what is global city essay

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global city

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• Academia - Global City-Regions: An Overview

global city , an urban centre that enjoys significant competitive advantages and that serves as a hub within a globalized economic system . The term has its origins in research on cities carried out during the 1980s, which examined the common characteristics of the world’s most important cities. However, with increased attention being paid to processes of globalization during subsequent years, these world cities came to be known as global cities. Linked with globalization was the idea of spatial reorganization and the hypothesis that cities were becoming key loci within global networks of production, finance , and telecommunications. In some formulations of the global city thesis, then, such cities are seen as the building blocks of globalization. Simultaneously, these cities were becoming newly privileged sites of local politics within the context of a broader project to reconfigure state institutions.

Early research on global cities concentrated on key urban centres such as London , New York City , and Tokyo . With time, however, research has been completed on emerging global cities outside of this triad, such as Amsterdam , Frankfurt , Houston , Los Angeles , Mexico City , Paris , São Paulo , Sydney , and Zürich . Such cities are said to knit together to form a global city network serving the requirements of transnational capital across broad swathes of territory.

The rise of global cities has been linked with two globalization-related trends: first, the expansion of the role of transnational corporations (TNCs) in global production patterns and, second, the decline of mass production along Fordist lines and the concomitant rise of flexible production centred within urban areas. These two trends explain the emergence of networks of certain cities serving the financial and service requirements of TNCs while other cities suffer the consequences of deindustrialization and fail to become “global.” Global cities are those that therefore become effective command-and-coordination posts for TNCs within a globalizing world economy. Such cities have also assumed a governance role at the local scale and within wider configurations of what some commentators have termed the “glocalization” of state institutions. This refers to processes in which certain national state functions of organization and administration have been devolved to the local scale. An example of this would be London. Since the 1980s London has consolidated its position as a global banking and financial centre, de-linked from the national economy.

The global city thesis poses a challenge to state-centric perspectives on contemporary international political economy because it implies the disembedding of cities from their national territorial base, so that they occupy an extraterritorial space. Global cities, it is suggested, have more interconnectedness with other cities and across a transnational field of action than with the national economy. Global cities are also said to share many of the same characteristics because of their connectedness and shared experiences of globalization. They all exhibit clear signs of deindustrialization. They possess the concentration of financial and service industries within their spatial boundaries, as well as the concentration of large pools of labour. On the downside, many also share experiences of class and ethnic conflict . They often have segmented labour markets in which employees of key industries enjoy well-paid and consumerist lifestyles while a lower stratum of workers staffs less well-paid, more precarious, and less attractive positions within the urban economy. It has been further argued that the promotion of global cities runs the risk of economically marginalizing nonurban populations within the national economy.

Although global cities are interconnected, embedded as they are in global production and financial networks, they are also locked into competition with one another to command increasing resources and to attract capital. To successfully compete, local governments have been keen to promote their cities as global. Such cities have been marketed as “entrepreneurial” centres, sites of innovation in the knowledge economy, and as being rich with cultural capital. A common strategy has been to stress the multiethnic qualities of a city, for example. This is intended to stress its cosmopolitan and global character and to disassociate the city from its actual territorial, ethnic, or cultural setting. Such cities also regularly compete to host world events of considerable prestige that present further economic opportunities, such as the Olympic Games .

There has been some skepticism regarding the global city thesis in its simplest formulation. On a qualitative level, some scholars questioned whether global cities are indeed new phenomena and pointed to the long-standing existence of similar economic centres over time. One can think of Florence during the Renaissance , for example, or Manchester during the Industrial Revolution . Other commentators questioned whether the ascendance of global cities implies state decline along zero-sum lines. These skeptics argued that a more complex and interdependent relationship exists between the state and cities under its national jurisdiction. Indeed, national governments can play a proactive role in the promotion of key urban centres as global cities. Correspondingly, it is possible that global cities occupy the forefront position within a hierarchy of cities and local spaces that together constitute the national economy. Such a perspective would appear to transcend a dichotomizing view of global cities and the national state.

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Understanding Society

Daniel Little

The global city — Saskia Sassen

Saskia Sassen is the leading urban theorist of the global world. (Here are several prior posts that intersect with her work.) Her The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo  (1991) has shaped the concepts and methods that other theorists have used to analyze the role of cities and their networks in the contemporary world. The core ideas in her theory of the global city are presented in a 2005 article, “The Global City: Introducing a Concept” ( link ). This article is a convenient place to gain an understanding of her basic approach to the subject.

Key to Sassen’s concept of the global city is an emphasis on the flow of information and capital. Cities are major nodes in the interconnected systems of information and money, and the wealth that they capture is intimately related to the specialized businesses that facilitate those flows — financial institutions, consulting firms, accounting firms, law firms, and media organizations. Sassen points out that these flows are no longer tightly bound to national boundaries and systems of regulation; so the dynamics of the global city are dramatically different than those of the great cities of the nineteenth century.

Sassen emphasizes the importance of creating new conceptual resources for making sense of urban systems and their global networks — a new conceptual architecture, as she calls it (28). She argues for seven fundamental hypotheses about the modern global city:

• The geographic dispersal of economic activities that marks globalization, along with the simultaneous integration of such geographically dispersed activities, is a key factor feeding the growth and importance of central corporate functions.
• These central functions become so complex that increasingly the headquarters of large global firms outsource them: they buy a share of their central functions from highly specialized service firms.
• Those specialized service firms engaged in the most complex and globalized markets are subject to agglomeration economies.
• The more headquarters outsource their most complex, unstandardized functions, particularly those subject to uncertain and changing markets, the freer they are to opt for any location.
• These specialized service firms need to provide a global service which has meant a global network of affiliates … and a strengthening of cross border city-to-city transactions and networks.
• The economic fortunes of these cities become increasingly disconnected from their broader hinterlands or even their national economies.
• One result of the dynamics described in hypothesis six, is the growing informalization of a range of economic activities which find their effective demand in these cities, yet have profit rates that do not allow them to compete for various resources with the high-profit making firms at the top of the system. (28-30)

Three key tendencies seem to follow from these structural facts about global cities.  One is a concentration of wealth in the hands of owners, partners, and professionals associated with the high-end firms in this system. Second is a growing disconnection between the city and its region. And third is the growth of a large marginalized population that has a very hard time earning a living in the marketplace defined by these high-end activities. Rather than constituting an economic engine that gradually elevates the income and welfare of the whole population, the modern global city funnels global surpluses into the hands of a global elite dispersed over a few dozen global cities.

These tendencies seem to line up well with several observable features of modern urban life throughout much of the world: a widening separation in quality of life between a relatively small elite and a much larger marginalized population; a growth of high-security gated communities and shopping areas; and dramatically different graphs of median income for different socioeconomic groups. New York, London, and Hong Kong/Shanghai represent a huge concentration of financial and business networks, and the concentration of wealth that these produce is manifest:

Inside countries, the leading financial centers today concentrate a greater share of national financial activity than even ten years ago, and internationally, cities in the global North concentrate well over half of the global capital market. (33)

This mode of global business creates a tight network of supporting specialist firms that are likewise positioned to capture a significant level of wealth and income:

By central functions I do not only mean top level headquarters; I am referring to all the top level financial, legal, accounting, managerial, executive, planning functions necessary to run a corporate organization operating in more than one country. (34)

These features of the global city economic system imply a widening set of inequalities between elite professionals and specialists and the larger urban population of service and industrial workers. They also imply a widening set of inequalities between North and South. Sassen believes that communications and Internet technologies have the effect of accelerating these widening inequalities:

Besides their impact on the spatial correlates of centrality, the new communication technologies can also be expected to have an impact on inequality between cities and inside cities. (37)

Sassen’s conceptual architecture maintains a place for location and space: global cities are not disembodied, and the functioning of their global firms depends on a network of activities and lesser firms within the spatial scope of the city and its environs. So Sassen believes there is space for political contest between parties over the division of the global surplus.

If we consider that global cities concentrate both the leading sectors of global capital and a growing share of disadvantaged populations (immigrants, many of the disadvantaged women, people of color generally, and, in the megacities of developing countries, masses of shanty dwellers) then we can see that cities have become a strategic terrain for a whole series of conflicts and contradictions. (39)

But this strategic contest seems badly tilted against the disadvantaged populations she mentions. So the outcomes of these contests over power and wealth are likely to lead, it would seem, to even deeper marginalization, along the lines of what Loic Wacquant describes in Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality ( link ).

This is a hugely important subject for everyone who wants to understand the dynamics and future directions of the globe’s mega-cities and their interconnections. What seems pressingly important for urbanists and economists alike, is to envision economic mechanisms that can be established that do a better job of sharing the fruits of economic progress with the whole of society, not just the elite and professional end of the socioeconomic spectrum.

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Synthetic Milk that Promises to Fight Climate Change

The technology coming in 2018: a realistic analysis, openmind books, scientific anniversaries, how does space affect the human body, featured author, latest book, the global city: introducing a concept.

Each phase in the long history of the world economy raises specific questions about the particular conditions that make it possible. One of the key properties of the current phase is the ascendance of information technologies and the associated increase in the mobility and liquidity of capital. There have long been cross-border economic processes—flows of capital, labor, goods, raw materials, and tourists. But to a large extent these took place within the inter-state system, where the key articulators were national states. The international economic system was ensconced largely in this inter-state system. This has changed rather dramatically over the last decade as a result of privatization, deregulation, the opening up of national economies to foreign firms, and the growing participation of national economic actors in global markets.

It is in this context that we see a rescaling of what are the strategic territories that articulate the new system. With the partial unbundling or at least weakening of the national as a spatial unit due to privatization and deregulation and the associated strengthening of globalization, come conditions for the ascendance of other spatial units or scales. Among these are the sub-national, notably cities and regions; cross-border regions encompassing two or more sub-national entities; and supra-national entities, i.e., global digitalized markets and free trade blocs. The dynamics and processes that get terrritorialized at these diverse scales can in principle be regional, national or global.

I locate the emergence of global cities in this context and against this range of instantiations of strategic scales and spatial units (Sassen 2001; 2006a). In the case of global cities, the dynamics and processes that get territorialized are global. Here I examine the general conceptual and empirical elements that can be applied to a large number of very diverse cities, each with its own empirical specificities.

