complex and globalized markets are subject to agglomeration economies.
The more headquarters outsource their most complex, unstandardized functions, particularly those subject to uncertain and changing markets, the freer they are to opt for any location.
These specialized service firms need to provide a global service which has meant a global network of affiliates … and a strengthening of cross border city-to-city transactions and networks.
The economic fortunes of these cities become increasingly disconnected from their broader hinterlands or even their national economies.
One result of the dynamics described in hypothesis six, is the growing informalization of a range of economic activities which find their effective demand in these cities, yet have profit rates that do not allow them to compete for various resources with the high-profit making firms at the top of the system. (28-30)

Three key tendencies seem to follow from these structural facts about global cities. One is a concentration of wealth in the hands of owners, partners, and professionals associated with the high-end firms in this system. Second is a growing disconnection between the city and its region. And third is the growth of a large marginalized population that has a very hard time earning a living in the marketplace defined by these high-end activities. Rather than constituting an economic engine that gradually elevates the income and welfare of the whole population, the modern global city funnels global surpluses into the hands of a global elite dispersed over a few dozen global cities.

These tendencies seem to line up well with several observable features of modern urban life throughout much of the world: a widening separation in quality of life between a relatively small elite and a much larger marginalized population; a growth of high-security gated communities and shopping areas; and dramatically different graphs of median income for different socioeconomic groups. New York, London, and Hong Kong/Shanghai represent a huge concentration of financial and business networks, and the concentration of wealth that these produce is manifest:

Inside countries, the leading financial centers today concentrate a greater share of national financial activity than even ten years ago, and internationally, cities in the global North concentrate well over half of the global capital market. (33)

This mode of global business creates a tight network of supporting specialist firms that are likewise positioned to capture a significant level of wealth and income:

By central functions I do not only mean top level headquarters; I am referring to all the top level financial, legal, accounting, managerial, executive, planning functions necessary to run a corporate organization operating in more than one country. (34)

These features of the global city economic system imply a widening set of inequalities between elite professionals and specialists and the larger urban population of service and industrial workers. They also imply a widening set of inequalities between North and South. Sassen believes that communications and Internet technologies have the effect of accelerating these widening inequalities:

Besides their impact on the spatial correlates of centrality, the new communication technologies can also be expected to have an impact on inequality between cities and inside cities. (37)

Sassen’s conceptual architecture maintains a place for location and space: global cities are not disembodied, and the functioning of their global firms depends on a network of activities and lesser firms within the spatial scope of the city and its environs. So Sassen believes there is space for political contest between parties over the division of the global surplus.

If we consider that global cities concentrate both the leading sectors of global capital and a growing share of disadvantaged populations (immigrants, many of the disadvantaged women, people of color generally, and, in the megacities of developing countries, masses of shanty dwellers) then we can see that cities have become a strategic terrain for a whole series of conflicts and contradictions. (39)

But this strategic contest seems badly tilted against the disadvantaged populations she mentions. So the outcomes of these contests over power and wealth are likely to lead, it would seem, to even deeper marginalization, along the lines of what Loic Wacquant describes in Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality ( link ).

This is a hugely important subject for everyone who wants to understand the dynamics and future directions of the globe’s mega-cities and their interconnections. What seems pressingly important for urbanists and economists alike, is to envision economic mechanisms that can be established that do a better job of sharing the fruits of economic progress with the whole of society, not just the elite and professional end of the socioeconomic spectrum.

Some Of The World's Best-Known Global Cities

According to the A.T. Kearney’s Global Cities Index 2017, New York outsmarted London as the world’s best-performing city while the latter ranked second. Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong followed respectively. The city of San Francisco topped the Global Cities Outlook Index ahead of New York, Paris, London, and Boston respectively. New York was ranked the best city for business activities, and human capital. Paris topped the best cities for information exchange while London was rated the best city for a cultural experience. Washington, D.C. the best city for political engagements. Hon Kong boasts of being a global leader in air freights while Brussels boasts of being the best place to set up an embassy.

Reasons Of Increase In Global Cities

The increase in global cities is linked to the globalization of economies and the centralization of mass production within urban centers. The two factors have led to the emergence of networks of activities that seek to fulfill the service and financial requirements of multinationals. The cities grow to became global while other suffer deindustrialization or stagnation of their economies.

Criticisms Of Global Cities

Despite playing significant roles in the global economy, global city thesis has been known for being a threat to state-centric perspectives. These cities have been accused of focusing their reach to other global cities and neglecting cities within the national outreach. These cities are more connected to the outside world than to their domestic economy. Although they are interconnected and interdependent, global cities are always in a competitive state. The cities of New York and London have been trying to outwit each other as the global financial centers. Local governments have been keen to promote the global cities within their territories as either economic or cultural centers, and sites of innovation.

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The importance of a global city

La mayor: 'we are the shot callers, the investors, the storytellers'.

LA Mayor Eric Garcetti speaking behind a lectern.

Editor's note: This story is part of our coverage of a weeklong series of events to mark ASU's expansion in California at the ASU California Center in downtown Los Angeles.

The pandemic highlighted the nimble ways that cities can quickly address problems that take national governments months to untangle, according to Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.

In the early days of the pandemic, Garcetti jumped on a Zoom call – only his second ever – with 70 mayors from around the world, sharing information and best practices, such as how to prepare hospitals and whether to shut down.

“We talked to each other and the next day, we were implementing,” he said.

“Thousands if not tens of thousands of people are alive today because the cities of the world connected to each other.”

Garcetti spoke at an event on Monday morning called “Is LA Still a Global City?” at Arizona State University’s California Center in downtown Los Angeles. The talk is part of a weeklong celebration of ASU’s new site, based in the historic Herald Examiner Building.

Garcetti said that the important question for Los Angeles is: "What kind of global city are we?"

“Nothing about being global inherently makes you a fair city or a just city. It just makes you big,” he said.

Los Angeles, where 63% of the residents are immigrants or the children of immigrants, is at the crossroads of many of the world’s biggest industries, including not only the entertainment industry but also fashion, fine arts and new media, he said.

“We are the shot callers, the investors, the storytellers.

“Part of that is our universities, like ASU, which we welcome as an LA university joining the other great institutions,” Garcetti said.

A panel discussion followed Garcetti’s talk, in which ASU President Michael Crow emphasized the need for cities to maintain a vibrant urban core.

“We’re here because this is the place where the future is being outlined,” he said.

“You have to be downtown. We searched for years for this building. We wanted to be in downtown LA. It’s an essential location for human capital development.”

Four people on stage in chairs at ASU California Center event

ASU President Michael Crow (second from left) speaks during the "Is LA Still a Global City?" panel discussion, following Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti's keynote speech, on Oct. 3, during a weeklong celebration of the ASU California Center in downtown Los Angeles. Joining the discussion is (from left to right) moderator Jessica Lall, CEO of the Central City Association; Stephanie Hsieh, president of Biocom CA; and Stephen Cheung, president of the World Trade Center, LA. Photo by Charlie Leight/ASU News

Steven Cheung, president of the World Trade Center in Los Angeles, said that the narrative of an influx of companies leaving California is not new.

“It’s true that it’s cheaper to do business elsewhere. But as we know, cheaper is cheaper, it’s not better,” he said.

“Companies are coming to LA not because it’s cheaper but because of the diversity of the population.

“The bottom line is that these companies still need to grow and find talent, and LA has one of the biggest and most diverse talent pools.”

The speakers emphasized the need for more education opportunities.

Stephanie Hsieh, executive director of Biocom CA and a biotech entrepreneur, said that nearly two-thirds of the workers the life sciences industry don’t have a bachelor’s degree.

“When it comes to workforce development, it starts in pre-K and it’s a continuum,” he said. “You have to get the kids in early.”

Hsieh said that with the Los Angeles Community College system, plus the Cal State and University of California systems, Los Angeles produces more PhDs in the life sciences than any other part of the country.

“But there’s a lot more we could be doing. How do we pull together to have people in our community see themselves in these positions?” she said.

The speakers noted that LA’s sprawling workforce weakens the ability to be collaborative.

“Prior to COVID, we were talking about downtown going through a renaissance,” Cheung said.

“There’s been a slight hiccup, but I think we can get back there. But also because of the transition to remote work, how do we look at the office space and attract a different type of collaboration?

“It can happen, but we need more leadership.”

Hsieh said that office space can be transformed.

“We have essentially a zero percent vacancy rate for wet lab space. We need to make room for that,” she said.

Crow said that of the top cities in the world, Los Angeles has the most potential.

“It’s the most economically diverse and has the highest concentration of forward-thinking industries,” he said.

“It also has a deep commitment to social transformation and justice. All the momentum is here.”

Top photo: Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti answers the question “Is LA Still a Global City?” during a keynote speech on Oct. 3, during a weeklong celebration of the ASU California Center in the historic LA Herald Examiner Building. Photo by Charlie Leight/ASU News

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Global Cities: Introducing the 10 Traits of Globally Fluent Metro Areas

Subscribe to the brookings metro update, brad mcdearman and brad mcdearman nonresident senior fellow - brookings metro joseph parilla joseph parilla senior fellow & director of applied research - brookings metro @joeparilla.

June 24, 2013

Swift global integration, the rapid expansion of a global consumer class, and the rise of urban regions as the engines of global economic growth have ushered in a new era. The global economy no longer revolves around a handful of dominant states and their national urban centers. This fundamental shift has both challenged the United States with greater global competition but also offered the prospect of all U.S. metropolitan areas to benefiting from engaging in growing markets abroad.

Aware of the enormous untapped opportunities offered through trade and global engagement, many U.S. metropolitan leaders are abandoning their path dependent focus on the U.S. market by improving their region’s global fluency. Our new report, “ The Ten Traits of Globally Fluent Metro Areas ,” defines global fluency as the level of global understanding, competence, practice, and reach that a metro area exhibits to facilitate progress toward its desired economic future.

In this report, we specifically isolate the 10 key traits associated with cities that have achieved global success. Many of these traits align with the key inputs to economic competitiveness: distinct specializations, infrastructure, human capital and innovation, capital investment, and good governance to name a few. But the list begins with Leadership with a Worldview because having a broad worldview enables regional leaders to be intentional in evaluating and leveraging all their other traits.

Over the next 10 weeks, starting today, a Brookings expert will post a blog related to one of the ten traits, presented in sequential order. Together, these traits provide one framework for metropolitan leaders to gauge their global starting point. The 10 traits below have proven to be particularly strong determinants of a metro area’s ability to succeed in global markets, manage the negative consequences of globalization, and better secure its desired economic future. The most successful cities are those that have a long-term outlook and achieve some level of integration between many of the traits.

Leadership with a Worldview – Local leadership networks with a global outlook have great potential for impact on the global fluency of a metro area.
Legacy of Global Orientation – Due to their location, size, and history, certain cities were naturally oriented toward global interaction at an early stage, giving them a first mover advantage.
Specializations with Global Reach – Cities often establish their initial global position through a distinct economic specialization, leveraging it as a platform for diversification.
Adaptability to Global Dynamics – Cities that sustain their market positions are able to adjust to each new cycle of global change.
Culture of Knowledge and Innovation – In an increasingly knowledge-driven world, positive development in the global economy requires high levels of human capital to generate new ideas, methods, products, and technologies.
Opportunity and Appeal to the World – Metro areas that are appealing, open, and opportunity-rich serve as magnets for attracting people and firms from around the world.
International Connectivity – Global relevance requires global reach that efficiently connects people and goods to international markets through well-designed, modern infrastructure.
Ability to Secure Investment for Strategic Priorities – Attracting investment from a wide variety of domestic and international sources is decisive in enabling metro areas to effectively pursue new growth strategies.
Government as Global Enabler – Federal, state, and local governments have unique and complementary roles to play in enabling firms and metro areas to “go global.”
Compelling Global Identity – Cities must establish an appealing global identity and relevance in international markets not only to sell the city, but also to shape and build the region around a common purpose.

innsbruck university press

Globalization and the city.

