Key points
- Grant and Nijman: globalisation produces in Accra or Mumbai a foreign corporate enclave separate from the domestic and the informal city.
- GaWC rankings measure what London has, and African and Andean cities fall to the lower rungs by definition.
- Robinson: the global city category condemns most cities to irrelevance; each must be understood on its own terms.
Peripheral global cities are the metropolises of the Global South that take part in the world economy in a subordinate way, as nodes of extraction, assembly and low-cost services connected to the networks of capital but not controlling them. Saskia Sassen defined in The Global City (1991) New York, London and Tokyo as the command centres from which dispersed production is coordinated, and that definition left a question open: what happens to Lagos, Lima, Manila or Nairobi, which appear in the world rankings in the lowest categories or not at all, even though their ports, free zones and call centres sustain the chains the hegemonic cities direct.
Grant and Nijman: the corporate geography of three superimposed cities
The mechanism of subordinate integration has a spatial form. Richard Grant and Jan Nijman showed in 2002, in Accra and Mumbai, that globalisation produces in the cities of the less developed world a new corporate geography: a district of foreign firms with towers, hotels and international services, separate from the city of domestic firms and from the traditional and informal city, three superimposed economies that barely touch. Special economic zones, privatised ports and logistics corridors connect that enclave to the outside better than to its own hinterland, and exclusion is not a side effect but the condition of insertion: the city enters the global network through a door most of its residents cannot pass.
GaWC, Worlding Cities and Eko Atlantic: the hierarchy rankings reinforce
Rankings make the hierarchy visible and reinforce it. The GaWC network at Loughborough University classifies cities by the presence of advanced services, global banks, consultancies and law firms, in alpha, beta and gamma categories, and African and Andean cities appear on the lower rungs by definition, because the yardstick measures what London has. Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong described in Worlding Cities (2011) the response of Asian elites: projects to become world-class cities, Dubai, Shanghai, Bangalore, with iconic towers, financial districts and settlement clearances that copy the image of the global city at the expense of those who live there, and Eko Atlantic, in Lagos, is the African version of the same experiment.
Jennifer Robinson: cities off the map and ordinary cities
Jennifer Robinson raised the decisive objection. In her 2002 article on cities off the map and in Ordinary Cities (2006), she argued that the global city category condemns most of the world's cities to irrelevance or backwardness, and that each city should be understood on its own terms, with its own forms of modernity and creativity, without New York as the measure. Her critique does not deny the inequality of the world economy but the theory that naturalises it, and Sassen herself later acknowledged, in Expulsions (2014), that advanced globalisation expels people and whole territories out of the system even as it extracts from them.
The counterargument: Sandton, Bangalore and who captures the value
The counterargument is that subordinate integration is still integration: Sandton, in Johannesburg, became Africa's financial node, Bangalore created a software industry with jobs that did not exist before, and ports and free zones attract investment that local governments could not generate. The reply is that the balance depends on who captures the value and on whether the enclave connects to the city or only to the outside; where Sandton grows beside Alexandra without bridges between them, global integration and local exclusion are the same operation.
The lesson is that the world economy has not only command centres but an urban periphery that sustains it and that rankings make invisible, and that policies chasing the global city label usually produce enclaves connected to the world and disconnected from the neighbourhood. Understanding those cities on their own terms, as Robinson proposes, is not an academic gesture: it is the condition for their insertion in the global network to serve those who live in them and not only those who look at them from outside.
Frequently asked questions
What is a peripheral global city?
A metropolis of the Global South that takes part in the world economy in a subordinate way, as a node of extraction, assembly or low-cost services connected to the networks of capital without controlling them, with a corporate enclave tied to the outside and separate from the domestic and informal city around it.
What does Jennifer Robinson criticise in global city theory?
That it condemns most of the world's cities to irrelevance or backwardness by taking New York and London as the measure; she proposes understanding each city on its own terms, as an ordinary city with its own forms of modernity, without denying the inequality of the world economy.