Elements in a new conceptual architecture

The globalization of economic activity entails a new type of organizational structure. To capture this theoretically and empirically requires, correspondingly, a new type of conceptual architecture.1 Constructs such as the global city and the global-city region are, in my reading, important elements in this new conceptual architecture. The activity of naming these elements is part of the conceptual work. There are other closely linked terms which could conceivably have been used: the old and by now classic term world cities,2 “supervilles” (Braudel 1984), informational city (Castells 1989). Thus choosing how to name a configuration has its own substantive rationality.

When I first chose to use global city (1984), 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 chose the obvious alternative, world city, because it had precisely the opposite attribute: it referred to a type of city that we have seen over the centuries (e.g., Braudel 1984; Hall 1966; King 1990; Gugler 2004), and most probably also in much earlier periods in Asia (Abu-Lughod 1989) or in European colonial centers (King 1990) than in the West. In this regard it could 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. This is partly an empirical question; further, as the global economy expands and incorporates additional cities into the various networks, it is quite possible that the answer to that particular question will vary. Thus, the fact that Miami has developed global city functions beginning in the late 1980s does not make it a world city in that older sense of the term.

The global city model: organizing hypotheses

There are seven hypotheses through which I organized the data and the theorization of the global city model. I will discuss each of these briefly as a way of producing a more precise representation.

Firstly, the geographic dispersal of economic activities that marks globalization, along with the simultaneous integration of such geographically dispersed activities, is a key factor feeding the growth and importance of central corporate functions. The more dispersed a firm’s operations across different countries, the more complex and strategic its central functions—that is, the work of managing, coordinating, servicing, financing a firm’s network of operations.

Secondly, these central functions become so complex that increasingly the headquarters of large global firms outsource them: they buy a share of their central functions from highly specialized service firms: accounting, legal, public relations, programming, telecommunications, and other such services. Thus while even ten years ago the key site for the production of these central headquarter functions was the headquarters of a firm, today there is a second key site: the specialized service firms contracted by headquarters to produce some of these central functions or components of them. This is especially the case with firms involved in global markets and non-routine operations. But increasingly the headquarters of all large firms are buying more of such inputs rather than producing them in-house.

Thirdly, those specialized service firms engaged in the most complex and globalized markets are subject to agglomeration economies. The complexity of the services they need to produce, the uncertainty of the markets they are involved with either directly or through the headquarters for which they are producing the services, and the growing importance of speed in all these transactions, is a mix of conditions that constitutes a new agglomeration dynamic. The mix of firms, talents, and expertise from a broad range of specialized fields makes a certain type of urban environment function as an information center. Being in a city becomes synonymous with being in an extremely intense and dense information loop.

A fourth hypothesis, derived from the preceding one, is that the more headquarters outsource their most complex, unstandardized functions, particularly those subject to uncertain and changing markets, the freer they are to opt for any location, because less work actually done in the headquarters is subject to agglomeration economies. This further underlines that the key sector specifying the distinctive production advantages of global cities is the highly specialized and networked services sector. In developing this hypothesis I was responding to a very common notion that the number of headquarters is what specifies a global city. Empirically it may still be the case in many countries that the leading business center is also the leading concentration of headquarters, but this may well be because there is an absence of alternative locational options. But in countries with a well-developed infrastructure outside the leading business center, there are likely to be multiple locational options for such headquarters.

Fifthly, these specialized service firms need to provide a global service which has meant a global network of affiliates or some other form of partnership, and as a result we have seen a strengthening of cross border city-to-city transactions and networks. At the limit this may well be the beginning of the formation of transnational urban systems. The growth of global markets for finance and specialized services, the need for transnational servicing networks due to sharp increases in international investment, the reduced role of the government in the regulation of international economic activity and the corresponding ascendance of other institutional arenas, notably global markets and corporate headquarters—all these point to the existence of a series of transnational networks of cities.

A related hypothesis for research is that the economic fortunes of these cities become increasingly disconnected from their broader hinterlands or even their national economies. We can see here the formation, at least incipient, of transnational urban systems. To a large extent major business centers in the world today draw their importance from these transnational networks. There is no such thing as a single global city—and in this sense there is a sharp contrast with the erstwhile capitals of empires.

A sixth hypothesis, is that the growing numbers of high level professionals and high-profit making specialized service firms has the effect of raising the degree of spatial and socio-economic inequality evident in these cities. The strategic role of these specialized services as inputs raises the value of top-level professionals and their numbers. Furthermore, the fact that talent can matter enormously for the quality of these strategic outputs and, given the importance of speed, proven talent is an added value, the structure of rewards is likely to experience rapid increases. Types of activities and workers lacking these attributes, whether manufacturing or industrial services, are likely to get caught in the opposite cycle.

A seventh hypothesis is that one result of the dynamics described in hypothesis six is the growing informalization of a range of economic activities that find their effective demand in these cities yet have profit rates that do not allow them to compete for various resources with the high-profit making firms at the top of the system. Informalizing part or all production and distribution activities, including of services, is one way of surviving under these conditions.

Recovering place and work process

In the first four hypotheses, my effort was to qualify what was emerging in the 1980s as a dominant discourse on globalization, technology, and cities that posited the end of cities as important economic units or scales. I saw a tendency in that account to take the existence of a global economic system as a given, a function of the power of transnational corporations and global communications.

My counter argument is that the capabilities for global operation, coordination, and control contained in the new information technologies and in the power of transnational corporations need to be produced. By focusing on the production of these capabilities we add a neglected dimension to the familiar issue of the power of large corporations and the capacity of the new technologies to neutralize distance and place. A focus on the production of these capabilities shifts the emphasis to the practices that constitute what we call economic globalization and global control.

Further, a focus on practices draws the categories of place and work process into the analysis of economic globalization. These are two categories easily overlooked in accounts centered on the hypermobility of capital and the power of transnationals. Developing categories such as place and work process does not negate the centrality of hypermobility and power. Rather, it brings to the fore the fact that many of the resources necessary for global economic activities are not hypermobile and are, indeed, deeply embedded in place, notably places such as global cities, global-city regions, and export processing zones.

This entails a whole infrastructure of activities, firms, and jobs that are necessary to run the advanced corporate economy. These industries are typically conceptualized in terms of the hypermobility of their outputs and the high levels of expertise of their professionals rather than in terms of the production or work process involved and the requisite infrastructure of facilities and non-expert jobs that are also part of these industries. Focusing on the work process brings with it an emphasis on economic and spatial polarization because of the disproportionate concentration of very high- and very low-income jobs in these major global city sectors. Emphasizing place, infrastructure, and non-expert jobs matters precisely because so much of the focus has been on the neutralization of geography and place made possible by the new technologies.

The growth of networked cross-border dynamics among global cities includes a broad range of domains: political, cultural, social, and criminal. There are cross-border transactions among immigrant communities and communities of origin, and a greater intensity in the use of these networks once they become established, including for economic activities. We also see greater cross-border networks for cultural purposes, as in the growth of international markets for art and a transnational class of curators; and for non-formal political purposes, as in the growth of transnational networks of activists around environmental causes, human rights, and so on. These are largely city-to-city cross-border networks, or, at least, it appears at this time to be simpler to capture the existence and modalities of these networks at the city level. The same can be said for the new cross-border criminal networks.

Recapturing the geography of places involved in globalization allows us to recapture people, workers, communities, and more specifically, the many different work cultures, besides the corporate culture, involved in the work of globalization. It also brings with it an enormous research agenda, one that goes beyond the by now familiar focus on cross-border flows of goods, capital, and information. It opens up the global city as a space for a new type of politics, one that claims rights to the city.

Finally, by emphasizing the fact that global processes are at least partly embedded in national territories, such a focus introduces new variables in current conceptions about economic globalization and the shrinking regulatory role of the state. That is to say, the space economy for major new transnational economic processes diverges in significant ways from the duality global/national presupposed in many analyses of the global economy. The duality, national versus global, suggests two mutually exclusive spaces—where one begins the other ends. One of the outcomes of a global city analysis is that it makes evident that the global materializes by necessity in specific places, and institutional arrangements, a good number of which, if not most, are located in national territories.

Worldwide networks and central command functions

The geography of globalization contains both a dynamic of dispersal and of centralization. The massive trends towards the spatial dispersal of economic activities at the metropolitan, national, and global level that we associate with globalization have contributed to a demand for new forms of territorial centralization of top-level management and control functions. Insofar as these functions benefit from agglomeration economies even in the face of telematic integration of a firm’s globally dispersed manufacturing and service operations, they tend to locate in cities. This raises a question as to why they should benefit from agglomeration economies, especially since globalized economic sectors tend to be intensive users of the new telecommunications and computer technologies, and increasingly produce a partly dematerialized output, such as financial instruments and specialized services. There is growing evidence that business networks are a crucial variable that is to be distinguished from technical networks. Such business networks have been crucial long before the current technologies were developed. Business networks benefit from agglomeration economies and hence thrive in cities even today when simultaneous global communication is possible. Elsewhere, I examine this issue and find that the key variable contributing to the spatial concentration of central functions and associated agglomeration economies is the extent to which this dispersal occurs under conditions of concentration in control, ownership, and profit appropriation (Sassen 2001, ch. 2 & 5).

This dynamic of simultaneous geographic dispersal and concentration is one of the key elements in the organizational architecture of the global economic system. While there is no space to discuss it here, this systemic feature also enables particular types of struggles and implementations linked to environmental sustainability (Sassen 2006b; Marcotullio and Lo 2001). Let me first give some empirical referents and then examine some of the implications for theorizing the impact of globalization and the new technologies on cities.

The rapid growth of affiliates illustrates the dynamic of simultaneous geographic dispersal and concentration of a firm’s operations. By 1999 firms had well over half a million affiliates outside their home countries, and by 2005 they had well over a million such affiliates (for details see Sassen, 2006a: chapter 2). Firms with large numbers of geographically dispersed factories and service outlets face massive new needs for central coordination and servicing, especially when their affiliates involve foreign countries with different legal and accounting systems.

Another instance today of this negotiation between a global cross-border dynamic and territorially specific site is that of the global financial markets. The orders of magnitude in these transactions have risen sharply, as illustrated by the US$300 plus trillion for 2007 in traded derivatives, a major component of the global economy and one that dwarfs the value of global trade which stood at US$14 trillion. These transactions are partly embedded in electronic systems that make possible the instantaneous transmission of money and information around the globe. Much attention has gone to this capacity for instantaneous transmission of the new technologies. But the other half of the story is the extent to which the global financial markets are located in an expanding network of cities, with a disproportionate concentration in cities of the global north. Indeed, the degrees of concentration internationally and within countries are unexpectedly high for an increasingly globalized and digitized economic sector. Inside countries, the leading financial centers today concentrate a greater share of national financial activity than even ten years ago, and internationally, cities in the global north concentrate well over half of the global capital market.