Introduction

Texte intégral.

1 It is often said that the world is turning into a “global village”. In reality, it is much more a “global city”: today, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities (although often under poor conditions), and many metropolises of the world are much more economically productive and significant with respect to global networks than most of the world’s states. In addition, these cities look increasingly alike, shaping a global space which is more and more indistinguishable between continents. Thus the modern city is the primary manifestation of globalization today, and its very essence is a global network of multidimensional spaces of congestion that both describes and shapes it.

2 The relevance of cities is nothing but new. While there were phases and places in history, when and where cities were not particularly important, and as a rule, only a small fraction of the population lived in these settlements, the history of civilization as we know it is very much connected to cities. From ancient to medieval and modern times, and from China, India and Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean, Europe and Mesoamerica, cities have been a recurrent phenomenon, and still archeology finds further evidence for large and hitherto undocumented – albeit not totally unexpected – settlements in distant periods and places. Hence, cities were essential for culture and civilization; they allowed a centralization of power and knowledge, and they were crucial for the division of labor and for organizing the demand of the people, on which economic development rests. And if we adopt a view of globalization that allows for a history in the longue durée , then cities emerge as the places people traveled to and from, where people exchanged news and goods, and where people could develop a view of a wider world, particularly if the city was located at the sea-shore.

1 A very recent exception is Global Cities , a large-scale collective volume by Taylor et al. (2012).

3 Hence, as places of intense and continuous interactions, cities are the locations par excellence where global history takes place, and we must study the history of cities in connection with the history of globalization from this perspective. Interestingly, although we can look back on twenty years of manifold globalization debates and shelves of books about the topic, this has hardly been done so far. 1 Hence, we lack orientation. One reason for that is, of course, methodological: it is simply impossible to fully grasp the complexities of a global social system that incorporates about seven billion individuals and a lot of collectives that are organized in different hierarchies and networks, all of them interwoven. But there are also two ways out of this dilemma: the first is to study the emergence of globalization in its various dimensions historically to identify the characteristics relevant for change and to understand the path-dependence of the process in order to comprehend recent developments and to contextualize them properly in the form of a meta-narrative; the second is to collect data about what is “really” going on, recently as well as historically, to get an idea of the structure and practical constraints of human action and choices at the micro level as well. Both help us make (more) sense of the alleged chaos of human existence.

2 See Friedman (1986), Sassen (1991, 1994), and Castells (1996, 2004).

3 Braudel (1986) particularly referred to Venice, Antwerp, Genoa and Amsterdam as cities that shaped (...)

4 This book is about cities and globalization for this very reason. It is centered on cities because they have played a crucial role throughout the whole process as centers of exchange and as focal points of developments. It is here that two rather different strands of literature meet: On the one hand, there is vivid research on “global cities” (or “world cities”) going back to the concepts of John Friedman and Saskia Sassen in the 1980s and early 1990s (as a global space also referencing Manuel Castell’s “network society”) although the term is certainly older. 2 On the other hand, the ideas of historians like Fernand Braudel, who observed that “central cities” shaped “world economies”, 3 are highly relevant in this context and show that certain nodes of exchange have been crucial for the overall development of the world even in times when city populations were comparably small and the world economies far from global in a literal sense.

4 See Taylor (1999), also with reference to several seminal works on global cities.

5 The KOF Index of Globalization was recently extended backwards until 1970; Dreher et al. (2009), 29

5 Further, Peter Taylor correctly claims that there is a clear empirical misbalance of city- and state-centered research, especially with regard to connections between cities. 4 From this approach, the research tradition of the Global and World Cities (GaWC) network emerged, which challenged this lack of data, especially when compared to data about nation-states, for which also a lot of ranking exercises referring to their degree of globalization exist. However, all this research has, so far, remained focused on the present and has lacked a historical dimension. As a result, most quantitative research about globalization focuses on variables, which are useful only for analyzing short-term trends (if any). 5 This is totally clear when data about internet access, international tourism or UN peace-keeping missions is included, which – as such – can logically only exist for a few decades. But it is also true for seemingly more neutral data like foreign direct investment (FDI), gross domestic product (GDP), migration flows or portfolio investments, which in many cases is not only poorly specified historically (and consequently hardly collected), but also – at least potentially – omits factors relevant for earlier globalization episodes, which could be informative for recent developments as well. In addition, most of this data is collected in a regular and comparable way for states only, today as well as in the past.

6 This book approaches several of the shortcomings of earlier literature about globalization and about cities. It offers a multi-dimensional perspective on several time periods, places and reference texts, on economic, cultural and social phenomena manifesting in and connecting cities in the context of globalization (or at least global relevance at the respective time). Thus it offers empirical material to understand how global processes affected these cities and vice versa. And it offers discussions of the concept of global city, especially in the context of (re) writing global history.

Now There is the Book…

7 The book starts with a general historical discussion about the connection between urbanization and the industrial revolution by Franz Mathis (Innsbruck). In the chapter No Industrialization without Urbanization: The Role of Cities in Modern Economic Development , Mathis emphasizes the role of cities as amplifiers of change. They provide agglomerations of people, of supply (of labor and capital) and demand (for goods and services), of markets and opportunities. Hence, they are a precondition, as well as an incentive, for industrialization. The connection is positive (as shown by the examples of Britain, the U.S. and Japan) as well as negative (where there are no cities, there is no industrialization) and is also relevant in today’s globalization, as more recent examples of successful industrialization in the developing world show.

6 Abu-Lughod (1989).

8 In a second overview chapter, Locating and Teaching Cities in the “New” World History: Perspectives from the U. S. after the Fall of “Western Civilization”, Jim Mokhiber (New Orleans) demonstrates how the global city concept in world history research and teaching has been neglected. Mokhiber links Sassen’s theoretical approach, which is extensively outlined in this contribution, to Janet Abu-Lughod’s work on the premodern Eurasian world system 6 and thus demonstrates the usefulness of a historically grounded debate. But he also draws the connection between city research and the teaching of world history and discusses the didactic usefulness of cities in this context, an approach that is certainly applicable beyond the context of teaching (Western) civilization history in the United States.

7 Wallerstein (1974).

9 Finally, in a third overview chapter, Bringing Economic Geography Back in: Global Cities and the Governance of Commodity Chain , Christof Parnreiter (Hamburg) argues – from a geographic perspective – that global cities have to be theoretically conceptualized and empirically scrutinized as critical nodes in commodity chains. He stresses the inherent spatial character of the concept and emphasizes the connections to world systems theory, 7 to which many of the authors in this book at least implicitly refer; he also discusses the problem of governance in this context.

10 The second part of the book contains five case studies from very diverse historical epochs and places, which are presented chronologically. The first, The Phenomenon of Global Cities in the Ancient World by Brigitte Truschnegg (Innsbruck), analyzes the reception of ancient cities as “global” (in its meaning at the respective time). In her comparative study of Alexandria, Babylon, Athens, Carthage and Rome, she not only stresses and discusses cultural significance, economic relevance and political power as notable dimensions of global reach, but also the problems in finding historically stable concepts to measure these dimensions. Hence, her contribution is also very valuable in interdisciplinary methodological terms.

11 The second case study by Robert Dupont (New Orleans), New Orleans as a Global City: Contemporary Assessment and Past Glory , describes one of the first colonial settlements in what was to become the South of the United States and its multifarious history. Throughout time, New Orleans has shown some of the features that mark a global city, especially in the early nineteenth century, when it was among the most relevant port cities in the Americas (if not the world) because of its strategic location at the mouth of the Mississippi. Besides this historical assessment, Dupont also contributes to methodological questions and provides a discussion of the global city concept in the context of urban studies.

12 In the third case study, Zanzibar: Imperialism, Proto-Globalization, and a Nineteenth Century Indian Ocean Boom Town , Erik Gilbert (Arkansas) analyzes the increasingly multiethnic city of Zanzibar. It is still perceived as “ancient”, but is actually a quite recent product of the emerging globalized Indian Ocean economy in the nineteenth century, which was ruled by the British. Here we find a second, more local example for the relevance of perception, as well as the mutual forces of influence, in a nutshell: while Zanzibar is a product of this “new” economy, it simultaneously helped to shape it. Consequently, the chapter also draws our attention to Africa, often enough neglected as a place of agency in global processes.

13 While these case studies focus on historical developments, the remaining two are more spatial in their approach. The fourth case study, The Evolution of a Global City: Vienna’s Integration into the World City System , by Robert Musil (Vienna), examines the connection between cities and globalization by focusing on a semi-peripheral (or second order) city, Vienna. This contribution is particularly interesting not only because it is explicitly spatial, but also because it directly relates to the concept of pathdependence. It does not only provide an empirical study of the global city hypothesis, but it also discusses the question of how influential the history of a city is for its current role in a larger network of cities (a concept that lies at the heart of Peter Taylor’s understanding of “global city”). While Vienna is the most likely Austrian candidate for a global city today and in the past, its connections rest on its historical function as a bridge between East and West in Europe, on its role as the metropolis of a multi-ethnic empire and also on its role in the slow industrialization of this empire during the nineteenth century.

14 Finally, in São Paulo: Big, Bigger, Global? The Development of a Megacity in the Global South , Tobias Töpfer (Innsbruck) leads us to one of the great metropolises of today’s global South and echoes discussions presented earlier in the volume (especially Mathis, Parnreiter and Musil). In his chapter, he not only provides an interesting typological discussion on the question of what kind of city São Paulo in Brazil actually is (along the main categories of global city vs. megacity), but he also stresses the consequences of its actual status for the geography of the city and the greater metropolitan area as well as its historical and recent development. As a result, while there is no doubt that São Paulo is a megacity, its status as a “global” city is debatable.

8 These chapters were selected via a call for papers for the conference preceding this book.

15 Instead of a concluding section, the third part of the book presents a collection of three shorter works from diverse disciplinary backgrounds as some kind of research outlook. 8 In the first of these, The Reach of the Continental Blockade: The Case of Toulouse , Andreas Dibiasi (Zurich) takes an economic-historical approach as he discusses the effects of the conflicts during the Napoleonic Wars on the economic situation (especially the prices) in the city of Toulouse. The second, Designing a Global City: Tokyo , is an architectural case study from a city-planning perspective by Beate Löffler (Dresden) about the largest metropolitan area today, which Sassen explicitly mentions as one of the prominent examples of a global city. The third, The Council of European Municipalities and Regions: Shared Governance in a World Featured by Globalization Issues by Manfred Kohler (Bruxelles), finally provides an institutional case study from a political-science perspective, linking the levels of regions and cities with that of nations and supra-national entities. All three of these chapters refer to important but somehow neglected topics and provide fruitful directions for further research about cities and globalization, namely economic integration, cultural perception and political governance.

16 Throughout the book, we also find reflections on various concepts related to the idea of “global” cities. Most of the authors refer explicitly to Saskia Sassen’s work, and all conceptualize their approach in the broader context of works that try to define world versus global cities, as well as about metropolises, megacities or central, imperial and primary cities. These reflections are necessary because the concepts cannot simply be used interchangeably and hence have to be clarified, especially when applied to historical material. As a result, the book is also interesting for those looking for conceptual clarifications, which is particularly relevant from a historical perspective, because the term “global city” as originally coined is a rather specific idea not easily applied to historical research. Thus, the contributions to this book also pave the way for a historically informed re-conceptualization of the approach.

… But There Also Was a Preceding Conference

9 For more information, see www.uibk.ac.at/fakultaeten/vwl/forschung/wsg/symp11.html (accessed 15 Feb (...)
10 While Christof Parnreiter could not participate in the conference, he was able to provide a chapter (...)

17 However, the book is also the result of an even longer process. It is based on a conference dedicated to discuss some of the problems associated to the global-city debate. 9 The Conference in World History: The Role and Significance of Global City was held in November 2011 in Innsbruck as a joint conference of the partner universities of Innsbruck and New Orleans. At this interdisciplinary conference, earlier versions of most of the papers were presented. 10 In the course of the event, the fruitful and intense discussions between the researchers from Europe and the United States gave rise to considerably improved papers, which now constitute the chapters of this book.

