Global city
The global city is, in Saskia Sassen's formulation (1991), the one that concentrates the command functions of the world economy: headquarters, finance, advanced services, and with them a workforce polarised between highly paid professionals and precarious services. New York, London and Tokyo were her cases; today the list is long and the mechanism the same.
Neil Brenner extended the idea with planetary urbanisation: there is no longer an outside to the urban, because mines, fields and seas are organised from cities. The global city is also where housing prices are set on the international market rather than by local wages.
Videos on this term (21)
- Infrastructure
Brian Berry: Cities as an Invisible System of Connections
Brian J. L. Berry showed that cities form systems ranked by flows of goods, people and information: central places,…
Brian Berry 3 min read - Urban economy
Castells: From Collective Consumption to the Space of Flows
Manuel Castells's urban thought moved from collective consumption and urban social movements to the network society…
Manuel Castells 3 min read - Public space
Why Cities Should Not Be Identical Models: Jennifer Robinson
Jennifer Robinson argues in Ordinary Cities that every city can produce theory and that judging them by the…
Jennifer Robinson 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Why Cities Are the Key Nodes of Globalization: Saskia Sassen
Saskia Sassen explains why a dispersed economy needs global cities to coordinate it: command functions, social…
Saskia Sassen 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Michael Peter Smith: Transnational Urbanism and Global Cities
Michael Peter Smith argues in Transnational Urbanism that globalisation is made by migrants and networks in…
Michael Peter Smith 2 min read - Public space
John Friedmann: Transactive Planning and Community Participation
John Friedmann proposed transactive planning: a dialogue between technical and community knowledge.
John Friedmann 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Cities: Reimagining the Urban by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift
Cities: Reimagining the Urban (2002) by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift proposes thinking the city as flows, rhythms and…
Ash Amin 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Çağlar Keyder: Istanbul Between the Global and the Local
Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local (1999), edited by Çağlar Keyder, explains how Istanbul turned its…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Hong Kong as a Global City: Stephen Chiu and Tai-lok Lui
Stephen Chiu and Tai-lok Lui explain how Hong Kong went from colony to global financial centre and what that means…
Stephen Chiu 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Manuel Castells: the space of flows
What Manuel Castells means by the space of flows: how networks of information and capital reorganise global cities,…
Manuel Castells 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Shanghai as a Global City: From the Concessions to Pudong
Shanghai went from an open port in 1843 to a cosmopolitan metropolis and, after 1990, to a state-directed global…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Saskia Sassen: what makes a global city global
New York, London and Tokyo concentrate capital, information and decisions. Saskia Sassen explains what links them…
Saskia Sassen 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Brenda Yeoh: Migration and Urbanization in Asian Cities
Brenda Yeoh explains how Singapore and other Asian cities grow with migrant workers denied belonging.
Brenda Yeoh 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Saskia Sassen: migration, inequality and the global city
How Saskia Sassen explains the global city: financial concentration, international migration, urban inequality and…
Saskia Sassen 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Peripheral Global Cities: Subordinate Integration and Exclusion
How the cities of the Global South are inserted into the world economy in a subordinate way: Grant and Nijman's…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
The Production of Space in the Global South: Robinson and Pieterse
The production of space in the Global South needs its own categories. What Jennifer Robinson (Ordinary Cities). The…
2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Socio-Spatial Segregation: Wacquant, Massey and Sassen
Socio-spatial segregation sorts rich and poor into separate neighborhoods. How Loïc Wacquant, Douglas Massey and…
2 min read - Urban economy
Richard Florida's The New Urban Crisis: Inequality in Cities
The New Urban Crisis (2017) by Richard Florida explains why the most prosperous cities push out the people who…
Richard Florida 2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Jennifer Robinson and Ordinary Cities: Urban Theory from the South
Ordinary Cities (2006) by Jennifer Robinson holds that all cities are ordinary and sources of theory. Her critique…
Jennifer Robinson 3 min read - Public space
Citizen Participation in Urban Governance: Keys and Limits
Citizen participation decides who shapes the city. What Neil Brenner and Saskia Sassen explain, which mechanisms…
2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Saskia Sassen: Cities in a World Economy
A summary of Saskia Sassen's Cities in a World Economy: why a handful of cities concentrate command over the global…
Saskia Sassen 2 min read