One of the components of the global capital market is stock markets. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the addition of markets such as Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Bangkok, Taipei, Moscow, and growing numbers of non-national firms listed in most of these markets. The growing number of stock markets has contributed to raise the capital that can be mobilized through these markets, reflected in the sharp worldwide growth of stock market capitalization, which reached well over US$30 trillion in 2007. This globally integrated financial market, which makes possible the circulation of publicly listed shares around the globe in seconds, is embedded in a grid of very material, physical, strategic places.

The specific forms assumed by globalization over the last decade have created particular organizational requirements. The emergence of global markets for finance and specialized services, the growth of investment as a major type of international transaction, all have contributed to the expansion in command functions and in the demand for specialized services for firms (3).

By central functions I do not only mean top level headquarters; I am referring to all the top level financial, legal, accounting, managerial, executive, planning functions necessary to run a corporate organization operating in more than one country, and increasingly in several countries. These central functions are partly embedded in headquarters, but also in good part in what has been called the corporate services complex, that is, the network of financial, legal, accounting, advertising firms that handle the complexities of operating in more than one national legal system, national accounting system, advertising culture, etc., and do so under conditions of rapid innovations in all these fields (see generally Bryson and Daniels 2005). Such services have become so specialized and complex, that headquarters increasingly buy them from specialized firms rather than producing them in-house. These agglomerations of firms producing central functions for the management and coordination of global economic systems, are disproportionately concentrated in the highly developed countries—particularly, though not exclusively, in global cities. Such concentrations of functions represent a strategic factor in the organization of the global economy, and they are situated in an expanding network of global cities (4).

It is important analytically to unbundle strategic functions for the global economy or for global operation, and the overall corporate economy of a country. These global control and command functions are partly embedded in national corporate structures, but also constitute a distinct corporate subsector. This subsector can be conceived as part of a network that connects global cities across the world through firms’ affiliates or other representative offices (5). For the purposes of certain kinds of inquiry this distinction may not matter; for the purposes of understanding the global economy, it does.

This distinction also matters for questions of regulation, notably regulation of cross-border activities. If the strategic central functions—both those produced in corporate headquarters and those produced in the specialized corporate services sector—are located in a network of major financial and business centers, the question of regulating what amounts to a key part of the global economy will entail a different type of effort from what would be the case if the strategic management and coordination functions were as distributed geographically as the factories, service outlets, and affiliates generally. We can also read this as a strategic geography for political activisms that seek accountability from major corporate actors, among others concerning environmental standards and workplace standards.

National and global markets as well as globally integrated organizations require central places where the work of globalization gets done. Finance and advanced corporate services are industries producing the organizational commodities necessary for the implementation and management of global economic systems. Cities are preferred sites for the production of these services, particularly the most innovative, speculative, internationalized service sectors. Further, leading firms in information industries require a vast physical infrastructure containing strategic nodes with hyper-concentration of facilities; we need to distinguish between the capacity for global transmission/communication and the material conditions that make this possible. Finally, even the most advanced information industries have a production process that is at least partly place-bound because of the combination of resources it requires even when the outputs are hypermobile.

Theoretically this addresses two key issues in current debates and scholarship. One of these is the complex articulation between capital fixity and capital mobility and the other, the position of cities in a global economy. Elsewhere, I have developed the thesis that capital mobility cannot be reduced simply to that which moves nor can it be reduced to the technologies that facilitate movement (Sassen 2008, ch. 5 & 7). Rather, multiple components of what we keep thinking of as capital fixity are actually components of capital mobility. This conceptualization allows us to reposition the role of cities in an increasingly globalizing world, in that they contain the resources that enable firms and markets to have global operations (6). The mobility of capital, whether in the form of investments, trade, or overseas affiliates, needs to be managed, serviced, coordinated. These are often rather place-bound, yet are key components of capital mobility. Finally, states, place-bound institutional orders, have played an often crucial role in producing regulatory environments that facilitate the implementation of cross-border operations for their national and for foreign firms, investors, and markets (Sassen 2008, ch. 4 & 5).

In brief, a focus on cities makes it possible to recognize the anchoring of multiple cross-border dynamics in a network of places, prominent among which are cities, particularly global cities or those with global city functions. This in turn anchors various features of globalization in the specific conditions and histories of these cities, in their variable articulations with their national economies, and with various world economies across time and place (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1999; Allen et al. 1999; Gugler, 2004; Amen et al. 2006; Taylor 2004; Lo and Yeung 1996; Harvey 2007; Orum and Chen 2004). This optic on globalization contributes to identifying a complex organizational architecture that cuts across borders, and is both partly de-territorialized and partly spatially concentrated in cities. Further, it creates an enormous research agenda in that every particular national or urban economy has its specific and inherited modes of articulating with current global circuits. Once we have more information about this variance we may also be able to establish whether position in the global hierarchy makes a difference and the various ways in which it might do so.

Impacts of new communication technologies on centrality

Cities have historically provided national economies, polities, and societies with something we can think of as centrality. In terms of their economic function, cities provide agglomeration economies, massive concentrations of information on the latest developments, a marketplace. How do the new technologies of communication alter the role of centrality and hence of cities as economic entities?

As earlier sections have indicated, centrality remains a key feature of today’s global economy. But today there is no longer a simple straightforward relation between centrality and such geographic entities as the downtown, or the central business district (CBD). In the past, and up to quite recently in fact, the center was synonymous with the downtown or the CBD. Today, partly as a result of the new communication technologies, the spatial correlates of the center can assume several geographic forms, ranging from the CBD to a new global grid of cities (see, for instance, Herzog 2006; Burdett 2006; Short 2005; Marcuse 2003).

Simplifying one could identify three forms assumed by centrality today (7). Firstly, while there is no longer a simple straightforward relation between centrality and such geographic entities as the downtown, as was the case in the past, the CBD remains a key form of centrality. But the CBD in major international business centers is one profoundly reconfigured by technological and economic change.

Secondly, the center can extend into a metropolitan area in the form of a grid of nodes of intense business activity, a case well illustrated by recent developments in cities as diverse as Buenos Aires (Ciccolella and Mignaqui 2002), Chicago (Lloyd 2005), Shanghai (Chen and Jianming 2007), and Paris (Veltz 1996; Landrieu et al. 1998). One might ask whether a spatial organization characterized by dense strategic nodes spread over a broader region does or does not constitute a new form of organizing the territory of the “center,” rather than, as in the more conventional view, an instance of suburbanization or geographic dispersal. Insofar as these various nodes are articulated through cyber-routes or digital highways, they represent a new geographic correlate of the most advanced type of “center.” The places that fall outside this new grid of digital highways, however, are peripheralized, with the most dramatic instance that of shrinking cities (Giesecke 2005). This regional grid of nodes represents, in my analysis, a reconstitution of the concept of region. Far from neutralizing geography the regional grid is likely to be embedded in conventional forms of communications infrastructure, notably rapid rail and highways connecting to airports. Ironically, perhaps, conventional infrastructure is likely to maximize the economic benefits derived from telematics. I think this is an important issue that has been lost somewhat in discussions about the neutralization of geography through telematics.

Thirdly, we are seeing the formation of a transterritorial “center” constituted via telematics and intense economic transactions. The most powerful of these new geographies of centrality at the inter-urban level binds the major international financial and business centers: New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Sydney, Hong Kong, among others (8). But this geography now also includes cities such as Sao Paulo and Mexico City. The intensity of transactions among these cities, particularly through the financial markets, trade in services, and investment has increased sharply, and so have the orders of magnitude involved. Finally, we see emergent regional hierarchies, as is illustrated by the growth corridors in southeast Asia (Lo and Yeung 1996), the case of São Paulo in the Mercosur free-trade area (Schiffer 2002), and by the relation between the participating entities in the Iran-Dubai corridor (Parsa and Keivafin 2002). (For a general overview see the MasterCard International Global Hearts of Commerce Report on 70 Cities, 2008)

Besides their impact on the spatial correlates of centrality, the new communication technologies can also be expected to have an impact on inequality between cities and inside cities. There is an expectation in much of the literature on these technologies that they will override older hierarchies and spatial inequalities through the universalizing of connectivity that they represent. The available evidence suggests that this is not quite the case. Whether it is the network of financial centers and foreign direct investment patterns discussed in this chapter, or the more specific examinations of the spatial organization of various cities, the new communication technologies have not reduced hierarchy nor spatial inequalities (Graham 2004; Graham and Marvin 2001; Castells 1996; Rutherford 2004; Journal of Urban Technology, various issues). And this is so even in the face of massive upgradings and state-of-the-art infrastructure in a growing number of cities worldwide. There is little doubt that connecting to global circuits has brought with it a significant level of development of expanded central urban areas and metropolitan grids of business nodes, and considerable economic dynamism. But the question of inequality has not been engaged.

Further, the pronounced orientation to the world markets evident in many of these cities raises questions about the articulation with their nation-states, their regions, and the larger economic and social structure in such cities. Cities have typically been deeply embedded in the economies of their region, indeed often reflecting the characteristics of the latter; and they still do. But cities that are strategic sites in the global economy tend, in part, to disconnect from their region. This conflicts with a key proposition in traditional scholarship about urban systems, namely, that these systems promote the territorial integration of regional and national economies. There has been a sharpening inequality in the concentration of strategic resources and activities between each of these cities and others in the same country, though this tends to be evident only at fairly disaggregated levels of evidence. For example, Mexico City today concentrates a higher share of some types of economic activity and value production than it did in the past (9), but to see this requires a very particularized set of analyses (Parnreiter 2002).

The global city as a nexus for new politico-cultural alignments

The incorporation of cities into a new cross-border geography of centrality also signals the emergence of a parallel political geography. Major cities have emerged as a strategic site not only for global capital, but also for the transnationalization of labor and the formation of translocal communities and identities (Smith 2006; Kloosterman and Rath 2003; Bartlett 2007; Hagedorn 2007; Sandercock 2003). In this regard cities are a site for new types of political operations and for a whole range of new “cultural” and subjective operations (Krause and Petro 2003; Sennett 1992; Peterson 2007; King 1996). The centrality of place in a context of global processes makes possible a transnational economic and political opening for the formation of new claims and hence for the constitution of entitlements, notably rights to place. At the limit, this could be an opening for new forms of “citizenship” (e.g., Holston 1996; Torres et al. 1999; Sassen 2008: ch. 6).