18 To assist the participants in the process of producing the chapters for the book, we ended the conference with a concluding round-table talk, dedicated to summarize the results and still-open questions. Chaired by Günter Bischof (New Orleans), Franz Mathis (Innsbruck) and James Mokhiber (New Orleans), who have also contributed to this book, as well as Katja Schmidtpott (Marburg) and Malte Fuhrmann (Istanbul), who presented papers at the conference, exchanged reflections about the conference and discussed these with the audience.

19 The first question raised in this talk was whether a global city necessarily must be multi-ethnic – which has been the case in some of the examples discussed during the conference (like Istanbul, Venice or New Orleans). On the other hand, Tokyo, one of the cities used by Saskia Sassen to elaborate her global city thesis, is certainly far from being “global” in that sense on account of its lack of “foreign faces”. Hence, as Katja Schmidtpott argued, the description of a city as global depends on the observer’s point of view. From an economic point of view, Tokyo may clearly be “global”, but from the Japanologists’perspective, things look rather different, notably less connected and interrelated. Multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, two specific manifestations of multi-ethnicity, are particularly relevant here, although these concepts are sometimes overloaded. But they point to the fact that multi-ethnicity is neither necessarily successful nor peaceful but has to develop, often in a contradictory and discordant way.

20 In addition, the question of measurability of the concept “global” remained unanswered (and is consequently picked up and clarified in several contributions to this volume). What is regarded as “global” is often subject to a certain approach. One could, like James Mokhiber did in his talk, easily argue that the number of plane flights that arrive or depart in a city’s airport is relevant. This is an indicator of exchange in general, indeed, but also more specifically of international tourism, which can be further intensified by a proper utilization of the cultural heritage of a city, of its very nature as a global city, of codes dedicated to fulfill the expectations of international costumers. Icons are relevant, and – as some contributions to this volume very clearly show – they always have been for the perception of a city. But the connection to the global market is an additional factor in the process, and many cities became “boom towns” only after their (economic) globalization.

21 It is also worth noting that further conceptual differentiation is necessary. Franz Mathis emphasized the difference between megacities and global cities (which is explicitly picked up in this volume by Tobias Töpfer), a difference directly related to globalization. Consequently, big cities have to be divided into cities that play an important role within a global network and cities that are “merely” important for their region. In this context, megacities are cities whose economic and cultural importance grows because of their connection to their hinterland, while global cities owe their specific significance to their connections to the “wide globalized world”. Both concepts are connected: historically, many cities grew at first because of their relations to the hinterland and only later reached global importance by connections to a wider global market. But this is only one element of the “global character” of a city. As Malte Fuhrmann mentioned with reference to Immanuel Wallerstein, a starting point to conceptualize this could be a city’s connections to the world system (which is explicitly picked up in this volume by Christof Parnreiter and James Mokhiber). And here we come back to Fernand Braudel, who has identified “world cities” as the driving forces of development in early modern Europe, as exemplified by port cities in which overseas markets and connections dominated local exchange. As a result, both paths are possible, and a major city can develop from a local or a global base although the difference will most likely influence the character and potential of a city. Finally, achieving a “global” character also leads to problems, prominently problems of governability of a city and its diverse population, often also resulting in a spatial differentiation of the city in connection to the influences of globalization.

11 Schulz (2006), 53 (translation Brigitte Truschnegg).

22 Not surprisingly, many questions remain open after the conference and also after the publication of this book. It still is unclear what makes a city a global city: is it cultural factors, economic factors, multi-ethnicity, or a combination of all of these – and if so, what kind of combination? The answers may remain subject to conceptualizations specific for certain questions. A more general characterization may be approached via a description of Athens, taken from a chapter in this volume: “Never has a city in so short a time unharnessed so much tradition-building energy that even millenniums later people look upon it as a spiritual mother”. 11 What more could be said about a city than that it transcends space and time, at least as an idea? The only caveat is that a statement like this can never be said about a contemporary city, because judgments like these are always strictly retrospective.

23 While this book contributes to a critical reflection of concepts related to the global city debate and provides empirical material from various periods and places, further research is still necessary. But cities are a fruitful and at the same time rather neglected laboratory of social, economic and cultural, sometimes also political change. They are clearly worth studying, because cities are central places in the process of mutual influence of globalization on people (and vice versa). They are meeting places, communication nodes and sites of exchange as well as locations where global processes become particularly visible and influential. “Global cities” are and always have been both, products and producers of globalization. They play an important role in shaping a global economy, culture and society, but they are also shaped by it. And they are places where countervailing forces match and local reactions to globalization become especially visible. Consequently, the adverse effects of globalization are particularly apparent as well: not only economic exchange, migration, communication, and technological development take place predominantly in cities, but also political conflict, cultures clashing and amalgamating, and violence. Hence, the global city is opening a door to the world, for better or for worse, as a multifaceted information interface and as a focal point of globalization in various forms.

12 Taylor et al. (2012).

24 Some of these forms will be explored in more detail in this book. To address all would require not a single one but shelves of them. And indeed, when we were about to finish this book, Routledge published a four-volume collection of seminal contributions to research about Global Cities . 12 While its price (₤ 800) is still rather prohibitive and points to the fact that some profits can be earned by doing global city research, its publication is also showing the relevance of this book and underlining the growing importance of the subject. Furthermore, the examples stressed here can also be understood complementary, because they are special and hence particularly instructive: they do not simply discuss the usual suspects (like London or New York) but take a much broader approach; and they also re-read several of these seminal contributions from different disciplinary, geographical and historical backgrounds. In the end, they offer an elaborate arrangement of viewpoints certainly worth exploring in more detail.

Bibliographie

Abu-Lughod, Janet L. (1989): Before European Hegemony: The World System, A. D. 1250 – 1350. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Braudel, Fernand (1984): Civilization and Capitalism, 15th – 18th Centuries , Volume 3: The Perspective of the World . New York: Harper & Row.

Castells, Manuel (1996): The Rise of the Network Society . Oxford: Blackwell.

Castells, Manuel, ed. (2004): The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective . Cheltenham: Elgar.

Dreher, Axel/Gaston, Noel/Martens, Pim/van Boxem, Lotte (2009): “Measuring Globalization. Opening the Black Box. A Critical Analysis of Globalization Indices”, Bond University Messages 32.

Exenberger, Andreas (2007): “Reiche als Partner, Gegner oder Ziel? Die historischen Erfahrungen zweier europäischer Weltstädte”, in: Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 115 (1-2), 76-84.

Exenberger, Andreas/Cian, Carmen (2006): Der weite Horizont. Globalisierung durch Kaufleute . Innsbruck: Studienverlag.

Friedmann, John (1986): “The World City Hyphothesis”, in: Development and Change 17, 69-83.

Sassen, Saskia (1991): Global Cities. Princeton/NJ: Princeton University Press.

Sassen, Saskia (1994): Cities in a World-Economy . Thousand Oaks/CA: Pine Forge.

Schulz, Raimund (2006): “Die Schule von Hellas”, in: Ameling, Walter/Gehrke, Hans-Joachim/Kolb, Frank/Leppin, Hartmut/Schulz, Raimund/Streck, Michael P./Wiesehöfer, Josef/Wilhelm, Gernot (2006): Antike Metropolen . Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 53-68.

Taylor, Peter J. (1999): “So-called ‘World Cities’: The Evidential Structure within a Literature”, in: Environment and Planning A 31 (11), 1901-1904.

Taylor, Peter J./Beaverstock, Jonathan V./Derudder, Ben/Faulconbridge, James/Harrison, John/Hoyler, Michael/Pain, Kathy/Witlox, Frank, eds. (2012): Global Cities . 4 vols. London: Routledge.

Wallerstein, Immanuel M. (1974): The Modern World-System , Volume 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century . New York-London: Academic Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel M. (2004): World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction . Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press.

3 Braudel (1986) particularly referred to Venice, Antwerp, Genoa and Amsterdam as cities that shaped late medieval and early modern Europe, at least economically. See also Exenberger/Cian (2006) and Exenberger (2007) for more extensive elaborations on the significance of Venice and the hanseatic city of Lubeck for “globalization” in Europe in medieval times.

5 The KOF Index of Globalization was recently extended backwards until 1970; Dreher et al. (2009), 29.

9 For more information, see www.uibk.ac.at/fakultaeten/vwl/forschung/wsg/symp11.html (accessed 15 Feb 2013).

10 While Christof Parnreiter could not participate in the conference, he was able to provide a chapter for the book. Unfortunately there are also three contributions, which had – for various reasons – to be withdrawn from it. Katja Schmidtpott (Marburg) talked about The Globalization of Labour in East Asia: The Japanese Treaty Port of Yokohama and Its Chinese Community , a case study from the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century; Malte Fuhrmann (Istanbul) about When the Conquering Sultan Appears in the Metro and Byzantium Sabotages the Railway Station: Istanbul’s Pasts and their Roles in the Present , a long-term city history focusing on its perception and instrumentalization; and Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi (Tervuren) about Tide of Times in the Post-Colonial Era: Tourists, Venetians and Street Vendors in the Doge City , a contemporary case study about social relationships in a historically loaded environment.

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Derobotizing human thought - a sustainable response ii, openmind books, scientific anniversaries, does laboratory meat have a future, featured author, latest book, the global city: introducing a concept.

Each phase in the long history of the world economy raises specific questions about the particular conditions that make it possible. One of the key properties of the current phase is the ascendance of information technologies and the associated increase in the mobility and liquidity of capital. There have long been cross-border economic processes—flows of capital, labor, goods, raw materials, and tourists. But to a large extent these took place within the inter-state system, where the key articulators were national states. The international economic system was ensconced largely in this inter-state system. This has changed rather dramatically over the last decade as a result of privatization, deregulation, the opening up of national economies to foreign firms, and the growing participation of national economic actors in global markets.

It is in this context that we see a rescaling of what are the strategic territories that articulate the new system. With the partial unbundling or at least weakening of the national as a spatial unit due to privatization and deregulation and the associated strengthening of globalization, come conditions for the ascendance of other spatial units or scales. Among these are the sub-national, notably cities and regions; cross-border regions encompassing two or more sub-national entities; and supra-national entities, i.e., global digitalized markets and free trade blocs. The dynamics and processes that get terrritorialized at these diverse scales can in principle be regional, national or global.

I locate the emergence of global cities in this context and against this range of instantiations of strategic scales and spatial units (Sassen 2001; 2006a). In the case of global cities, the dynamics and processes that get territorialized are global. Here I examine the general conceptual and empirical elements that can be applied to a large number of very diverse cities, each with its own empirical specificities.

Elements in a new conceptual architecture

The globalization of economic activity entails a new type of organizational structure. To capture this theoretically and empirically requires, correspondingly, a new type of conceptual architecture.1 Constructs such as the global city and the global-city region are, in my reading, important elements in this new conceptual architecture. The activity of naming these elements is part of the conceptual work. There are other closely linked terms which could conceivably have been used: the old and by now classic term world cities,2 “supervilles” (Braudel 1984), informational city (Castells 1989). Thus choosing how to name a configuration has its own substantive rationality.

When I first chose to use global city (1984), I did so knowingly—it was an attempt to name a difference: the specificity of the global as it gets structured in the contemporary period. I did not chose the obvious alternative, world city, because it had precisely the opposite attribute: it referred to a type of city that we have seen over the centuries (e.g., Braudel 1984; Hall 1966; King 1990; Gugler 2004), and most probably also in much earlier periods in Asia (Abu-Lughod 1989) or in European colonial centers (King 1990) than in the West. In this regard it could be said that most of today’s major global cities are also world cities, but that there may well be some global cities today that are not world cities in the full, rich sense of that term. This is partly an empirical question; further, as the global economy expands and incorporates additional cities into the various networks, it is quite possible that the answer to that particular question will vary. Thus, the fact that Miami has developed global city functions beginning in the late 1980s does not make it a world city in that older sense of the term.

