Global Cities According to Saskia Sassen: Power and Inequality

Global cities are, according to the sociologist Saskia Sassen, the centres from which the world economy is managed: not the largest or most populous, but those where headquarters, financial markets and the specialised services that make it possible to coordinate production dispersed across the planet are concentrated. Sassen formulated the idea in The Global City (1991) and summarised it for a wide audience in Cities in a World Economy, published in 1994 and updated through its fifth edition in 2018. Her contribution is to have shown that globalisation, far from making place irrelevant, needs very specific places, and that those places pay a price in inequality.

The paradox of dispersal: why globalisation needs places

The starting point is a paradox. The more production is dispersed across Asian factories, data centres and offshored offices, the more complex its management becomes, and that management demands concentration: lawyers, auditors, consultants, banks, advertisers and programmers who work face to face and need to be close to one another. New York, London and Tokyo became in the 1980s the nodes where that command capacity gathers, and behind them a hierarchical network of cities, from Frankfurt to Hong Kong and from São Paulo to Sydney, occupies the next tiers. The global city is a site of production, Sassen says: it produces the service of running the economy.

Social polarisation and the dual city

The second thesis is polarisation. Advanced services generate very well paid jobs and, at the same time, an enormous demand for low-wage work: cleaning, catering, care, couriers, security, met largely by migrants, many undocumented. Between the two extremes, the middle-class industrial employment that sustained twentieth-century cities disappears. The result is an hourglass social structure and a dual urban geography: centres and renovated neighbourhoods for global professionals, peripheries and enclaves where the precarious workforce concentrates. Sassen insists that the two worlds depend on each other.

Spatial transformation and a new urban politics

Cities in a World Economy adds two dimensions the 1991 book treated less. The first is physical transformation: office towers, financial districts, airports and telecommunications networks that reorganise the city's space in the service of capital, and luxury housing that pushes out earlier uses. The second is political: the global city is also the place where precarious workers and migrants become visible, organise and claim rights, because only there do they concentrate enough to be seen. Sassen sees in that presence the possibility of a new urban politics.

Critiques and revisions of the global city thesis

The thesis has been debated. Researchers such as Peter Taylor and the GaWC network have measured connections between cities and confirmed the hierarchy, but also its change: Shanghai, Dubai and Singapore have climbed positions, and digitalisation has allowed part of the command functions to disperse. Others argue that polarisation is not uniform and that in European cities with welfare states the social structure has professionalised more than polarised. Sassen has responded by incorporating those variations into successive editions, without abandoning the central idea that place matters.

For planning, the book leaves a question that remains open: what to do with a city whose economic success produces its own crisis of housing, segregation and precarity. Sassen offers no recipe, but she does offer a warning: policies that attend only to global competitiveness reinforce polarisation, and those that ignore the global economy run out of resources. The global city needs, in her reading, a politics that recognises everyone who makes it work, from the banker to the cleaner who empties his bin before dawn.