The emphasis on the transnational and hypermobile character of capital has contributed to a sense of powerlessness among local actors, a sense of the futility of resistance. But an analysis that emphasizes place suggests that the new global grid of strategic sites is a terrain for politics and engagement. (Allen et al. 1999; Brenner and Theodore 2002; Copjek and Sorkin 1999; Berner and Korff 1995; INURA 2003). The loss of power at the national level produces the possibility for new forms of power and politics at the sub-national level. Further, insofar as the national as container of social process and power is cracked (Taylor 1995; Beck 2006; Marcuse 2003) it opens up possibilities for a geography of politics that links sub-national spaces across borders (Sassen 2008: ch. 7 & 8). Cities are foremost in this new geography. This engenders how and whether we are seeing the formation of a new type of transnational politics that localizes in these cities.

Immigration, for instance, is one major process through which a new transnational political economy and trans-local household strategies are being constituted. It is one largely embedded in major cities insofar as these concentrate most immigrants, certainly in the developed world, whether in the US, Japan, or Western Europe. It is, in my reading, one of the constitutive processes of globalization today, even though not recognized or represented as such in mainstream accounts of the global economy. (Sassen 2008: Part 2; Ribas-Mateos 2005; Farrer 2007; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003).

Global capital and the new immigrant workforce are two major instances of transnationalized actors that each have unifying properties across borders internally, and find themselves in contestation with each other inside global cities (Bonilla et al. 1998; Sassen 2006a: ch. 8; 2008: ch. 6; Brenner and Theodore 2002; Gugler 2004). Researching and theorizing these issues will require approaches that diverge from the more traditional studies of political elites, local party politics, neighborhood associations, immigrant communities, and so on through which the political landscape of cities and metropolitan regions has been conceptualized in urban studies.

One way of thinking about the political implications of this strategic transnational space anchored in global cities is in terms of the formation of new claims on that space. The global city particularly has emerged as a site for new claims: by global capital that uses the global city as an “organizational commodity,” but also by disadvantaged sectors of the urban population, frequently as internationalized a presence in global cities as capital. The “denationalizing” of urban space and the formation of new claims by transnational actors, raise the question: Whose city is it?

The global city and the network of these cities is a space that is both place-centered in that it is embedded in particular and strategic locations; and it is transterritorial because it connects sites that are not geographically proximate yet are intensely connected to each other. If we consider that global cities concentrate both the leading sectors of global capital and a growing share of disadvantaged populations—immigrants, many of the disadvantaged women, people of color generally, and, in the megacities of developing countries, masses of shanty dwellers—then we can see that cities have become a strategic terrain for a whole series of conflicts and contradictions. We can then think of cities also as one of the sites for the contradictions of the globalization of capital, even though, heeding Katznelson’s (1992) observation, the city cannot be reduced to this dynamic.

An examination of globalization through the concept of the global city introduces a strong emphasis on strategic components of the global economy rather than the broader and more diffuse homogenizing dynamics we associate with the globalization of consumer markets. Consequently, this also brings an emphasis on questions of power and inequality. It brings an emphasis on the actual work of managing, servicing, and financing a global economy. Secondly, a focus on the city in studying globalization will tend to bring to the fore the growing inequalities between highly provisioned and profoundly disadvantaged sectors and spaces of the city, and hence such a focus introduces yet another formulation of questions of power and inequality.

Thirdly, the concept of the global city brings a strong emphasis on the networked economy because of the nature of the industries that tend to be located there: finance and specialized services, the new multimedia sectors, and telecommunications services. These industries are characterized by cross-border networks and specialized divisions of functions among cities rather than inter-national competition per se. In the case of global finance and the leading specialized services catering to global firms and markets—law, accounting, credit rating, telecommunications—it is clear that we are dealing with a cross-border system, one that is embedded in a series of cities, each possibly part of a different country. It is a de facto global system.

Fourthly, a focus on networked cross-border dynamics among global cities also allows us to capture more readily the growing intensity of such transactions in other domains—political, cultural, social, and criminal.

Global cities around the world are the terrain where a multiplicity of globalization processes assume concrete, localized forms. These localized forms are, in good part, what globalization is about. Recovering place means recovering the multiplicity of presences in this landscape. The large city of today has emerged as a strategic site for a whole range of new types of operations—political, economic, “cultural,” subjective. It is one of the nexi where the formation of new claims, by both the powerful and the disadvantaged, materializes and assumes concrete forms.

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1. Here Arrighi’s analysis is of interest (1994) in that it posits the recurrence of certain organizational patterns in different phases of the capitalist world economy, but at higher orders of complexity and expanded scope, and timed to follow or precede particular configurations of the world economy. On the other hand, for a variety of less system-centered view of cities see, e.g., Amin and Thrift (2002), Herzog (2006), Neuwirth 2005, and Short (2005).

2. Originally attributed to Goethe, the term was relaunched in the work of Peter Hall (1966) and more recently re-specified by John Friedmann (Friedmann & Goetz, 1982). See also Stren (1996).

3. A central proposition here, developed at length in my work, is that we cannot take the existence of a global economic system as a given, but rather need to examine the particular ways in which the conditions for economic globalization are produced. This requires examining not only communication capacities and the power of multinationals, but also the infrastructure of facilities and work processes necessary for the implementation of global economic systems, including the production of those inputs that constitute the capability for global control and the infrastructure of jobs involved in this production. The emphasis shifts to the practice of global control: the work of producing and reproducing the organization and management of a global production system and a global marketplace for finance, both under conditions of economic concentration. The recovery of place and production also implies that global processes can be studied in great empirical detail.

4. We are seeing the formation of an economic complex with a valorization dynamic that has properties clearly distinguishing it from other economic complexes whose valorization dynamic is far more articulated with the public economic functions of the state, the quintessential example being Fordist manufacturing. Global markets in finance and advanced services partly operate through a “regulatory” umbrella that is not state-centered but market-centered. This in turn brings up a question of control linked to the currently inadequate capacities to govern transactions in electronic space.

5. In this sense, global cities are different from the old capitals of erstwhile empires, in that they are a function of cross-border networks rather than simply the most powerful city of an empire. There is, in my conceptualization, no such entity as a single global city as there could be a single capital of an empire; the category global city only makes sense as a component of a global network of strategic sites. The corporate subsector which contains the global control and command functions is partly embedded in this network.

6. There are multiple specifications to this argument. For instance, and going in the opposite direction, the development of financial instruments that represent fixed real estate repositions the latter in various systems of circulation, including global ones. In so doing the meaning of capital fixity is partly transformed and the fixed capital also becomes a site for circulation. For a fuller elaboration see Sassen 2001, ch. 2.

7. There is a fourth case which I have addressed elsewhere (Sassen 2001, ch. 4 & 5), which is represented by new forms of centrality constituted in electronically generated spaces.

8. In the case of a complex landscape such as Europe’s, we see in fact several geographies of centrality, one global, others continental and regional. A central urban hierarchy connects major cities, many of which in turn play central roles in the wider global system of cities: Paris, London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Zurich. These cities are also part of a wider network of European financial/cultural/service capitals, some with only one, others with several of these functions, articulate the European region and are somewhat less oriented to the global economy than Paris, Frankfurt, or London. And then there are several geographies of marginality: the east-west divide and the north-south divide across Europe as well as newer divisions. In Eastern Europe, certain cities and regions, notably Budapest, are rather attractive for purposes of investment, both European and non-European, while others will increasingly fall behind, notably in Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Albania. We see a similar differentiation in the south of Europe: Madrid, Barcelona and Milan are gaining in the new European hierarchy; Naples, Rome, and Marseille are not. For a general overview of European cities see Kazepov 2005.

9. This also holds in the highly developed world. For instance, the Paris region accounts for over 40% of all producer services in France, and over 80% of the most advanced ones. New York City is estimated to account for between a fourth and a fifth of all US producer services exports though it has only 3% of the US population. London accounts for 40% of all exports of producer services in the UK. Similar trends are also evident in Zurich, Frankfurt, and Tokyo, all located in much smaller countries.

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Introduction

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Globalization and the City

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1 It is often said that the world is turning into a “global village”. In reality, it is much more a “global city”: today, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities (although often under poor conditions), and many metropolises of the world are much more economically productive and significant with respect to global networks than most of the world’s states. In addition, these cities look increasingly alike, shaping a global space which is more and more indistinguishable between continents. Thus the modern city is the primary manifestation of globalization today, and its very essence is a global network of multidimensional spaces of congestion that both describes and shapes it.

2 The relevance of cities is nothing but new. While there were phases and places in history, when and where cities were not particularly important, and as a rule, only a small fraction of the population lived in these settlements, the history of civilization as we know it is very much connected to cities. From ancient to medieval and modern times, and from China, India and Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean, Europe and Mesoamerica, cities have been a recurrent phenomenon, and still archeology finds further evidence for large and hitherto undocumented – albeit not totally unexpected – settlements in distant periods and places. Hence, cities were essential for culture and civilization; they allowed a centralization of power and knowledge, and they were crucial for the division of labor and for organizing the demand of the people, on which economic development rests. And if we adopt a view of globalization that allows for a history in the longue durée , then cities emerge as the places people traveled to and from, where people exchanged news and goods, and where people could develop a view of a wider world, particularly if the city was located at the sea-shore.

3 Hence, as places of intense and continuous interactions, cities are the locations par excellence where global history takes place, and we must study the history of cities in connection with the history of globalization from this perspective. Interestingly, although we can look back on twenty years of manifold globalization debates and shelves of books about the topic, this has hardly been done so far. 1 Hence, we lack orientation. One reason for that is, of course, methodological: it is simply impossible to fully grasp the complexities of a global social system that incorporates about seven billion individuals and a lot of collectives that are organized in different hierarchies and networks, all of them interwoven. But there are also two ways out of this dilemma: the first is to study the emergence of globalization in its various dimensions historically to identify the characteristics relevant for change and to understand the path-dependence of the process in order to comprehend recent developments and to contextualize them properly in the form of a meta-narrative; the second is to collect data about what is “really” going on, recently as well as historically, to get an idea of the structure and practical constraints of human action and choices at the micro level as well. Both help us make (more) sense of the alleged chaos of human existence.