The global city model: organizing hypotheses

There are seven hypotheses through which I organized the data and the theorization of the global city model. I will discuss each of these briefly as a way of producing a more precise representation.

Firstly, the geographic dispersal of economic activities that marks globalization, along with the simultaneous integration of such geographically dispersed activities, is a key factor feeding the growth and importance of central corporate functions. The more dispersed a firm’s operations across different countries, the more complex and strategic its central functions—that is, the work of managing, coordinating, servicing, financing a firm’s network of operations.

Secondly, these central functions become so complex that increasingly the headquarters of large global firms outsource them: they buy a share of their central functions from highly specialized service firms: accounting, legal, public relations, programming, telecommunications, and other such services. Thus while even ten years ago the key site for the production of these central headquarter functions was the headquarters of a firm, today there is a second key site: the specialized service firms contracted by headquarters to produce some of these central functions or components of them. This is especially the case with firms involved in global markets and non-routine operations. But increasingly the headquarters of all large firms are buying more of such inputs rather than producing them in-house.

Thirdly, those specialized service firms engaged in the most complex and globalized markets are subject to agglomeration economies. The complexity of the services they need to produce, the uncertainty of the markets they are involved with either directly or through the headquarters for which they are producing the services, and the growing importance of speed in all these transactions, is a mix of conditions that constitutes a new agglomeration dynamic. The mix of firms, talents, and expertise from a broad range of specialized fields makes a certain type of urban environment function as an information center. Being in a city becomes synonymous with being in an extremely intense and dense information loop.

A fourth hypothesis, derived from the preceding one, is that the more headquarters outsource their most complex, unstandardized functions, particularly those subject to uncertain and changing markets, the freer they are to opt for any location, because less work actually done in the headquarters is subject to agglomeration economies. This further underlines that the key sector specifying the distinctive production advantages of global cities is the highly specialized and networked services sector. In developing this hypothesis I was responding to a very common notion that the number of headquarters is what specifies a global city. Empirically it may still be the case in many countries that the leading business center is also the leading concentration of headquarters, but this may well be because there is an absence of alternative locational options. But in countries with a well-developed infrastructure outside the leading business center, there are likely to be multiple locational options for such headquarters.

Fifthly, these specialized service firms need to provide a global service which has meant a global network of affiliates or some other form of partnership, and as a result we have seen a strengthening of cross border city-to-city transactions and networks. At the limit this may well be the beginning of the formation of transnational urban systems. The growth of global markets for finance and specialized services, the need for transnational servicing networks due to sharp increases in international investment, the reduced role of the government in the regulation of international economic activity and the corresponding ascendance of other institutional arenas, notably global markets and corporate headquarters—all these point to the existence of a series of transnational networks of cities.

A related hypothesis for research is that the economic fortunes of these cities become increasingly disconnected from their broader hinterlands or even their national economies. We can see here the formation, at least incipient, of transnational urban systems. To a large extent major business centers in the world today draw their importance from these transnational networks. There is no such thing as a single global city—and in this sense there is a sharp contrast with the erstwhile capitals of empires.

A sixth hypothesis, is that the growing numbers of high level professionals and high-profit making specialized service firms has the effect of raising the degree of spatial and socio-economic inequality evident in these cities. The strategic role of these specialized services as inputs raises the value of top-level professionals and their numbers. Furthermore, the fact that talent can matter enormously for the quality of these strategic outputs and, given the importance of speed, proven talent is an added value, the structure of rewards is likely to experience rapid increases. Types of activities and workers lacking these attributes, whether manufacturing or industrial services, are likely to get caught in the opposite cycle.

A seventh hypothesis is that one result of the dynamics described in hypothesis six is the growing informalization of a range of economic activities that find their effective demand in these cities yet have profit rates that do not allow them to compete for various resources with the high-profit making firms at the top of the system. Informalizing part or all production and distribution activities, including of services, is one way of surviving under these conditions.

Recovering place and work process

In the first four hypotheses, my effort was to qualify what was emerging in the 1980s as a dominant discourse on globalization, technology, and cities that posited the end of cities as important economic units or scales. I saw a tendency in that account to take the existence of a global economic system as a given, a function of the power of transnational corporations and global communications.

My counter argument is that the capabilities for global operation, coordination, and control contained in the new information technologies and in the power of transnational corporations need to be produced. By focusing on the production of these capabilities we add a neglected dimension to the familiar issue of the power of large corporations and the capacity of the new technologies to neutralize distance and place. A focus on the production of these capabilities shifts the emphasis to the practices that constitute what we call economic globalization and global control.

Further, a focus on practices draws the categories of place and work process into the analysis of economic globalization. These are two categories easily overlooked in accounts centered on the hypermobility of capital and the power of transnationals. Developing categories such as place and work process does not negate the centrality of hypermobility and power. Rather, it brings to the fore the fact that many of the resources necessary for global economic activities are not hypermobile and are, indeed, deeply embedded in place, notably places such as global cities, global-city regions, and export processing zones.

This entails a whole infrastructure of activities, firms, and jobs that are necessary to run the advanced corporate economy. These industries are typically conceptualized in terms of the hypermobility of their outputs and the high levels of expertise of their professionals rather than in terms of the production or work process involved and the requisite infrastructure of facilities and non-expert jobs that are also part of these industries. Focusing on the work process brings with it an emphasis on economic and spatial polarization because of the disproportionate concentration of very high- and very low-income jobs in these major global city sectors. Emphasizing place, infrastructure, and non-expert jobs matters precisely because so much of the focus has been on the neutralization of geography and place made possible by the new technologies.

The growth of networked cross-border dynamics among global cities includes a broad range of domains: political, cultural, social, and criminal. There are cross-border transactions among immigrant communities and communities of origin, and a greater intensity in the use of these networks once they become established, including for economic activities. We also see greater cross-border networks for cultural purposes, as in the growth of international markets for art and a transnational class of curators; and for non-formal political purposes, as in the growth of transnational networks of activists around environmental causes, human rights, and so on. These are largely city-to-city cross-border networks, or, at least, it appears at this time to be simpler to capture the existence and modalities of these networks at the city level. The same can be said for the new cross-border criminal networks.

Recapturing the geography of places involved in globalization allows us to recapture people, workers, communities, and more specifically, the many different work cultures, besides the corporate culture, involved in the work of globalization. It also brings with it an enormous research agenda, one that goes beyond the by now familiar focus on cross-border flows of goods, capital, and information. It opens up the global city as a space for a new type of politics, one that claims rights to the city.

Finally, by emphasizing the fact that global processes are at least partly embedded in national territories, such a focus introduces new variables in current conceptions about economic globalization and the shrinking regulatory role of the state. That is to say, the space economy for major new transnational economic processes diverges in significant ways from the duality global/national presupposed in many analyses of the global economy. The duality, national versus global, suggests two mutually exclusive spaces—where one begins the other ends. One of the outcomes of a global city analysis is that it makes evident that the global materializes by necessity in specific places, and institutional arrangements, a good number of which, if not most, are located in national territories.

Worldwide networks and central command functions

The geography of globalization contains both a dynamic of dispersal and of centralization. The massive trends towards the spatial dispersal of economic activities at the metropolitan, national, and global level that we associate with globalization have contributed to a demand for new forms of territorial centralization of top-level management and control functions. Insofar as these functions benefit from agglomeration economies even in the face of telematic integration of a firm’s globally dispersed manufacturing and service operations, they tend to locate in cities. This raises a question as to why they should benefit from agglomeration economies, especially since globalized economic sectors tend to be intensive users of the new telecommunications and computer technologies, and increasingly produce a partly dematerialized output, such as financial instruments and specialized services. There is growing evidence that business networks are a crucial variable that is to be distinguished from technical networks. Such business networks have been crucial long before the current technologies were developed. Business networks benefit from agglomeration economies and hence thrive in cities even today when simultaneous global communication is possible. Elsewhere, I examine this issue and find that the key variable contributing to the spatial concentration of central functions and associated agglomeration economies is the extent to which this dispersal occurs under conditions of concentration in control, ownership, and profit appropriation (Sassen 2001, ch. 2 & 5).

This dynamic of simultaneous geographic dispersal and concentration is one of the key elements in the organizational architecture of the global economic system. While there is no space to discuss it here, this systemic feature also enables particular types of struggles and implementations linked to environmental sustainability (Sassen 2006b; Marcotullio and Lo 2001). Let me first give some empirical referents and then examine some of the implications for theorizing the impact of globalization and the new technologies on cities.

The rapid growth of affiliates illustrates the dynamic of simultaneous geographic dispersal and concentration of a firm’s operations. By 1999 firms had well over half a million affiliates outside their home countries, and by 2005 they had well over a million such affiliates (for details see Sassen, 2006a: chapter 2). Firms with large numbers of geographically dispersed factories and service outlets face massive new needs for central coordination and servicing, especially when their affiliates involve foreign countries with different legal and accounting systems.

Another instance today of this negotiation between a global cross-border dynamic and territorially specific site is that of the global financial markets. The orders of magnitude in these transactions have risen sharply, as illustrated by the US$300 plus trillion for 2007 in traded derivatives, a major component of the global economy and one that dwarfs the value of global trade which stood at US$14 trillion. These transactions are partly embedded in electronic systems that make possible the instantaneous transmission of money and information around the globe. Much attention has gone to this capacity for instantaneous transmission of the new technologies. But the other half of the story is the extent to which the global financial markets are located in an expanding network of cities, with a disproportionate concentration in cities of the global north. Indeed, the degrees of concentration internationally and within countries are unexpectedly high for an increasingly globalized and digitized economic sector. Inside countries, the leading financial centers today concentrate a greater share of national financial activity than even ten years ago, and internationally, cities in the global north concentrate well over half of the global capital market.

One of the components of the global capital market is stock markets. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the addition of markets such as Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Bangkok, Taipei, Moscow, and growing numbers of non-national firms listed in most of these markets. The growing number of stock markets has contributed to raise the capital that can be mobilized through these markets, reflected in the sharp worldwide growth of stock market capitalization, which reached well over US$30 trillion in 2007. This globally integrated financial market, which makes possible the circulation of publicly listed shares around the globe in seconds, is embedded in a grid of very material, physical, strategic places.

The specific forms assumed by globalization over the last decade have created particular organizational requirements. The emergence of global markets for finance and specialized services, the growth of investment as a major type of international transaction, all have contributed to the expansion in command functions and in the demand for specialized services for firms (3).

By central functions I do not only mean top level headquarters; I am referring to all the top level financial, legal, accounting, managerial, executive, planning functions necessary to run a corporate organization operating in more than one country, and increasingly in several countries. These central functions are partly embedded in headquarters, but also in good part in what has been called the corporate services complex, that is, the network of financial, legal, accounting, advertising firms that handle the complexities of operating in more than one national legal system, national accounting system, advertising culture, etc., and do so under conditions of rapid innovations in all these fields (see generally Bryson and Daniels 2005). Such services have become so specialized and complex, that headquarters increasingly buy them from specialized firms rather than producing them in-house. These agglomerations of firms producing central functions for the management and coordination of global economic systems, are disproportionately concentrated in the highly developed countries—particularly, though not exclusively, in global cities. Such concentrations of functions represent a strategic factor in the organization of the global economy, and they are situated in an expanding network of global cities (4).

It is important analytically to unbundle strategic functions for the global economy or for global operation, and the overall corporate economy of a country. These global control and command functions are partly embedded in national corporate structures, but also constitute a distinct corporate subsector. This subsector can be conceived as part of a network that connects global cities across the world through firms’ affiliates or other representative offices (5). For the purposes of certain kinds of inquiry this distinction may not matter; for the purposes of understanding the global economy, it does.

