Globalization, economic change, urban formation and public
governance during the twentieth century gave the impetus for the emergence of a
special type of spatial expression at their intersection, which came to be
known as the global city. The root of such a formation is more accurately
conceptualized as ‘world city’, which was used in 1915 by Patrick Geddes to
refer to those urban centres where a disproportionate amount of the world’s
business was conducted (Doel and Hubbard 2002), but more properly
conceptualized in the 1960s by the urban historian Sir Peter Hall, who
conceptualized world cities primarily as concentrations of political and
bureaucratic power surrounded by a range of professional associations, trade
unions, headquarters of business concerns and cultural institutions (Newman and
Thornley 2005: 20).
Around the early 1980s our understanding of globalization
started to become more mature, including the re-conceptualization of world
cities. This new insight is usually associated with John Friedmann (1986), who
in turn relied on Wallerstein’s (1976) world systems theory but focused
primarily on its implications for cities. This theorization became known as the
‘world city hypothesis’ which is based on the idea that economic globalization
is articulated through urban nodal points, leading to the restructuring of
these cities and the asymmetric relations with cities in terms of a global
division of labour. Some of the cities became world cities – either primary or
secondary world cities depending on their maturity and connections to the world
economy – due to their role in global financial services, the availability of
advanced business services, connections to major transportation hubs, the
attraction of international institutions, the concentration of headquarters of
multinational corporations and the size of population (Newman and Thornley
2005: 20).
This view started to feed the discussion about world
cities and related global hierarchy, primarily seen as concentrations of international
institutions, financial institutions and company headquarters. Such a
conceptualization emphasizes economic power at the core of urban hierarchy
formation. The seminal work that disseminated the view of the apex of global
urban hierarchy, highlighting the role of New York, London and Tokyo as the
major trans-territorial marketplaces and command-and-control centres of the
global economy, was Saskia Sassen’s The Global City (2001 [1991]).
Sassen was also one of those who started to point out the difference between
‘world city’ and ‘global city’, as not all world cities were global cities in
the sense she understood them. (Newman and Thornley 2005: 20–1). Sassen
explains her terminological choice as follows: “When I first chose to use
global city, 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 choose the obvious alternative, world city, because it had precisely
the opposite attribute: it referred to a type of city which we have seen over
the centuries in earlier periods in Asia and
in European colonial centers. In this regard, it can 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.” (Sassen, 2005: 28)
What is essential in such a view is the focus on the
function of cities in the global division of labour and in global networks
rather than, say, their population size or political power. Thus there are many
exceptionally large cities or megacities in different parts of the world, but
only a few of them are genuine world cities and even fewer could be included
among the highest ranking global cities. Beside command power and financial and
business services, global cities essentially are defined by their connectivity,
which has different layers, such as telecommunications, transportation and
business networks (cf. Newman and Thornley 2005: 22–3). One aspect of such
connectivity relates to the key topic of this book, the preconditions for a
city’s ability to attract values from the global value flows.
It has been claimed that the concepts of world city and
global city are atomistic – or at least ‘pointillist’ – as they are defined as
bounded spatial entities with quantifiable attributes that are in their
exclusive possession. The world city discourse started to change after
Castells’ (1989) analysis of the informational city and Sassen’s analysis of
the global city, as both of them in their own way shifted the root metaphor
from hierarchy to network. A postmodern challenge to this view was articulated
by Doel and Hubbard (2002) in an attempt to overcome the atomism implicit in
the idea of functionally and spatially fixed positions of cities within a
structured global network by focusing on how such relations are built, how
flows drift in and out, how they contract and expand, how they fold and unfold
space. At its extreme, in such a picture cities’ positions and intercity relations
are in a perpetual state of becoming. Whether such a hyperbolic conception
matches reality is another matter.
Even if cities such as New York
and London are
currently unchallenged as global cities, their ability to stay competitive
cannot be taken for granted. Amirahmadi and Wah (2002) have pointed out how
industry employment, occupational structure and educational attainment in New
York City gives a glimpse of the daunting challenges ahead for economic
restructuring. They state: “[t]he need to upgrade skill and educational levels
and to grow quality jobs in the global city is of utmost importance to its
economic restructuring. The question remains unanswered as to what types of
industries would best suit the city’s population and would simultaneously
maintain its global advantage … New York City will need to undertake the long
and expensive process of generating highly educated residents if it is to
retain and grow its global competitive advantage.” (Amirahmadi and Wah 2002:
101). In just the same way all global cities from London
to Tokyo, San Francisco
and Singapore
face their own challenges which may threaten their long-term success.
Yet the global city is
not a theoretical stance or paradigm that helps us to explain the realities of
cities world-wide. As concluded by Newman and Thornley (2005: 268), grand
theories of globalization and the world city or global city concept cannot
account for the different experiences in cities throughout the developed world,
from the USA to Europe and East Asia. What is needed is the analysis of the state
and urban politics and governance. Local preconditions, histories and responses
vary considerably, making it practically impossible to find a common pattern
for the development of cities in the global context. This relates to the
convergence hypothesis that cities, especially in the higher levels of global
urban hierarchy, would become more similar owing to the pressure of global
forces, the dominant model being business-led urban development or the
neo-liberal city, epitomized by New York, Los Angeles or Toronto.
In European cities, competitiveness policy is generally balanced by inclusion
and a social agenda, as evidenced by Barcelona, Amsterdam, Stockholm
and many other dynamic cities. The surge of Asian cities to the global top
creates a new situation in the sense that they have traditionally been
instances of the developmental state, which did not conform to the neo-liberal
global city model. Seoul, just like Tokyo, is a developmental
city that serves as a starting point for the Korean transnational corporations,
not as a starting point for the global operations of footloose firms (Hill and
Kim 2000). Even if the paradigmatic differences between Western neo-liberal
global cities and Asian developmentalist global cities are definitively
blurring, some traits of this dichotomy persist in representative top ranking
cities in West and East.
The above is an excerpt from The Political Economy of City
Branding by A.-V. Anttiroiko (Routledge, 2014, pp. 23-25).
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