4 This book is about cities and globalization for this very reason. It is centered on cities because they have played a crucial role throughout the whole process as centers of exchange and as focal points of developments. It is here that two rather different strands of literature meet: On the one hand, there is vivid research on “global cities” (or “world cities”) going back to the concepts of John Friedman and Saskia Sassen in the 1980s and early 1990s (as a global space also referencing Manuel Castell’s “network society”) although the term is certainly older. 2 On the other hand, the ideas of historians like Fernand Braudel, who observed that “central cities” shaped “world economies”, 3 are highly relevant in this context and show that certain nodes of exchange have been crucial for the overall development of the world even in times when city populations were comparably small and the world economies far from global in a literal sense.

5 Further, Peter Taylor correctly claims that there is a clear empirical misbalance of city- and state-centered research, especially with regard to connections between cities. 4 From this approach, the research tradition of the Global and World Cities (GaWC) network emerged, which challenged this lack of data, especially when compared to data about nation-states, for which also a lot of ranking exercises referring to their degree of globalization exist. However, all this research has, so far, remained focused on the present and has lacked a historical dimension. As a result, most quantitative research about globalization focuses on variables, which are useful only for analyzing short-term trends (if any). 5 This is totally clear when data about internet access, international tourism or UN peace-keeping missions is included, which – as such – can logically only exist for a few decades. But it is also true for seemingly more neutral data like foreign direct investment (FDI), gross domestic product (GDP), migration flows or portfolio investments, which in many cases is not only poorly specified historically (and consequently hardly collected), but also – at least potentially – omits factors relevant for earlier globalization episodes, which could be informative for recent developments as well. In addition, most of this data is collected in a regular and comparable way for states only, today as well as in the past.

6 This book approaches several of the shortcomings of earlier literature about globalization and about cities. It offers a multi-dimensional perspective on several time periods, places and reference texts, on economic, cultural and social phenomena manifesting in and connecting cities in the context of globalization (or at least global relevance at the respective time). Thus it offers empirical material to understand how global processes affected these cities and vice versa. And it offers discussions of the concept of global city, especially in the context of (re) writing global history.

Now There is the Book…

7 The book starts with a general historical discussion about the connection between urbanization and the industrial revolution by Franz Mathis (Innsbruck). In the chapter No Industrialization without Urbanization: The Role of Cities in Modern Economic Development , Mathis emphasizes the role of cities as amplifiers of change. They provide agglomerations of people, of supply (of labor and capital) and demand (for goods and services), of markets and opportunities. Hence, they are a precondition, as well as an incentive, for industrialization. The connection is positive (as shown by the examples of Britain, the U.S. and Japan) as well as negative (where there are no cities, there is no industrialization) and is also relevant in today’s globalization, as more recent examples of successful industrialization in the developing world show.

8 In a second overview chapter, Locating and Teaching Cities in the “New” World History: Perspectives from the U. S. after the Fall of “Western Civilization”, Jim Mokhiber (New Orleans) demonstrates how the global city concept in world history research and teaching has been neglected. Mokhiber links Sassen’s theoretical approach, which is extensively outlined in this contribution, to Janet Abu-Lughod’s work on the premodern Eurasian world system 6 and thus demonstrates the usefulness of a historically grounded debate. But he also draws the connection between city research and the teaching of world history and discusses the didactic usefulness of cities in this context, an approach that is certainly applicable beyond the context of teaching (Western) civilization history in the United States.

9 Finally, in a third overview chapter, Bringing Economic Geography Back in: Global Cities and the Governance of Commodity Chain , Christof Parnreiter (Hamburg) argues – from a geographic perspective – that global cities have to be theoretically conceptualized and empirically scrutinized as critical nodes in commodity chains. He stresses the inherent spatial character of the concept and emphasizes the connections to world systems theory, 7 to which many of the authors in this book at least implicitly refer; he also discusses the problem of governance in this context.

10 The second part of the book contains five case studies from very diverse historical epochs and places, which are presented chronologically. The first, The Phenomenon of Global Cities in the Ancient World by Brigitte Truschnegg (Innsbruck), analyzes the reception of ancient cities as “global” (in its meaning at the respective time). In her comparative study of Alexandria, Babylon, Athens, Carthage and Rome, she not only stresses and discusses cultural significance, economic relevance and political power as notable dimensions of global reach, but also the problems in finding historically stable concepts to measure these dimensions. Hence, her contribution is also very valuable in interdisciplinary methodological terms.

11 The second case study by Robert Dupont (New Orleans), New Orleans as a Global City: Contemporary Assessment and Past Glory , describes one of the first colonial settlements in what was to become the South of the United States and its multifarious history. Throughout time, New Orleans has shown some of the features that mark a global city, especially in the early nineteenth century, when it was among the most relevant port cities in the Americas (if not the world) because of its strategic location at the mouth of the Mississippi. Besides this historical assessment, Dupont also contributes to methodological questions and provides a discussion of the global city concept in the context of urban studies.

12 In the third case study, Zanzibar: Imperialism, Proto-Globalization, and a Nineteenth Century Indian Ocean Boom Town , Erik Gilbert (Arkansas) analyzes the increasingly multiethnic city of Zanzibar. It is still perceived as “ancient”, but is actually a quite recent product of the emerging globalized Indian Ocean economy in the nineteenth century, which was ruled by the British. Here we find a second, more local example for the relevance of perception, as well as the mutual forces of influence, in a nutshell: while Zanzibar is a product of this “new” economy, it simultaneously helped to shape it. Consequently, the chapter also draws our attention to Africa, often enough neglected as a place of agency in global processes.

13 While these case studies focus on historical developments, the remaining two are more spatial in their approach. The fourth case study, The Evolution of a Global City: Vienna’s Integration into the World City System , by Robert Musil (Vienna), examines the connection between cities and globalization by focusing on a semi-peripheral (or second order) city, Vienna. This contribution is particularly interesting not only because it is explicitly spatial, but also because it directly relates to the concept of pathdependence. It does not only provide an empirical study of the global city hypothesis, but it also discusses the question of how influential the history of a city is for its current role in a larger network of cities (a concept that lies at the heart of Peter Taylor’s understanding of “global city”). While Vienna is the most likely Austrian candidate for a global city today and in the past, its connections rest on its historical function as a bridge between East and West in Europe, on its role as the metropolis of a multi-ethnic empire and also on its role in the slow industrialization of this empire during the nineteenth century.

14 Finally, in São Paulo: Big, Bigger, Global? The Development of a Megacity in the Global South , Tobias Töpfer (Innsbruck) leads us to one of the great metropolises of today’s global South and echoes discussions presented earlier in the volume (especially Mathis, Parnreiter and Musil). In his chapter, he not only provides an interesting typological discussion on the question of what kind of city São Paulo in Brazil actually is (along the main categories of global city vs. megacity), but he also stresses the consequences of its actual status for the geography of the city and the greater metropolitan area as well as its historical and recent development. As a result, while there is no doubt that São Paulo is a megacity, its status as a “global” city is debatable.

15 Instead of a concluding section, the third part of the book presents a collection of three shorter works from diverse disciplinary backgrounds as some kind of research outlook. 8 In the first of these, The Reach of the Continental Blockade: The Case of Toulouse , Andreas Dibiasi (Zurich) takes an economic-historical approach as he discusses the effects of the conflicts during the Napoleonic Wars on the economic situation (especially the prices) in the city of Toulouse. The second, Designing a Global City: Tokyo , is an architectural case study from a city-planning perspective by Beate Löffler (Dresden) about the largest metropolitan area today, which Sassen explicitly mentions as one of the prominent examples of a global city. The third, The Council of European Municipalities and Regions: Shared Governance in a World Featured by Globalization Issues by Manfred Kohler (Bruxelles), finally provides an institutional case study from a political-science perspective, linking the levels of regions and cities with that of nations and supra-national entities. All three of these chapters refer to important but somehow neglected topics and provide fruitful directions for further research about cities and globalization, namely economic integration, cultural perception and political governance.

16 Throughout the book, we also find reflections on various concepts related to the idea of “global” cities. Most of the authors refer explicitly to Saskia Sassen’s work, and all conceptualize their approach in the broader context of works that try to define world versus global cities, as well as about metropolises, megacities or central, imperial and primary cities. These reflections are necessary because the concepts cannot simply be used interchangeably and hence have to be clarified, especially when applied to historical material. As a result, the book is also interesting for those looking for conceptual clarifications, which is particularly relevant from a historical perspective, because the term “global city” as originally coined is a rather specific idea not easily applied to historical research. Thus, the contributions to this book also pave the way for a historically informed re-conceptualization of the approach.

… But There Also Was a Preceding Conference

17 However, the book is also the result of an even longer process. It is based on a conference dedicated to discuss some of the problems associated to the global-city debate. 9 The Conference in World History: The Role and Significance of Global City was held in November 2011 in Innsbruck as a joint conference of the partner universities of Innsbruck and New Orleans. At this interdisciplinary conference, earlier versions of most of the papers were presented. 10 In the course of the event, the fruitful and intense discussions between the researchers from Europe and the United States gave rise to considerably improved papers, which now constitute the chapters of this book.

18 To assist the participants in the process of producing the chapters for the book, we ended the conference with a concluding round-table talk, dedicated to summarize the results and still-open questions. Chaired by Günter Bischof (New Orleans), Franz Mathis (Innsbruck) and James Mokhiber (New Orleans), who have also contributed to this book, as well as Katja Schmidtpott (Marburg) and Malte Fuhrmann (Istanbul), who presented papers at the conference, exchanged reflections about the conference and discussed these with the audience.

19 The first question raised in this talk was whether a global city necessarily must be multi-ethnic – which has been the case in some of the examples discussed during the conference (like Istanbul, Venice or New Orleans). On the other hand, Tokyo, one of the cities used by Saskia Sassen to elaborate her global city thesis, is certainly far from being “global” in that sense on account of its lack of “foreign faces”. Hence, as Katja Schmidtpott argued, the description of a city as global depends on the observer’s point of view. From an economic point of view, Tokyo may clearly be “global”, but from the Japanologists’perspective, things look rather different, notably less connected and interrelated. Multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, two specific manifestations of multi-ethnicity, are particularly relevant here, although these concepts are sometimes overloaded. But they point to the fact that multi-ethnicity is neither necessarily successful nor peaceful but has to develop, often in a contradictory and discordant way.