This distinction also matters for questions of regulation, notably regulation of cross-border activities. If the strategic central functions—both those produced in corporate headquarters and those produced in the specialized corporate services sector—are located in a network of major financial and business centers, the question of regulating what amounts to a key part of the global economy will entail a different type of effort from what would be the case if the strategic management and coordination functions were as distributed geographically as the factories, service outlets, and affiliates generally. We can also read this as a strategic geography for political activisms that seek accountability from major corporate actors, among others concerning environmental standards and workplace standards.

National and global markets as well as globally integrated organizations require central places where the work of globalization gets done. Finance and advanced corporate services are industries producing the organizational commodities necessary for the implementation and management of global economic systems. Cities are preferred sites for the production of these services, particularly the most innovative, speculative, internationalized service sectors. Further, leading firms in information industries require a vast physical infrastructure containing strategic nodes with hyper-concentration of facilities; we need to distinguish between the capacity for global transmission/communication and the material conditions that make this possible. Finally, even the most advanced information industries have a production process that is at least partly place-bound because of the combination of resources it requires even when the outputs are hypermobile.

Theoretically this addresses two key issues in current debates and scholarship. One of these is the complex articulation between capital fixity and capital mobility and the other, the position of cities in a global economy. Elsewhere, I have developed the thesis that capital mobility cannot be reduced simply to that which moves nor can it be reduced to the technologies that facilitate movement (Sassen 2008, ch. 5 & 7). Rather, multiple components of what we keep thinking of as capital fixity are actually components of capital mobility. This conceptualization allows us to reposition the role of cities in an increasingly globalizing world, in that they contain the resources that enable firms and markets to have global operations (6). The mobility of capital, whether in the form of investments, trade, or overseas affiliates, needs to be managed, serviced, coordinated. These are often rather place-bound, yet are key components of capital mobility. Finally, states, place-bound institutional orders, have played an often crucial role in producing regulatory environments that facilitate the implementation of cross-border operations for their national and for foreign firms, investors, and markets (Sassen 2008, ch. 4 & 5).

In brief, a focus on cities makes it possible to recognize the anchoring of multiple cross-border dynamics in a network of places, prominent among which are cities, particularly global cities or those with global city functions. This in turn anchors various features of globalization in the specific conditions and histories of these cities, in their variable articulations with their national economies, and with various world economies across time and place (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1999; Allen et al. 1999; Gugler, 2004; Amen et al. 2006; Taylor 2004; Lo and Yeung 1996; Harvey 2007; Orum and Chen 2004). This optic on globalization contributes to identifying a complex organizational architecture that cuts across borders, and is both partly de-territorialized and partly spatially concentrated in cities. Further, it creates an enormous research agenda in that every particular national or urban economy has its specific and inherited modes of articulating with current global circuits. Once we have more information about this variance we may also be able to establish whether position in the global hierarchy makes a difference and the various ways in which it might do so.

Impacts of new communication technologies on centrality

Cities have historically provided national economies, polities, and societies with something we can think of as centrality. In terms of their economic function, cities provide agglomeration economies, massive concentrations of information on the latest developments, a marketplace. How do the new technologies of communication alter the role of centrality and hence of cities as economic entities?

As earlier sections have indicated, centrality remains a key feature of today’s global economy. But today there is no longer a simple straightforward relation between centrality and such geographic entities as the downtown, or the central business district (CBD). In the past, and up to quite recently in fact, the center was synonymous with the downtown or the CBD. Today, partly as a result of the new communication technologies, the spatial correlates of the center can assume several geographic forms, ranging from the CBD to a new global grid of cities (see, for instance, Herzog 2006; Burdett 2006; Short 2005; Marcuse 2003).

Simplifying one could identify three forms assumed by centrality today (7). Firstly, while there is no longer a simple straightforward relation between centrality and such geographic entities as the downtown, as was the case in the past, the CBD remains a key form of centrality. But the CBD in major international business centers is one profoundly reconfigured by technological and economic change.

Secondly, the center can extend into a metropolitan area in the form of a grid of nodes of intense business activity, a case well illustrated by recent developments in cities as diverse as Buenos Aires (Ciccolella and Mignaqui 2002), Chicago (Lloyd 2005), Shanghai (Chen and Jianming 2007), and Paris (Veltz 1996; Landrieu et al. 1998). One might ask whether a spatial organization characterized by dense strategic nodes spread over a broader region does or does not constitute a new form of organizing the territory of the “center,” rather than, as in the more conventional view, an instance of suburbanization or geographic dispersal. Insofar as these various nodes are articulated through cyber-routes or digital highways, they represent a new geographic correlate of the most advanced type of “center.” The places that fall outside this new grid of digital highways, however, are peripheralized, with the most dramatic instance that of shrinking cities (Giesecke 2005). This regional grid of nodes represents, in my analysis, a reconstitution of the concept of region. Far from neutralizing geography the regional grid is likely to be embedded in conventional forms of communications infrastructure, notably rapid rail and highways connecting to airports. Ironically, perhaps, conventional infrastructure is likely to maximize the economic benefits derived from telematics. I think this is an important issue that has been lost somewhat in discussions about the neutralization of geography through telematics.

Thirdly, we are seeing the formation of a transterritorial “center” constituted via telematics and intense economic transactions. The most powerful of these new geographies of centrality at the inter-urban level binds the major international financial and business centers: New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Sydney, Hong Kong, among others (8). But this geography now also includes cities such as Sao Paulo and Mexico City. The intensity of transactions among these cities, particularly through the financial markets, trade in services, and investment has increased sharply, and so have the orders of magnitude involved. Finally, we see emergent regional hierarchies, as is illustrated by the growth corridors in southeast Asia (Lo and Yeung 1996), the case of São Paulo in the Mercosur free-trade area (Schiffer 2002), and by the relation between the participating entities in the Iran-Dubai corridor (Parsa and Keivafin 2002). (For a general overview see the MasterCard International Global Hearts of Commerce Report on 70 Cities, 2008)

Besides their impact on the spatial correlates of centrality, the new communication technologies can also be expected to have an impact on inequality between cities and inside cities. There is an expectation in much of the literature on these technologies that they will override older hierarchies and spatial inequalities through the universalizing of connectivity that they represent. The available evidence suggests that this is not quite the case. Whether it is the network of financial centers and foreign direct investment patterns discussed in this chapter, or the more specific examinations of the spatial organization of various cities, the new communication technologies have not reduced hierarchy nor spatial inequalities (Graham 2004; Graham and Marvin 2001; Castells 1996; Rutherford 2004; Journal of Urban Technology, various issues). And this is so even in the face of massive upgradings and state-of-the-art infrastructure in a growing number of cities worldwide. There is little doubt that connecting to global circuits has brought with it a significant level of development of expanded central urban areas and metropolitan grids of business nodes, and considerable economic dynamism. But the question of inequality has not been engaged.

Further, the pronounced orientation to the world markets evident in many of these cities raises questions about the articulation with their nation-states, their regions, and the larger economic and social structure in such cities. Cities have typically been deeply embedded in the economies of their region, indeed often reflecting the characteristics of the latter; and they still do. But cities that are strategic sites in the global economy tend, in part, to disconnect from their region. This conflicts with a key proposition in traditional scholarship about urban systems, namely, that these systems promote the territorial integration of regional and national economies. There has been a sharpening inequality in the concentration of strategic resources and activities between each of these cities and others in the same country, though this tends to be evident only at fairly disaggregated levels of evidence. For example, Mexico City today concentrates a higher share of some types of economic activity and value production than it did in the past (9), but to see this requires a very particularized set of analyses (Parnreiter 2002).

The global city as a nexus for new politico-cultural alignments

The incorporation of cities into a new cross-border geography of centrality also signals the emergence of a parallel political geography. Major cities have emerged as a strategic site not only for global capital, but also for the transnationalization of labor and the formation of translocal communities and identities (Smith 2006; Kloosterman and Rath 2003; Bartlett 2007; Hagedorn 2007; Sandercock 2003). In this regard cities are a site for new types of political operations and for a whole range of new “cultural” and subjective operations (Krause and Petro 2003; Sennett 1992; Peterson 2007; King 1996). The centrality of place in a context of global processes makes possible a transnational economic and political opening for the formation of new claims and hence for the constitution of entitlements, notably rights to place. At the limit, this could be an opening for new forms of “citizenship” (e.g., Holston 1996; Torres et al. 1999; Sassen 2008: ch. 6).

The emphasis on the transnational and hypermobile character of capital has contributed to a sense of powerlessness among local actors, a sense of the futility of resistance. But an analysis that emphasizes place suggests that the new global grid of strategic sites is a terrain for politics and engagement. (Allen et al. 1999; Brenner and Theodore 2002; Copjek and Sorkin 1999; Berner and Korff 1995; INURA 2003). The loss of power at the national level produces the possibility for new forms of power and politics at the sub-national level. Further, insofar as the national as container of social process and power is cracked (Taylor 1995; Beck 2006; Marcuse 2003) it opens up possibilities for a geography of politics that links sub-national spaces across borders (Sassen 2008: ch. 7 & 8). Cities are foremost in this new geography. This engenders how and whether we are seeing the formation of a new type of transnational politics that localizes in these cities.

Immigration, for instance, is one major process through which a new transnational political economy and trans-local household strategies are being constituted. It is one largely embedded in major cities insofar as these concentrate most immigrants, certainly in the developed world, whether in the US, Japan, or Western Europe. It is, in my reading, one of the constitutive processes of globalization today, even though not recognized or represented as such in mainstream accounts of the global economy. (Sassen 2008: Part 2; Ribas-Mateos 2005; Farrer 2007; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003).

Global capital and the new immigrant workforce are two major instances of transnationalized actors that each have unifying properties across borders internally, and find themselves in contestation with each other inside global cities (Bonilla et al. 1998; Sassen 2006a: ch. 8; 2008: ch. 6; Brenner and Theodore 2002; Gugler 2004). Researching and theorizing these issues will require approaches that diverge from the more traditional studies of political elites, local party politics, neighborhood associations, immigrant communities, and so on through which the political landscape of cities and metropolitan regions has been conceptualized in urban studies.

One way of thinking about the political implications of this strategic transnational space anchored in global cities is in terms of the formation of new claims on that space. The global city particularly has emerged as a site for new claims: by global capital that uses the global city as an “organizational commodity,” but also by disadvantaged sectors of the urban population, frequently as internationalized a presence in global cities as capital. The “denationalizing” of urban space and the formation of new claims by transnational actors, raise the question: Whose city is it?

The global city and the network of these cities is a space that is both place-centered in that it is embedded in particular and strategic locations; and it is transterritorial because it connects sites that are not geographically proximate yet are intensely connected to each other. If we consider that global cities concentrate both the leading sectors of global capital and a growing share of disadvantaged populations—immigrants, many of the disadvantaged women, people of color generally, and, in the megacities of developing countries, masses of shanty dwellers—then we can see that cities have become a strategic terrain for a whole series of conflicts and contradictions. We can then think of cities also as one of the sites for the contradictions of the globalization of capital, even though, heeding Katznelson’s (1992) observation, the city cannot be reduced to this dynamic.

An examination of globalization through the concept of the global city introduces a strong emphasis on strategic components of the global economy rather than the broader and more diffuse homogenizing dynamics we associate with the globalization of consumer markets. Consequently, this also brings an emphasis on questions of power and inequality. It brings an emphasis on the actual work of managing, servicing, and financing a global economy. Secondly, a focus on the city in studying globalization will tend to bring to the fore the growing inequalities between highly provisioned and profoundly disadvantaged sectors and spaces of the city, and hence such a focus introduces yet another formulation of questions of power and inequality.

Thirdly, the concept of the global city brings a strong emphasis on the networked economy because of the nature of the industries that tend to be located there: finance and specialized services, the new multimedia sectors, and telecommunications services. These industries are characterized by cross-border networks and specialized divisions of functions among cities rather than inter-national competition per se. In the case of global finance and the leading specialized services catering to global firms and markets—law, accounting, credit rating, telecommunications—it is clear that we are dealing with a cross-border system, one that is embedded in a series of cities, each possibly part of a different country. It is a de facto global system.

