Why Cities Are the Key Nodes of Globalization: Saskia Sassen

Cities are the key nodes of globalization because an economy dispersed across the planet needs concrete places from which to coordinate it, and that is the paradox Saskia Sassen resolved with the concept of the global city in The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (1991). A financial order crosses continents in seconds, but someone has to produce, interpret and manage it in an office with lawyers, accountants, analysts and technicians, and those command functions concentrate in a few metropolises. Globalization, Sassen argues, does not make geography irrelevant: it produces new strategic places, and the more extensive the networks, the more necessary the points capable of coordinating them.

Territorial division of labour: concentrated command, dispersed production

The mechanism is a territorial division of labour. Factories may be in China, data centres in Ireland and customers anywhere, but managing that dispersion, finance, law, consulting, advertising, insurance, requires specialised services that benefit from proximity to one another and from density of talent, and so they cluster in New York, London and Tokyo and later in Paris, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Singapore or São Paulo. The global city is not the largest or the richest but the one that performs command functions within networks exceeding its borders; its importance depends on its connection with the others.

Polarisation and the global real estate market: the social consequences

Sassen also described the social consequences. The concentration of advanced services generates very high-income jobs and, at the same time, an enormous demand for low-paid work, cleaning, catering, care, security, delivery, often filled by migrants, and the result is a polarisation the earlier industrial middle class did not know. The global city is also a global real estate market, where international capital buys offices and homes and pushes out residents, and a place where peripheries and service neighbourhoods are disconnected from the centre they serve. Inequality, in her reading, is structural to the model.

GaWC, Robinson and the state: refinements and criticism

The concept has been refined and debated. The GaWC research group at Loughborough University has classified hundreds of cities since the late 1990s by their advanced service connections, showing the network to be wider and more layered than the original triad suggested. Jennifer Robinson criticised the theory for dividing the world into global cities and the rest and called for studying all as ordinary cities; others noted that Sassen underestimated states, which still decide regulation, currency and borders. She herself widened the frame in Territory, Authority, Rights (2006) and Expulsions (2014).

Political nodes: the powerless become visible

Global cities are also political nodes. Sassen has stressed that in them the powerless, migrants, informal workers, movements, become visible and gain capacity to make claims precisely because they stand at the centre of the networks; the occupied squares of 2011, from New York to Madrid and Cairo, were for her proof that the global city produces counter-power as well as elites. And city networks, from C40 to mayors' dialogues, show that economic nodes aspire to act on questions states fail to resolve, from climate to migration.

Sassen's lesson is that globalization has an address, and that address is concrete cities. Understanding which they are and how they work explains why housing prices in London or New York obey flows unrelated to their residents, why inequality grows in the most prosperous metropolises and why decisions affecting whole territories are taken on a few streets. The global city is at once the site of world economic power and the place where that power can be contested.