20 In addition, the question of measurability of the concept “global” remained unanswered (and is consequently picked up and clarified in several contributions to this volume). What is regarded as “global” is often subject to a certain approach. One could, like James Mokhiber did in his talk, easily argue that the number of plane flights that arrive or depart in a city’s airport is relevant. This is an indicator of exchange in general, indeed, but also more specifically of international tourism, which can be further intensified by a proper utilization of the cultural heritage of a city, of its very nature as a global city, of codes dedicated to fulfill the expectations of international costumers. Icons are relevant, and – as some contributions to this volume very clearly show – they always have been for the perception of a city. But the connection to the global market is an additional factor in the process, and many cities became “boom towns” only after their (economic) globalization.

21 It is also worth noting that further conceptual differentiation is necessary. Franz Mathis emphasized the difference between megacities and global cities (which is explicitly picked up in this volume by Tobias Töpfer), a difference directly related to globalization. Consequently, big cities have to be divided into cities that play an important role within a global network and cities that are “merely” important for their region. In this context, megacities are cities whose economic and cultural importance grows because of their connection to their hinterland, while global cities owe their specific significance to their connections to the “wide globalized world”. Both concepts are connected: historically, many cities grew at first because of their relations to the hinterland and only later reached global importance by connections to a wider global market. But this is only one element of the “global character” of a city. As Malte Fuhrmann mentioned with reference to Immanuel Wallerstein, a starting point to conceptualize this could be a city’s connections to the world system (which is explicitly picked up in this volume by Christof Parnreiter and James Mokhiber). And here we come back to Fernand Braudel, who has identified “world cities” as the driving forces of development in early modern Europe, as exemplified by port cities in which overseas markets and connections dominated local exchange. As a result, both paths are possible, and a major city can develop from a local or a global base although the difference will most likely influence the character and potential of a city. Finally, achieving a “global” character also leads to problems, prominently problems of governability of a city and its diverse population, often also resulting in a spatial differentiation of the city in connection to the influences of globalization.

22 Not surprisingly, many questions remain open after the conference and also after the publication of this book. It still is unclear what makes a city a global city: is it cultural factors, economic factors, multi-ethnicity, or a combination of all of these – and if so, what kind of combination? The answers may remain subject to conceptualizations specific for certain questions. A more general characterization may be approached via a description of Athens, taken from a chapter in this volume: “Never has a city in so short a time unharnessed so much tradition-building energy that even millenniums later people look upon it as a spiritual mother”. 11 What more could be said about a city than that it transcends space and time, at least as an idea? The only caveat is that a statement like this can never be said about a contemporary city, because judgments like these are always strictly retrospective.

23 While this book contributes to a critical reflection of concepts related to the global city debate and provides empirical material from various periods and places, further research is still necessary. But cities are a fruitful and at the same time rather neglected laboratory of social, economic and cultural, sometimes also political change. They are clearly worth studying, because cities are central places in the process of mutual influence of globalization on people (and vice versa). They are meeting places, communication nodes and sites of exchange as well as locations where global processes become particularly visible and influential. “Global cities” are and always have been both, products and producers of globalization. They play an important role in shaping a global economy, culture and society, but they are also shaped by it. And they are places where countervailing forces match and local reactions to globalization become especially visible. Consequently, the adverse effects of globalization are particularly apparent as well: not only economic exchange, migration, communication, and technological development take place predominantly in cities, but also political conflict, cultures clashing and amalgamating, and violence. Hence, the global city is opening a door to the world, for better or for worse, as a multifaceted information interface and as a focal point of globalization in various forms.

24 Some of these forms will be explored in more detail in this book. To address all would require not a single one but shelves of them. And indeed, when we were about to finish this book, Routledge published a four-volume collection of seminal contributions to research about Global Cities . 12 While its price (₤ 800) is still rather prohibitive and points to the fact that some profits can be earned by doing global city research, its publication is also showing the relevance of this book and underlining the growing importance of the subject. Furthermore, the examples stressed here can also be understood complementary, because they are special and hence particularly instructive: they do not simply discuss the usual suspects (like London or New York) but take a much broader approach; and they also re-read several of these seminal contributions from different disciplinary, geographical and historical backgrounds. In the end, they offer an elaborate arrangement of viewpoints certainly worth exploring in more detail.

Bibliographie

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Abu-Lughod, Janet L. (1989): Before European Hegemony: The World System, A. D. 1250 – 1350. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Braudel, Fernand (1984): Civilization and Capitalism, 15th – 18th Centuries , Volume 3: The Perspective of the World . New York: Harper & Row.

Castells, Manuel (1996): The Rise of the Network Society . Oxford: Blackwell.

Castells, Manuel, ed. (2004): The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective . Cheltenham: Elgar.

Dreher, Axel/Gaston, Noel/Martens, Pim/van Boxem, Lotte (2009): “Measuring Globalization. Opening the Black Box. A Critical Analysis of Globalization Indices”, Bond University Messages 32.

Exenberger, Andreas (2007): “Reiche als Partner, Gegner oder Ziel? Die historischen Erfahrungen zweier europäischer Weltstädte”, in: Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 115 (1-2), 76-84.

Exenberger, Andreas/Cian, Carmen (2006): Der weite Horizont. Globalisierung durch Kaufleute . Innsbruck: Studienverlag.

Friedmann, John (1986): “The World City Hyphothesis”, in: Development and Change 17, 69-83.

Sassen, Saskia (1991): Global Cities. Princeton/NJ: Princeton University Press.

Sassen, Saskia (1994): Cities in a World-Economy . Thousand Oaks/CA: Pine Forge.

Schulz, Raimund (2006): “Die Schule von Hellas”, in: Ameling, Walter/Gehrke, Hans-Joachim/Kolb, Frank/Leppin, Hartmut/Schulz, Raimund/Streck, Michael P./Wiesehöfer, Josef/Wilhelm, Gernot (2006): Antike Metropolen . Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 53-68.

Taylor, Peter J. (1999): “So-called ‘World Cities’: The Evidential Structure within a Literature”, in: Environment and Planning A 31 (11), 1901-1904.

Taylor, Peter J./Beaverstock, Jonathan V./Derudder, Ben/Faulconbridge, James/Harrison, John/Hoyler, Michael/Pain, Kathy/Witlox, Frank, eds. (2012): Global Cities . 4 vols. London: Routledge.

Wallerstein, Immanuel M. (1974): The Modern World-System , Volume 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century . New York-London: Academic Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel M. (2004): World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction . Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press.

Notes de bas de page

1 A very recent exception is Global Cities , a large-scale collective volume by Taylor et al. (2012).

2 See Friedman (1986), Sassen (1991, 1994), and Castells (1996, 2004).

3 Braudel (1986) particularly referred to Venice, Antwerp, Genoa and Amsterdam as cities that shaped late medieval and early modern Europe, at least economically. See also Exenberger/Cian (2006) and Exenberger (2007) for more extensive elaborations on the significance of Venice and the hanseatic city of Lubeck for “globalization” in Europe in medieval times.

4 See Taylor (1999), also with reference to several seminal works on global cities.

5 The KOF Index of Globalization was recently extended backwards until 1970; Dreher et al. (2009), 29.

6 Abu-Lughod (1989).

7 Wallerstein (1974).

8 These chapters were selected via a call for papers for the conference preceding this book.

9 For more information, see www.uibk.ac.at/fakultaeten/vwl/forschung/wsg/symp11.html (accessed 15 Feb 2013).

10 While Christof Parnreiter could not participate in the conference, he was able to provide a chapter for the book. Unfortunately there are also three contributions, which had – for various reasons – to be withdrawn from it. Katja Schmidtpott (Marburg) talked about The Globalization of Labour in East Asia: The Japanese Treaty Port of Yokohama and Its Chinese Community , a case study from the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century; Malte Fuhrmann (Istanbul) about When the Conquering Sultan Appears in the Metro and Byzantium Sabotages the Railway Station: Istanbul’s Pasts and their Roles in the Present , a long-term city history focusing on its perception and instrumentalization; and Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi (Tervuren) about Tide of Times in the Post-Colonial Era: Tourists, Venetians and Street Vendors in the Doge City , a contemporary case study about social relationships in a historically loaded environment.

11 Schulz (2006), 53 (translation Brigitte Truschnegg).

12 Taylor et al. (2012).

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books . Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Medienräume

Materialität und Regionalität

Valentin Dander, Veronika Gründhammer, Heike Ortner et al. (dir.)

Regional Economic Development Compared: EU-Europe and the American South

Günter Bischof (dir.)

Freie Bildungsmedien und Digitale Archive

Petra Missomelius, Wolfgang Sützl, Theo Hug et al. (dir.)

Activist Media and Biopolitics

Critical Media Interventions in the Age of Biopower

Wolfgang Sützl et Theo Hug (dir.)

Datenflut und Informationskanäle

Heike Ortner, Daniel Pfurtscheller, Michaela Rizzolli et al. (dir.)

Two Connected Phenomena in Past and Present

Andreas Exenberger, Philipp Strobl, Günter Bischof et al. (dir.)

Grenzenlose Enthüllungen?

Medien zwischen Öffnung und Schließung

Uta Rußmann, Andreas Beinsteiner, Heike Ortner et al. (dir.)

Medien – Wissen – Bildung: Kulturen und Ethiken des Teilens

Wolfgang Sützl, Felix Stalder, Ronald Maier et al. (dir.)

Zones Virtopiques

Die Virtualisierung der Heterotopien und eine mediale Dispositivanalyse am Beispiel des Medienkunstprojekts Zone*Interdite

Valentin Dander

Globalization and Austria: Past and Present

Andreas Exenberger

Afrika, ein Kontinent der Extreme?

Afrikanerinnen und afrikaner in globo: idealtypische profile als wissenschaftliches instrument.

Andreas Exenberger et Josef Nussbaumer

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Oxford Network for the Future of Cities Rethinking the urban to face future challenges

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Global Cities in Theory and Practice

What does it mean to be a “global city”? What is the state of the art in understanding this term in urban studies? How do contemporary metropolises become “global cities”? Is there a recipe for ‘making’ growing urban centres into the strategic hinges of globalization? Focusing on the evolution of global city research and on the pathways to global city formation, this project, developed by the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS) in collaboration with the Urban Research Program  (URP) at Griffith University, Australia, and led by Michele Acuto , seeks to unpack and analyze the evolution and governance of contemporary global cities. This project was funded by support from the Centre for Studies in Property Valuation and Management Trust with matched funding from Oxford Martin School, and previous fieldwork support from the Australian National University’s Vice Chancellor and the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU).