Fourthly, a focus on networked cross-border dynamics among global cities also allows us to capture more readily the growing intensity of such transactions in other domains—political, cultural, social, and criminal.

Global cities around the world are the terrain where a multiplicity of globalization processes assume concrete, localized forms. These localized forms are, in good part, what globalization is about. Recovering place means recovering the multiplicity of presences in this landscape. The large city of today has emerged as a strategic site for a whole range of new types of operations—political, economic, “cultural,” subjective. It is one of the nexi where the formation of new claims, by both the powerful and the disadvantaged, materializes and assumes concrete forms.

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1. Here Arrighi’s analysis is of interest (1994) in that it posits the recurrence of certain organizational patterns in different phases of the capitalist world economy, but at higher orders of complexity and expanded scope, and timed to follow or precede particular configurations of the world economy. On the other hand, for a variety of less system-centered view of cities see, e.g., Amin and Thrift (2002), Herzog (2006), Neuwirth 2005, and Short (2005).

2. Originally attributed to Goethe, the term was relaunched in the work of Peter Hall (1966) and more recently re-specified by John Friedmann (Friedmann & Goetz, 1982). See also Stren (1996).

3. A central proposition here, developed at length in my work, is that we cannot take the existence of a global economic system as a given, but rather need to examine the particular ways in which the conditions for economic globalization are produced. This requires examining not only communication capacities and the power of multinationals, but also the infrastructure of facilities and work processes necessary for the implementation of global economic systems, including the production of those inputs that constitute the capability for global control and the infrastructure of jobs involved in this production. The emphasis shifts to the practice of global control: the work of producing and reproducing the organization and management of a global production system and a global marketplace for finance, both under conditions of economic concentration. The recovery of place and production also implies that global processes can be studied in great empirical detail.

4. We are seeing the formation of an economic complex with a valorization dynamic that has properties clearly distinguishing it from other economic complexes whose valorization dynamic is far more articulated with the public economic functions of the state, the quintessential example being Fordist manufacturing. Global markets in finance and advanced services partly operate through a “regulatory” umbrella that is not state-centered but market-centered. This in turn brings up a question of control linked to the currently inadequate capacities to govern transactions in electronic space.

5. In this sense, global cities are different from the old capitals of erstwhile empires, in that they are a function of cross-border networks rather than simply the most powerful city of an empire. There is, in my conceptualization, no such entity as a single global city as there could be a single capital of an empire; the category global city only makes sense as a component of a global network of strategic sites. The corporate subsector which contains the global control and command functions is partly embedded in this network.

6. There are multiple specifications to this argument. For instance, and going in the opposite direction, the development of financial instruments that represent fixed real estate repositions the latter in various systems of circulation, including global ones. In so doing the meaning of capital fixity is partly transformed and the fixed capital also becomes a site for circulation. For a fuller elaboration see Sassen 2001, ch. 2.

7. There is a fourth case which I have addressed elsewhere (Sassen 2001, ch. 4 & 5), which is represented by new forms of centrality constituted in electronically generated spaces.

8. In the case of a complex landscape such as Europe’s, we see in fact several geographies of centrality, one global, others continental and regional. A central urban hierarchy connects major cities, many of which in turn play central roles in the wider global system of cities: Paris, London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Zurich. These cities are also part of a wider network of European financial/cultural/service capitals, some with only one, others with several of these functions, articulate the European region and are somewhat less oriented to the global economy than Paris, Frankfurt, or London. And then there are several geographies of marginality: the east-west divide and the north-south divide across Europe as well as newer divisions. In Eastern Europe, certain cities and regions, notably Budapest, are rather attractive for purposes of investment, both European and non-European, while others will increasingly fall behind, notably in Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Albania. We see a similar differentiation in the south of Europe: Madrid, Barcelona and Milan are gaining in the new European hierarchy; Naples, Rome, and Marseille are not. For a general overview of European cities see Kazepov 2005.

9. This also holds in the highly developed world. For instance, the Paris region accounts for over 40% of all producer services in France, and over 80% of the most advanced ones. New York City is estimated to account for between a fourth and a fifth of all US producer services exports though it has only 3% of the US population. London accounts for 40% of all exports of producer services in the UK. Similar trends are also evident in Zurich, Frankfurt, and Tokyo, all located in much smaller countries.

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Globalization after the Financial Crisis

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Open Education Sociology Dictionary

global city

Table of Contents

Definition of Global City

( noun ) A city that has international political influence, home to multinational corporations and non-governmental organizations , in addition to a globally influential mass media, and well-developed communication and transportation system.

Global City Pronunciation

Pronunciation Usage Guide

Syllabification : glob·al cit·y

Audio Pronunciation

Phonetic Spelling

American English – /glOH-buhl sIt-ee/
British English – /glOH-buhl sIt-ee/

International Phonetic Alphabet

American English – /ˈgloʊbəl ˈsɪti/
British English – /ˈgləʊbəl ˈsɪti/

Usage Notes

Plural: global cities
world center

Additional Information

Word origin of “global” and “city” – Online Etymology Dictionary: etymonline.com

Related Terms

globalization

Works Consulted

Dillon, Michele. 2014. Introduction to Sociological Theory: Theorists, Concepts, and their Applicability to the Twenty-First Century . 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Ferris, Kerry, and Jill Stein. 2010. The Real World: An Introduction to Sociology . 2nd ed. New York: Norton.

Wikipedia contributors. (N.d.) Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia . Wikimedia Foundation. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/ ).

Cite the Definition of Global City

ASA – American Sociological Association (5th edition)

Bell, Kenton, ed. 2013. “global city.” In Open Education Sociology Dictionary . Retrieved April 13, 2024 ( https://sociologydictionary.org/global-city/ ).

APA – American Psychological Association (6th edition)

global city. (2013). In K. Bell (Ed.), Open education sociology dictionary . Retrieved from https://sociologydictionary.org/global-city/

Chicago/Turabian: Author-Date – Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition)

Bell, Kenton, ed. 2013. “global city.” In Open Education Sociology Dictionary . Accessed April 13, 2024. https://sociologydictionary.org/global-city/ .

MLA – Modern Language Association (7th edition)

“global city.” Open Education Sociology Dictionary . Ed. Kenton Bell. 2013. Web. 13 Apr. 2024. < https://sociologydictionary.org/global-city/ >.

This striking feature of Manila makes it an emblematic global city

<p>Relaxing on a Manila rooftop. <em>Photo by John Christian Fjellestad/Flickr</em></p>

Relaxing on a Manila rooftop. Photo by John Christian Fjellestad/Flickr

by Nancy Kwak + BIO

Tokyo, London, New York, Paris, Manila. Few would think of Manila atop a list of the 21st century’s premiere cities. Nor would most think of the Philippine capital as a critical node in the global economy. Yet Manila is indisputably at the centre of some of the most important urban trends of the past half-century: it is the world’s most densely populated city, and continues to grow at an exponential pace. It serves as the headquarters to one of the fastest growing economies in the world (10th in 2017, according to the World Bank). Filipinos, especially residents of Manila, travel all over the world as nurses, nannies, construction workers and sailors. They provide the mass labour fuelling the global service economy.

In our urbanising world, Manila, and a few other rapidly growing world cities, are not only just helpful in understanding how global cities work; they are indispensable.

Manila has long served as a hub connecting regional, colonial and global economies. The city sits on the coast of Manila Bay at the mouth of the Pasig River; it is low-lying, fairly flat in topography, and woven through with estuaries. Not surprising given seasonal monsoons and tropical cyclones, Manilans often have to cope with devastating floods. The most striking aspect of life in Manila, however, lies not in physical attributes but rather in the legal status of the communities living above and around these waterways. For the residents of this city of nearly 2 million, ‘informality’ is an all-encompassing, defining feature of everyday life in the capital.

The term ‘informality’ is sometimes conceptualised as a periphery or a place of exclusion, but it is more accurate to define it simply as an absence of government control, management, or knowledge over an area. A city can be predominantly informal with lively black markets and mostly unregulated labour and housing. Informality does not have to occur on the margins of everyday life. In Manila, informality is both ubiquitous and poorly understood; statistics are widely varying and erratically collected. The government estimated in 2010 that roughly one in five residents of Metro Manila lived in housing about which the government kept few records and over which it had little authority. The number has most likely grown.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s current Informal City project offers some estimates. According to a recent report, 40 to 80 per cent of Filipino residents work in the informal economy. Meanwhile, informal settlements are everywhere apparent, with self-built structures lining the waterways and filling nearly every available space in the city, and with informal settlers working in seemingly every aspect of the urban economy.

Even a casual look at Manila, and other bourgeoning global cities, shows that the functioning of the urban economy depends on informality. Informality allows workers to subsist on marginal incomes. Informality provides homes where the formal market does not. Despite or perhaps because of their meagre pay, these workers’ role in the global service economy is anything but marginal. A shoe repairman sets up a roadside station where he fixes the shoes of the restaurant worker who in turn serves food to visiting investors and local businesspeople. Workers rest in informal settlements before getting up to drive the jeepneys that transport young men and women inexpensively to Makati’s call centres. There, they will answer questions and complaints from customers of global firms headquartered in New York, London, and more. All for a low wage. Informality provides the foundation for local and global profits.

M anila helps us to understand how informality grew into a prevalent way of life in some cities, and an integral component of the global economy. In 1945, at the end of the Second World War, poor rural migrants flooded into Manila, in search of work and food. For these desperate newcomers, land-use rights mattered much more than land titles. Rural migrants built their own shelter on unoccupied land in the city, whether along railroad tracks, extending on stilts over waterways, or under bridges, and they constructed a sense of ownership that included the right to lease and sublease their units.

Many ultimately set up their homes near or on Manila Bay in the northern district of Tondo – a community of some 180,000 residents by the early 1970s. Residents did not deny the lack of government recognition for their land rights. Nonetheless, they still felt a sense of ownership, as evidenced in Zone One Tondo Organization’s explanation for resident motives when staying in unserviced homes in 1973: ‘the people prefer to live in a very small barung-barong [shanty] that is their own rather than rent a place’.

The former president Ferdinand Marcos understood informality. He understood migrants’ claims to property rights; in fact, he tried to neutralise the political power of Tondo residents by defining informality in opposition to formal, state-regulated spaces. In 1975, Marcos issued a presidential decree criminalising ‘squatters’ and ‘squatting’ as a ‘nefarious’ action punishable by incarceration and/or fines. In this way, the Philippine government implemented a clear legal dichotomy – formal versus informal, legitimate versus squatting. It did so in an attempt to strengthen the power of the state while undermining the political power of poor people who might oppose the ruling class. Put simply, the state created informality.

The Philippine government is not unique in building a divide between formal and informal. Governments around the world do likewise, and for reasons historical and political. International advisors in United Nations technical assistance missions and US foreign-aid programmes advise Kenya, South Africa, Thailand, Peru, the Philippines and other so-called ‘developing’ countries to do so. These well-meaning technocrats, planners, housing experts and international development experts often find the manner and pace of urbanisation in these cities unruly and confusing. So they urge national governments to foster order by adopting or reinstituting vigorous land surveying and titling programmes. If individuals owned land, that land would become property – a site of investment and a potential source of profit. Regularised records would facilitate global investment. To Western development specialists, this is order, progress, modernity.

Development technocrats assure governments that fostering a class of property owners also means a class of citizens invested in political stability. Their message of stability appeals to governments concerned about their own security. Manila City Council members, for example, repeatedly requested advice from William Levitt, a US property developer who quipped in 1948: ‘No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do.’

People living and working in these spaces have for decades contended with efforts to, essentially, delegitimise their economic activity and weaken them politically. Informal dwellers have no illusions about their marginalisation in the global city. ‘They think we are garbage people,’ one taxi driver and Tondo resident observed bitterly. And then, with a bark of laughter, he added: ‘Unless it is time for an election!’