Theoretical background

What does it mean to be and become a ‘global city’? Several scholars have to date investigated the nature of popular metropolises like New York, London or Tokyo, presenting the academic public with accounts of the socio-economic characteristics of these easily recognizable cities. However, what remains relatively overlooked in both research and practices the process of becoming: if the ‘global city’ is a common object of discussion, empirical application, and even fascination in the contemporary scholarship, less so can be argued for the dynamics and nature of the process that leads to the emergence of global cities. Likewise, academic research on global cities has to date offered little self-reflexive analysis of the growing popularity and expanding interdisciplinarity of this term.

To redress these limits, the project consists of two parts. Part 1 is focused on unpacking the processes of becoming and governing emerging “global cities.” It involves fieldwork activities in Sydney and Dubai, and comparative analysis between these cities and the case of London. Part 2 is focused on collaborative and interdisciplinary initiative carried out jointly with Dr Wendy Steele at URP, Griffith University, stimulating a debate on what it means to study “global cities” and leading to a primer on the state of the art of the scholarship on these metropolises for Palgrave Macmillan.

Part 1: Building Global Cities

Building Global Cities investigates the connections between global city theory and urbanist practice. The project is the result of four years of research based at the Australian National University and at the University of Oxford, with fieldwork conducted in Dubai, Sydney and London. Comparing these cities, and analyzing the relation between “global city” theory and its urban public policy practice, this part of the project seeks to unpack the political strategies beyond these cities’ ascent to ‘global’ status. In doing so, the study is pinpointed on a double disciplinary target: while drawing on the global city literature, and conversely speaking to that growing college of urban studies researchers that work on this theme, the project also reaches out to political science audience, to introduce the global city theme in the analysis of transnational processes while contemporaneously connecting it to some of this discipline’s main problem fields. As such, the project has a twin purpose: one the one hand, for the urbanist readership, test the scholarly development of ‘global city research’ against the practice on the ground; on the other hand, for a broader and non-initiated audience, open the global city discourse to multidisciplinary research and a reflexive practice.

Part 2: Global City Challenges

Global City Challenges is a collection geared towards providing a practice-oriented review of the global city scholarship that is critical, case-based and inherently multidisciplinary. The book gathers a forum that integrates the extensive set of disciplinary dimensions to which the concept of “global city” can speak to promote cross-disciplinarity when it comes to tackling the policy challenges of today’s metropolises. The 16 contributions are representative of a multitude of specific viewpoints that include the cultural, economic, historical, postcolonial, virtual, architectural, literary, security and geopolitical dimensions of global cities. Tasked with providing a rejoinder to the global city scholarship from each of these perspectives, the contributors illustrate what twin analytical and practical challenges emerge from juxtaposing these stances to the concept of the “global city”. The authors rely not solely on theory but also on a sample case study either drawn from long-lived global cities such as New York, Shanghai and London, or emerging metropolises like Dubai, Cape Town and Sydney.

Contributors: Prof David Bassens (Free University of Brussels); Dr Ben Derudder (University of Ghent); Mr Kerwin Datu (London School of Economics); Dr Howard Dick (University of Melbourne); Dr Mark Graham (University of Oxford); Dr Sheila Hones (University of Tokyo); Dr Michael Hoyler (Loughborough University); Dr Oli Mould (Royal Holloway); Prof David Murakami-Wood (Queens University); Dr Christof Parnreiter (University of Hamburg); Prof Peter Rimmer  (Australian National University); Prof Glen Searle (University of Queensland); Dr Wendy Steele, (Griffith University); Prof Peter J. Taylor (Northumbria University); Prof Vanessa Watson (University of Cape Town).

Project organizer and partners

The project is carried out both individually by the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities in its “Building Global Cities” component, and collaboratively with the Urban Research Programme at Griffith University, Australia, in its “Global City Challenges” component.

Project coordinator: Dr Michele Acuto  is Stephen Barter Fellow in the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities and holds a CPD Fellowship in the Center on Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.

Co-Editor, “Global City Challenges”: Dr Wendy Steele is an Australian Research Council (DECRA) Fellow and Senior Research Fellow in the Urban Research Program at Griffith University, Australia.

Publications

Acuto, M. and Steele, W., eds (forthcoming October 2013) Global City Challenges . London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Acuto, M. (2012) “Ain’t about politics? The wicked power-geometry of Sydney’s greening governance” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research  36 (2), 381-399

Acuto, M. (2012) “Sydney: a greening global city” in Ben Derudder et al. (eds) International Handbook of Globalization and World Cities  Cheltenham: E. Elgar, 538-550.

Acuto, M. (2011) “Finding the Global City” Urban Studies  48 (14), 2953-2973.

Acuto, M. (2011) Baking the global city: an Emirati recipe for global significance. In: F. Zanni (ed.).  Urban Hybridizations .  Milan: Maggioli and Milan Polytechnic Press, 10-19.

Acuto, M. (2010) “High-rise Dubai: urban entrepreneurialism and the art of symbolic power.”  Cities  27 (4), 272-284.

Contact us for information on the Oxford Network for the Future of Cities

Phone +44 (0)1865 278818

Email [email protected]

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Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化

Journal of Global Cultural Studies

Accueil Numéros 3 Global Cities: Introduction

Global Cities: Introduction

Texte intégral.

1 Is the 'global' city an age-old historical phenomenon associated with economic, cultural, and imperial power (Rome, Athens, Beijing, Istanbul), or a consequence of the industrial revolution? Is it a product of the media age or a continuation of the power and influence of the imperial metropolis? In the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth century it would have been claimed as a Western imperialist phenomenon (London, Paris, New York) or cities and countries that consciously emulated western imperialism (Tokyo). This conception – if ever actually true – certainly cannot be supported today. The European and north American cities now vie with the booming cities of Asian Tigers (Mumbai, Shanghai, Seoul), and the great developing cities (Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Bahía Blanca, Lagos), as well as regional expressions like the 'Pacific Rim' cities.

1  Michel Andrieu, «The City in the Global Village», OECD Observer, no 217-218 Summer 1999.

2 What is the essence of the 'global' city and how has it been represented? Is it a modern phenomenon or an ancient practice? How do we define global – is globalism a consequence of mass urbanisation or does globalisation create the conditions for the emergence of the global city. How do the global cities of the twentieth century resemble or differ in form and function those of the past and, based on present trends, the future? In the 21st century more people than even will be living in urban environments: «Over the next thirty years, the world's urban population could double from 2.6 billion in 1995 to 5.2 billion in 2025. Most of this growth will take place in developing countries, where some 4 billion people (over half of the total) could be living in cities by 2025, compared with 1.5 billion (37%) in the early 1990s». 1 How will this impact on how we imagine the city and issues of migration, diaspora, and existing geopolitical inequalities – not all global cities are equal in these terms. What have been and will be the consequences of such global economic and technological inequalities?

• 2  James Donald, «Metropolis: The City as Text», in R. Bocock and K. Thompson (eds), Social and Cultu (...)
• 3  Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford UK and Cambridge US (...)

3 Such questions are of course as open ended as the phenomenon to which they respond. If there is a problem of definition, the potential ways in which the «global» city might be represented and discussed are as equally plural. The issue recalls James Donald’s observation that «by calling this diversity «the city», we ascribe to it a coherence or integrity». If even the basic notion of the city requires a strategy to contain its diversity and create a «textual» illusion of integrity, what of the global city surely an even vaster construct? Donald proceeds to draw a comparison between Benedict Anderson’s notion of the nation as an imagined community and the way we conceive of a construct an abstract notion of the city as imagined environment . 2 This approach runs the risk of implying that the city is a psychological construct and cultural process as purely discursive space rather than lived experience, as Henri Lefebvre warns: «this mental space then becomes the locus a «theoretical practice» which is separated from social practice and which sets itself up as the axis, pivot or central reference point of knowledge». 3 However, Donald is surely right to argue that the city is as much a psychological construct as material/social space. The global city is also part of an even greater imagined environment that implies a unity brought about by world-wide communications networks and a certain homogenization of the physical fabric of the city, particularly in the developed world but increasingly around the globe.

4 The conference at Liverpool Hope University in the UK in 2006 which generated this special issue of Transtext(e)s Transcultures on global cities, provided a forum whereby scholars from a variety of backgrounds shared techniques and insights on selected cities from the developed and developing world, North and South, the brash and new to ancient and care worn, from North America, Africa, the Near and the Far East. It is hoped that the selection herein captures something of the spirit of shared insight and debate into the phenomenon of the global city.

2  James Donald, «Metropolis: The City as Text», in R. Bocock and K. Thompson (eds), Social and Cultural Forms of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992, p. 427.

3  Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford UK and Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1997, p. 6.

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Lawrence Phillips

Lawrence Phillips is Reader in English and Divisional Leader for Media, English and Culture at the University of Northampton. He is the editor of the peer-reviewed academic e-journal Literary London: Interdisciplinary studies in the representation of London (www.literarylondon.org), academic director of the annual international conference of the same name, and secretary of the UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies. His most recent publication is an edited collection entitled A Mighty Mass of Brick and Smoke: Victorian and Edwardian Representations of London (Rodopi: 2007). He is also the author of London Narratives: Post-war Fiction and the City (Continuum: 2006), and the editor of a further collection entitled The Swarming Streets: Twentieth-Century Literary Representations of London (Rodopi, 2004).

Articles du même auteur

• Global Cities: Introduction [Texte intégral] Version française Paru dans Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化 , 3 | 2007
• The Agony of the Translated Subject [Texte intégral] English version Paru dans Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化 , 1 | 2006
• Le calvaire du sujet « traduit » [Texte intégral] Version française Paru dans Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化 , 1 | 2006

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NYC as Global City: A Decade of Change

A recent Facebook conversation about the proposed plans for the WTC PAC brought the performing arts sectors’ lack of systemic understanding glaringly to light, most notably that so many  Facebook commenters focused on the idea that NYC was becoming a Global City. That ship has sailed, kids. New York is a Global City. It’s a done deal, get with the program, this has been happening for over twenty years and really kicked into gear in 2004.

Here’s a rough 20 year timeline I hacked together for a lecture I gave recently at NYU:

The idea of the Global City was originally and most clearly articulated by Saskia Sassen in her book, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo published in September, 2001. In 2012 Aaron M. Renn published a thoughtful essay on “ What Is A Global City?” on the website New Geography. After offering a survey history of the term’s evolving definitions, he identifies four basic ways to look at global cities that include:

• Advanced Producer/Services Production Node
• Economic Giant
• International Gateway
• Political and Cultural Hub

Renn notes that over the past decade or so “the game has changed. Rather than attempting to look at specific global economic functions, the global city game has become effectively a balanced scorecard attempt to determine, as I like to put it, the world’s ‘biggest and baddest’ cities.”