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How can we make cities more competitive?

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Megha Mukim

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Stay up to date:, cities and urbanization.

Cities are the future. They are where people live and work. They are where growth happens and where innovation takes place. But they are also poles of poverty and, much too often, centers of unemployment.

How can we unleash the potential of cities? How do we make them more competitive? These are urgent questions. Questions, as it turns out, with complex answers – that could potentially have huge returns for job creation and poverty reduction.

Cities vary enormously when it comes to their economic performance. While 72 percent of cities grow faster than their countries, these benefits do not happen uniformly across all cities. The top 10 percent of cities increase GDP almost three times more than the remaining 90 percent. They create jobs four to five times faster. Their residents enjoy higher incomes and productivity, and they are magnets for external investment.

We’re not just talking about the “household names”among global cities: Competitive cities are often secondary cities, many of them exhibiting success amidst adversity – some landlocked and in lagging regions within their countries. For instance, Saltillo (Mexico), Meknes (Morocco), Coimbatore (India), Gaziantep (Turkey), Bucaramanga (Colombia), and Onitsha (Nigeria) are a few examples of cities that have been competitive in the last decade.

So how do cities become competitive? We define competitive cities as those that successfully help firms and industries create jobs, raise productivity and increase the incomes of citizens. A team at the World Bank Group spent the last 18 months investigating, creating and updating our knowledge base for the benefit of WBG’s clients. In our forthcoming report, “Competitive Cities for Jobs and Growth,”* we find that the recipe includes several basic ingredients.

In the long term, cities moving up the income ladder will transform their economies, changing from “market towns” to “production centers” to “financial and creative centers,” increasing efficiencies and productivity at each stage. But economic data clearly shows there are large gains to be had even without full-scale economic transformation: Cities can move from $2,500 to $20,000 in per capita income while still remaining a “production center.” In such cases, cities become more competitive at what they already do, finding niche products and markets in tradable goods and services. Competitive cities are those that manage to attract new firms and investors, while still nurturing established businesses and longtime residents.

What sort of policies do competitive cities use? We find that leading cities focus their energies on leveraging both economy-wide and sector-specific policies. In practice, we see how successful cities create a favorable business climate and target individual sectors for pro-active economic development initiatives. They use a combination of policies focused on cross-cutting issues such as land, capital markets and infrastructure, while not losing focus on the needs of different industries and firms. The crucial factor is consultation, collaboration and partnerships with the private sector. In fact, success also involves building coalitions for growth with neighbors and other tiers of government.

Process matters enormously. What is interesting about competitive cities is not their choice of policy action or reform, but how they get things done in the first place. Cities choose a strategy for economic development, align their budget to finance it, solve problems during implementation, and mobilize sufficient staff capacity and attention to the quality of implementation. They have an explicit economic development-oriented mindset that complements a social and environmental vision, and they rally agencies and layers of the city government around it.

The competitiveness opportunity for cities is overwhelming. If every average city had managed to do as well as its competitive-city counterpart within its region, the world would have added 19 million new jobs – in 2012 alone. Cities are potent tools in policymakers’ arsenal to reduce poverty and increase shared prosperity – and they deserve closer scrutiny and focus.

This post first appeared on The World Bank’s Private Sector Development Blog . Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

To keep up with the Agenda subscribe to our weekly newsletter .

Author: Megha Mukim is an Economist working on issues of competitiveness and urban development with the World Bank Group.

Image: The TV tower at Alexanderplatz square during sunset in Berlin. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch.

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The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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The Global City: A Photo Essay

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What makes a city “global”?

Essay, 2012, 4 pages, grade: b, zubeda issa mohammed (author).

Abstract or Introduction

Nowadays globalization occurs in places where a mass of people work and live in cities. However, for a city to achieve the title of being global, it must have values and ideas that will have an impact of the rest of the world. “Global city is a term that raises an understanding for the cognoscenti” (Low, 2005: p218). Low (2005) further says that a global city is a city that is well thought out to be an important node in the world’s economic system. A global city has wealth, power and influence to other countries as well as hosts the largest capital markets. Moreover, a city that has wealthy multinational companies, good infrastructure, better economy, well-educated and diverse populations and powerful organizations as well as a good political structure that are linked to the other parts of the world like nowhere else is considered to be global (Badcock, 2002: p31). A global city, therefore, is the world’s most important and influential city that covers the dimensions of the globalization. These dimensions are cultural experience, business activity, human capital as well as political engagement. London, New York, Paris, Rome and Tokyo are one of the most well-known global cities as it provides global competitiveness for its citizens and companies.

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Essay about Global Cities

The term “global city” was first used by Saskia Sassen, a well-known world specialist in urban strategies. It is also referred to as “world city” or world-class city”. This is a term which she describes or categorizes a city/ies which has a great deal of effect and influence on global affairs. Such cities create a “hub” for economic, political and cultural changes all across the globe.

The concept of a global city should be taken as a component of a global network of strategic sites. No global city exist as a single entity but serves as a function of cross-border networks, having “production functions” in their economic, political, cultural and even lifestyle areas being interlinked with other global cities.

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There are various criteria that categorize a city as a global city. Two main criteria are economic production function, which has to do with the city having the resources and capabilities necessary in managing its global operations of firms and markets, both local and foreign/multi-nationals. Global cities are able to ensure the existence, reproduction and renovation of these resources and capabilities through various forms of leadership and international economic diplomacy.

The political production function on the other hand pertains to producing or strengthening the professional elites, and creates a conducive environment for these national, and or foreign corporate professionals. Such a conducive environment is achieved by global cities since these are partly denationalized, furthering its ability to attract large foreign businesses and related expatriate communities.

In addition to these two main criteria, “culture production function” is also an important global ingredient. It must have a world-class culture, with world-renowned cultural institutions such as museums and universities, including its Lifestyle issues. It has a lively cultural scene, hosting film festivals, premieres, a thriving music or theatre scene such as that in Broadway. There is also an increasing presence of the servicing class which caters for the lifestyle of the new professionals and managerial elites. Such as nannies, housekeepers, etc. which serves as an indicator of a global city. It is also marked by physical expansions for its urban glamour zone (See “What you need to be a Global City”).

Other key important characteristics which global cities share include international, first-name familiarity. Such cities have gained world-wide popularity that the mere mention of its name is accepted and equated to its country, such as when one mentions Paris; it is automatically understood to mean Paris, France. Tokyo is readily assumed to mean Tokyo, Japan without mentioning the country or political subdivisions. It must also have a great influence and participation in world affairs.

A global city is the center of a metropolitan area possessing a fairly large population of at least one million people. As a major economic center, it should have an advanced transportation system which includes and international airport, that serves as a host for several international airlines; several freeways and large mass transit network. Global cities are also characterized by advanced communications infrastructure such as fiber optics, Wi-Fi networks, cellular phone services, and other high-speed lines of communications with which national and foreign firms can rely on.

Traditionally, the cities of London, New York city, Paris, and Tokyo known as the “big four” world cities have become the symbols of global capitalism. The goal of building a “world-class” city has become an obsession to some and has gained success in emerging new world-city such as Buenos Aires, Frankfurt, Sydney, and Toronto all of which have become large and influential.

The Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC), in its attempt to categorize world cities ranked cities based on provision of “advanced producer services” in areas of accountancy, finance and law, advertising which are owned by foreign or international firms. GaWC came up with categorization of these world cities in three levels and several sub-ranks. Those that were given much consideration were cities having multi-national companies that provided financial and consulting services rather than being a cultural or political centre. These three major categories are the alpha (full service); beta (major); and gamma (minor) world cities.

The “big four” world-cities received the highest rank, followed by Chicago, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore. Receiving the highest rank among Beta world cities are San Francisco, Sydney, Toronto, and Zurich. Second ranks on this category are Brussels, Madrid, Mexico City, Sao Paulo. These are followed by Moscow and Seoul. Gamma world cities with first ranking are Amsterdam, Boston, Caracas, Dallas, and Geneva among others. Next in rank within this category include Bangkok, Beijing, Montreal, Rome, Stockholm and Warsaw. Last in ranking among minor world cities are Atlanta, Barcelona, Berlin, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Manila, Miami, Shanghai, Munich, Kuala Lumpur, and Istanbul (See “Global City” from Wikipedia).

The inventory done by GaWc in 1999 undoubtedly considered Amsterdam a global city, despite ranking it in the third category. Based on the above mentioned characteristics, Amsterdam fits the category. It is the seat of one of the world’s chief stock exchanges, at the same time boasting of having a major port.

Amsterdam is also world-renown for its diamond-cutting industry, and one of the great commercial, intellectual, and artistic capitals of Europe. What makes it unique is the North Sea Canal which opened in 1876 which accommodates large oceangoing vessels, connected by the older North Holland Canal. In fact, the city is cut by about 40 concentric and radial canals containing streets and crossed by 400 bridges. These canals gave the city its nickname, “Venice of the North”.

The Amsterdam-Rhine Canal connects the city with the Rhine delta, and consequently with the industrial North West Germany. There is considerable transit trade within these canals. Its manufacturing firms include clothing, printed materials and metal goods. This city is a major road and rail hub, with Schiphol airport serving as an established hub for several international airlines. The Amsterdam Area is strategically positioned with a network of air, road, water, rail and cable connections to the rest of Europe. Its international airport and major seaport makes the city a multi-model hub, providing easy global accessibility because of its unique position as a gateway to all major European markets.

Tourism is an important industry since the city offers a unique experience with many old and picturesque houses along the canals which are now mostly used as offices and warehouses. Amsterdam is built on wooden and concrete piles because of its underlying soft ground. It is an ethnically diverse city with new residents from former Dutch colonies such as Indonesia and Suriname.

Amsterdam is home to art works done by world-famous Dutch masters such as Rembrandt, found in Rijksmuseum or National Museum built in 1808 by Bonaparte. Of equally famous are the Van Gogh museum, the house of Anne Frank, and Rembrandt’s house. The Concertgebouw Orchestra provides a lively cultural scene. Cultural institutions include the University of Amsterdam founded as an academy way back in 1632 and achieved university status by 1876, and has been serving as the largest learning center in Netherlands. The Free University (Calvinist) is also found in this city (See “Amsterdam”).

Likewise, the Economic Intelligence Unit’s Global Outlook Country Forecast Ranking of 2005 has named Netherlands as the best country to do business in the euro zone. Every five years, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) draws a list of ten best countries with which to do business and Netherlands is in sixth place, the highest among other countries in the euro zone. Amsterdam as Netherland’s capital is a thriving hub for business and industry. It has continued its traditional openness to the world and thus creating an excellent business environment able to offer a competitive cost to quality ratio, and an elite international network of professional services designed to assist international businesses. It also offers highly educated, flexible and motivated workforce with a high degree of English proficiency compared to other European countries.

International network of service providers in the city allows great outsourcing opportunities. Amsterdam is one of the most ‘wired’ regions in Europe, where the largest Internet exchange on the continent, the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) is located. The area has attracted many international ICT and telecoms companies because of its excellent IT infrastructure. Amsterdam also boasts of a strong creative industry such as advertising, design and publishing.

Guy Hayward has noted Amsterdam’s rise as a key player in the global advertising market. One such example is 180, an Amsterdam-based agency which is snatching multinational clients from traditional groups in London or New York. It has housed diverse nationalities, represented by twenty nationalities in its roughly estimated ninety employees. Such a scenario is not unusual in Amsterdam where other firms are attracting marketers’ attention such as Wiede+Kennedy, and Strawberry Frog ( E. Pfanner, “A World of Expertise at Home in Amsterdam)

It is a centre for life sciences activities in Europe, with a well established infrastructure, informatics and biomedical research. It has a high standard of expertise in areas including integrative bio-informatics and genomics for the treatment of infectious inflammatory and multi-factoral diseases, oncology, immunology, cardiology, cell and medical biology, including neurosciences. It contains the highest concentration of knowledge within the country.

The Amsterdam Area is one the world’s favorite places to live and work, offering a high quality of life for its constituents. Even foreign visitors and expatriates feel quickly at home. The city has been a ‘melting pot’ for many centuries. The city of Amsterdam has truly gained world-wide popularity with other nationals because of its lively, international, and cosmopolitan atmosphere.

Allowing dual citizenship has made the city home to a number of foreign nationals. The second largest Japanese community in Europe can be found in Amstelveen. A variety of international schools, associations and social centers in Amsterdam Area caters to its large community of expatriates (See “Doing Business in Amsterdam”).

As part of the new city marketing campaign, I amsterdam is the new motto for Amsterdam Area to assert itself continually on the international stage. Showcasing the city’s strengths for centuries are its enterprising, innovative and creative qualities, making its mark on the global level (See “Amsterdam City Marketing”).

“What you need to be a Global City”. http://www.gurusonline.tv/uk/conteudos/sassen2.asp
“Global City” From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city
“Amsterdam”. http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/world/A0803825.html
Pfanner, E. “A World of Expertise at Home in Amsterdam”. http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/09/18/business/ad19.php
“Doing Business in Amsterdam”. http://www.ez.amsterdam.nl/page.php?page=183&menu=99&PHPSESSID=862a6b961a870c6944b16dc2b1be13a5
“Amsterdam City Marketing”. http://www.amsterdamtourist.nl/encorporate/home/Amsterdam+City+Marketing/xp/content_artikel.ENamsterdamcitymarketing2/default.aspx

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London as a Global City Essay

Introduction: is london a global city.

A global city is a city which has a big economic significance in the world. Thus for a city to be deemed as global or world class it has to pass certain criteria. These criteria include economic characteristics, political characteristics, cultural characteristics, transport characteristics, and many others such as population, information exchange, human capital, and business activities.

According to recent surveys Asian cities are emerging as newcomers in the prominence of cities on the globe. For instance in the latest survey according to Kearney (2010), 5 of the top ten global cities come from Asia. Currently London is ranked second after New York City.

Characteristics of London as a Global City

The city of London is considered a global city because of many reasons. The city is a metropolitan and therefore it has a mixture of different cultures. According to Bloomberg Businessweek (2010), London ranks second after New York. This index is based on the rich human resource and the cultural wealth and other strengths. Business activities in London are also of a very high index. The human capital of the British capital is also increasing.

Population of London

According to Bentham (2010), London’s population is set to reach 8.3 million people. This means that the population is increasing by 10% in a period of eight years. In addition to this, more people in England are moving from the rural areas into London for many reasons. The report also states that fewer Londoners are moving abroad. Increased population has the advantage of increased human resource and also the presence of a ready market for goods and services.

GDP of London

The GDP of London is currently on the rise. As Packer (2004) writes, London has grown to become a major financial centre of the world. London is a metropolitan capital and which still remains a powerful center where the world gets sucked. Before being overtaken by New York in the twentieth century, London had been leading other world cities in terms of size and wealth.

Cultural wealth of London

Since time immemorial, London has continued to increase in its cosmopolitan state. The British capital has continued to attract human labor from across the whole world. For instance it attributes its name from Italian linguistics whereby the city of London emanated from the Roman Londonium which was a tribal capital of Britannia.

Cultural wealth of London is an accompaniment of the way in which Britain gained colonial powers. Slave trade as Packer (2004) puts it, made Britain ports to fill with cultural diversity which later on spread to the interior.

Transport facilities

London has invested heavily in the transport sector. There is an excellent network of roads and railway lines traversing across London. London is also well known for its highly developed marine transport. The good network of transport facilities provides the ease of movement of goods to and from the market.

Movement of Human labor is also enhanced. According to Litman (2006), London has continued to decongest its roads by implementing certain measures. Henrion (2010), also states that businessmen can travel quickly into London from other European cities.

Medical facilities in London

London is well endowed with world class medical facilities. According to Uhlhorn (2010), London health care facilities are among the top of the world as it is with the Australian facilities. Major laboratory researches are done in London universities. Medical centers such as the UCL medical center are also characterized by world class research facilities.

Information exchange of London

London was among the first city in the world to use transmission of information in form of radio waves. The use of this system is dated back during the Second World War when Britain used the technology of radar to track airplanes. London has also excelled in the IT sector such that its development has also been attributed to its existing IT policies.

Business and economic activities

There are many business activities in London. The major businesses activities include stock exchange, banking industry, insurance industry, transport industry, real estate business among others. Services in the business industry also present a major source of income for the Londoners. The City University, London (2010) informs how information exchange is used in almost all sectors and how Londoners are being educated on how to use this system.

Political stability

Political stability of Britain has enabled her capital to grow expansively throughout the years. British political system has enhanced the presence of peace. The presence of peace makes London an attractive place to invest, visit or live. According to Durham (2005), political situation in London has been formulated to accommodate all kinds of people including gays.

Conclusion: Why Is London a Global City

In conclusion London’s prosperity has been depending upon the above factors. Other factors which have enabled London to develop to a world class city include, tourism sector whereby people from all over the world have been able to access London’s beauty. London has some of the best hotels in the world. In addition to all the above, Britain also has an excellent learning system whereby some of the universities are well known to be world class. This is according to the Consolidated School District of New Britain (2010)

Reference List

Bentham, (2010). Population of London set to hit 8.3m high, Evening Standard, 2010. Web.

Bloomberg (2010). Business week, top global cities 20 10 . Web.

City University, London (2010). Guidelines on the use of Display Screen Equipment. Web.

Durham, M. (2005). Abortion, Gay Rights and Politics in Britain and America: A Comparison, Parliamentary Affairs Vol. 58 No. 1, Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government 2005, pp 89-103.

Henrion, N. (2010). Transportation Guide from Paris to London by Air, Rail and Road. Web.

Kearney, A. T. (2010). Global cities index . Web.

Litman, T. (2006). London Congestion Pricing Implications for Other Cities. Victoria Transport Policy Institute, pp 8.

Packer, D. (2004). London: Heart of Empire and Global City Socialist Outlook: SO/04 – Autumn 2004. Web.

The Consolidated School District of New Britain ct, (2010). Britain Board of Education website. Web.

Uhlhorn, D. (2010). The fifth estate, Medical facilities : Translational research – from the Bench to the bedside. Web.

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COMMENTS

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AI-generated answer. A city can be considered a global city based on several key factors: 1. Economic Importance: A global city typically has a significant economic influence on a global scale. It serves as a major hub for finance, commerce, and trade, attracting multinational corporations and fostering innovation and entrepreneurship.
Global city
global city, an urban centre that enjoys significant competitive advantages and that serves as a hub within a globalized economic system.The term has its origins in research on cities carried out during the 1980s, which examined the common characteristics of the world's most important cities. However, with increased attention being paid to processes of globalization during subsequent years ...
What makes a city a Global City?
A global city is a city that has a significant influence on global affairs, including political, economic, cultural, and social aspects. It serves as a hub for international business and finance, attracting multinational corporations and banking institutions. Examples of global cities include New York City, London, Tokyo, and Dubai.
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Answer. 21 people found it helpful. angel0931. report flag outlined. Answer: A global city has wealth, power and influence to other countries as well as hosts the largest capital markets. ... A global city, therefore, is the world's most important and influential city that covers the dimensions of the globalization. Sana maka help pa follow po.
What Is a Global City?
In this world then, a global city is a significant production point of specialized financial and producer services that make the globalized economy run. Sassen covered specifically New York, London, and Tokyo in her book, but there are many more global cities than this. The question then becomes how to identify these cities, and perhaps to ...
The global city
The core ideas in her theory of the global city are presented in a 2005 article, "The Global City: Introducing a Concept" . This article is a convenient place to gain an understanding of her basic approach to the subject. Key to Sassen's concept of the global city is an emphasis on the flow of information and capital.
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Cities are centers of innovation and businesses. They portray the economic, social, and political state of the country and its people. Cities are categorized differently depending on the role they play on the global scene. Although the city of Tokyo is the largest in the world with a population of about 38,000,000, it is considered an Alpha ...
The importance of a global city
Garcetti said that the important question for Los Angeles is: "What kind of global city are we?" "Nothing about being global inherently makes you a fair city or a just city. It just makes you big," he said. Los Angeles, where 63% of the residents are immigrants or the children of immigrants, is at the crossroads of many of the world's ...
Global Cities: Introducing the 10 Traits of Globally Fluent ...
Swift global integration, the rapid expansion of a global consumer class, and the rise of urban regions as the engines of global economic growth have ushered in a new era. The global economy no ...
Globalization and the City
Globalization and the City It is often said that the world is turning into a "global village". In reality, it is much more a "global city": today, more than half of the world's population lives in cities (although often under poor conditions), and many metropolises of the world are much more economically productive and significant with respect to global networks than most of the ...
The Global City: Introducing a Concept
The Global City: Introducing a Concept. Each phase in the long history of the world economy raises specific questions about the particular conditions that make it possible. One of the key properties of the current phase is the ascendance of information technologies and the associated increase in the mobility and liquidity of capital. There have ...
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Definition of Global City. ( noun) A city that has international political influence, home to multinational corporations and non-governmental organizations, in addition to a globally influential mass media, and well-developed communication and transportation system.
This striking feature of Manila makes it an emblematic global city
The most striking aspect of life in Manila, however, lies not in physical attributes but rather in the legal status of the communities living above and around these waterways. For the residents of this city of nearly 2 million, 'informality' is an all-encompassing, defining feature of everyday life in the capital.
how would you describe a global city?
Answer. Answer: Global city is an urban centre that enjoys significant competitive advantages and that serves as a hub within a globalized economic system. The term has its origins in research on cities carried out during the 1980s, which examined the common characteristics of the world's most important cities.
Global city
Global City A global city or world city is a central city which serves as a center within a globalized economic system that enjoys significant competitive advantages. It is an idea that globalization can be broken down in terms of strategic geological sites that see global processes being established, facilitated and achieved.
How can we make cities more competitive?
Process matters enormously. What is interesting about competitive cities is not their choice of policy action or reform, but how they get things done in the first place. Cities choose a strategy for economic development, align their budget to finance it, solve problems during implementation, and mobilize sufficient staff capacity and attention ...
The Global City: A Photo Essay
Read & Buy Digital Edition. At its core, the term "global city" is rooted in economics. Beginning in the fifteenth century globalization took root and the world's disparate regional economies began to converge. As a result, economic hubs began to emerge in key cities around the world. It is to this phenomenon that the term "global city ...
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"Global city is a term that raises an understanding for the cognoscenti" (Low, 2005: p218). Low (2005) further says that a global city is a city that is well thought out to be an important node in the world's economic system. A global city has wealth, power and influence to other countries as well as hosts the largest capital markets.
⇉Essay about Global Cities Essay Example
Essay about Global Cities. The term "global city" was first used by Saskia Sassen, a well-known world specialist in urban strategies. It is also referred to as "world city" or world-class city". This is a term which she describes or categorizes a city/ies which has a great deal of effect and influence on global affairs.
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The city of London is considered a global city because of many reasons. The city is a metropolitan and therefore it has a mixture of different cultures. According to Bloomberg Businessweek (2010), London ranks second after New York. This index is based on the rich human resource and the cultural wealth and other strengths.
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But I suspect if anyone were doing a global city survey and London and New York did not rank at the top, the developers would question whether they got the criteria right. In a sense, a global city is like obscenity: we know one when we see it, but we don't necessarily have a widely agreed upon objective set of criteria to measure it by.
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Answer: here is your answer. Explanation: Globalization and the City. 1It is often said that the world is turning into a "global village". In reality, it is much more a "global city": today, more than half of the world's population lives in cities (although often under poor conditions), and many metropolises of the world are much more economically productive and significant with ...
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verified. Verified answer. Making them clean the floors would be a (n) because it would be outside their usual duties, 2. Global city, an urban centre that enjoys significant competitive advantages and that serves as a hub within a globalized economic system. ... The term has its o….

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