Furthermore, upon reviewing the methodology the various “global city” evaluations, he notes that, “It’s also interesting to see what was included vs. not included in quality of life type ratings. For example, items like censorship, media access, the rule of law, and the environment are listed. But measures of upward social-economic mobility or income inequality are not.” And he offers that “a number of the rankings suggest a self-consciously elite mindset, such as shopping and dining options. As with many quality of life surveys, these seem to orient them towards expatriate executive types rather than normal folks.”

Sound familiar? It should.

Those of you who live in NYC prior to 9/11 (and that’s less of you than one might imagine, I’ll get to that in a minute) will recall that after 9//11 and the recession of 2001-2002, the economy was anemic at best. But in 2004 the global economic recovery finally picked up steam and virtually every major economy in North America, South America, Europe and Asia was growing.  New York, always a world financial capital, was flush once again.

Prior to 9/11, Giuliani – and I know people will argue ad nauseam about this – made NYC safer, cleaner, more economically stable and “growth-oriented” than it had been in decades. But Giuliani was still Old School New York, his personal manner and his management style the embodiment of the tribal, pugnacious, no-nonsense attitudes that characterized New York for most of its history.

Bloomberg, on the other hand, came into office already a globally connected billionaire, a mild-mannered technocrat more comfortable at Davos than in Da Bronx. And though he learned to “perform populism” – with his mangled Spanish and his subway rides – he was less interested in that kind of politics than in the kind of system design, planning and technological innovation that characterize his businesses.

Bloomberg’s first term as mayor was mostly focused on bringing the city back to its feet economically and psychologically as it recovered from 9/11, but by 2004 the city was not only stable but starting to prosper, the global economy was picking up steam and Bloomberg could move on to his grander ambitions. If Bloomberg’s global vision had been previously understated, it was readily foregrounded when NYC hosted the Republican National Convention in August 2004 and when, in 2005, he launched a proposal for a West Side Stadium as the centerpiece of NYC’s bid for the 2012 Olympics.

Over the course of his three terms Bloomberg would implement many programs that were specifically designed to foster technological and entrepreneurial innovation. From upgrading the city’s website and information systems to his strategic deployment of the quasi-governmental NYCEDC to helm major redevelopment projects (often skirting the bothersome bureaucracy of official government), Bloomberg change New Yorkers experiences and expectations of the city. He introduced 311, designed ambitious long-term initiatives like GreeNYC and PlaNYC 2030 and regularly exerted his influence on the national and international stage.

NYC has always been a media capital and Bloomberg aggressively courted Hollywood, incentivizing commercial film and television production.  Surely someone will write a doctoral thesis on the implications of the changing character of New York City as portrayed in police sitcoms from  Barney Miller  to  Brooklyn 99 .

Bloomberg incentivized New Media entrepreneurs by creating start-up incubators, luring Google and other tech giants to the city. The creation of The Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute at Cornell Tech, to be headquartered on Roosevelt Island, served as a visible centerpiece for Bloomberg’s ambition to turn NYC into a capital for STEM, diversifying the city’s revenue base beyond the financial and media sectors.

In August 2004 Choire Sicha became editorial director of Gawker Media and served as the New York face for British Internet mogul Nick Denton. Media industry gossip became a spectator sport. In May 2005 Accel partners invested $12.7 million in Facebook and in July 2005 MySpace was acquired by  News Corporation  for $580 million. In retrospect that seems ridiculous, but at the time MySpace still seemed viable, and social media was a brand new business. The dawn of social media and the ubiquity of handheld devices not only spurred another Internet boomlet but fundamentally changed New Yorkers’ relationship to physical place.

Even as Bloomberg embarked on an ambitious program of economic growth, technological innovation and real estate development that changed the built environment and the city looks and feels, the demography of the city was changed as well.

Prior to the turn of the last century, in the late 1990s, NYC was still home to many public spaces conducive to serendipitous encounters and confrontation with difference. Restaurants, nightclubs, parks, bars, events and street life were rife with social interaction across classes, races, ethnicities and experiences.

But when the city’s economy was recovering in 2004,  the dollar was still weaker than the euro, and some of you may remember the influx of wealthy expatriate executive types buying up property in the newly trendy East Village and other neighborhoods.

In fact, investment in NYC by wealthy people from all over the world spurred a buying and building spree that drove prices ever higher and displaced the middle class, not to mention the working class or working poor – and artists. And as NYC became safer and more familiar to non-New Yorker Americans, the city attracted wealthy people – or their children – from cities across the country.

Long story short – a lot of rich, mostly white people moved to NYC and a lot of poor black and Hispanic people – and working class white people – left the city, which fundamentally changed the city’s topography, demographics and DNA. Spike Lee’s recent impromptu tirade on gentrification notwithstanding, this is fact, not hyperbole.

You can read the data yourself at the website for the Center for Urban Research , but the short version is that between 2000 – 2010 New York City’s population increased by 2.1% (166,855 people) and has just kept growing. In Brooklyn, the White population grew by 38,774 while BLACKS LOST ALMOST 50,000 PEOPLE . Not only that, but Black losses were substantial in several communities with historically large Black populations.

The Black population in Crown Heights was down 12%,  Flatbush -14%, Prospect-Lefferts Gardens -12% and Bedford -15%. In Prospect Heights the White population share increased from just over one-quarter in 2000 (28.2%) to almost half (47.2%) in 2010, in Clinton Hill the White population share more than doubled from 15% in 2000 to just over 35% in 2010 and in Williamsburg, Whites increased their share of the population from 34% to 52% while the Latino population declined by almost 25%, moving from a population share in 2000 of 57% to just under 38% in 2010.

While NYC has always been somewhat segregated, the density and diversity of the population, combined with its mobility within the city, tended to foster a kind of frenetic, generative heterogeneity. But the past decade has homogenized the population across all categories, not only along racial and ethnic lines, but also by class and income.

In practical terms this demographic shift means that there are many, many people living in NYC now who did not live here prior to 9/11 or even 2004 and have no lived experience of the city as it was. For better or worse they have no point of reference for a more racially, culturally and economically diverse New York.

From the smoking ban to bike lanes to The Barclay’s Center, the city has been transformed. David Byrne, Patti Smith, and all the rest of that generation of artists who bemoan the loss of the city they knew are right: it is changed. And with the possible exception of some unforeseen catastrophe of unimaginable dimensions, it is unlikely to revert to its previous self any time in the near future. It isn’t a matter of good or bad – it just is.    The people now living in NYC – artists, audiences and cultural gatekeepers – are as different now as is the city itself.

While New York has always attracted strivers and dreamers, it once attracted young misfits and aspiring bohemians who had to escape their stultifying hometowns to find themselves. That era is over. Those people can’t afford to live here, there is no such thing as bohemianism or counterculture, the reductive binary structure of “us” vs. “them” is wholly insufficient to the task at hand – there is only us , a vastly complex, interconnected web of individuals and ever-morphing micro-communities existing in dynamic relational structures and conditional hierarchies where art must situate itself differently than before, and so too, must artists.

This was an essential underlying point to my My essay “ Considering Alastair/Questioning Realness ”: Downtown is dead and has been for a decade. It is the insular nature of the “community” that keeps the corpse of “downtown” alive, brooks no dissent, admits no newcomers, and thereby hinders the development of new ideas, aesthetics or rigorous critical discourse.

Macaulay’s implicit assertion, with which I agree, was that American Realness – and by extension a considerable swath of “downtown” dance – proposes itself as “cutting-edge”, “subversive”, “challenging” and “experimental” when in fact its aesthetic is by now mostly conventional and familiar, safely re-enacting the “experimental” and “subversive” tropes of a “downtown” that has long since ceased to exist.

The real question we should be asking is, “What does a Global City demand of its artists and what must artists demand of the city to be able to make the work they hope to make?”

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What Makes London a Global City? Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

A global city is characterized by several factors like a centre for world finance and trade flows, immigration in large scale, growing income, and polarized occupation (Sassen, 2001) & (Eade, 2000). London has attained the level of being characterized as a global city due to its effort of increasing citizen’s income and occupation. For several years, business inputs in London city have been high as well as large commercial spaces and availability of labour. Like other global cities, luxury goods are offered in most of the selling places.

However, the immigrants and other minority groups cannot afford to purchase these goods, and hence why they take an extra step of purchasing them from the co ethnic producers or even from other low cost shops of other immigrants. In London, there are niche markets composed of small packed goods which are meant to target the most competent consumers. However, this has led to labour intensive which mostly results from immigrants (Atkinson, and Bridge, 2004).

City of London like many other global cities has an increased population of immigrants which has led to a major growth of small scale producers. This has led to a noted competition between large stores and supermarkets with small scale producers.

It has been recognized as a world class and full of much dynamism due to its ability of giving many people different types of benefits and creation of opportunities. To mention but a few, London is a centre for transport which creates a connection between Europe and most parts of the world. According to Amin (2006), airport terminals in London conduct more than 110000 flights in one month.

Diversity is another opportunity offered by the global city of London due to its high population capacity which was estimated to be around 7.62 million by the year 2008, Cowan, (2005). The city population is mainly composed of black and other minority groups such as Asians.

It is looking forward to have these groups as the majority in working age population by 2013. As far as communication is concerned, Londoners speak in more than 300 languages with more than 15 different religions. In terms of business and finance, London has qualified to be a global city as it received the highest number of votes as a European city conducting different types of businesses.

This was based on the factors that it has an easier accessibility to various markets, availability of highly qualified personnel who can ensure the success of most businesses. Its internal and external transport and communication connections are effective. Different languages which are spoken in this global city also make it possible for the business transactions to be conducted smoothly (Block, 2007) & (Fyfe & Kenny, 2005).

London city has also managed to be the European headquarters for the most prestigious global companies which are over 550 in number. Most of the issues affecting these companies are tabled in London city. Globally, there are a lot of foreign transactions which are conducted regularly and more than 50% of these transactions are traded in London city.

This city has also offered a place to the whole world where majority of currency exchanges are performed more than how it’s done in New York or Tokyo. In addition, more than 80% of all the commerce duties done in London are international. This makes this city to be outstanding than other cities that relies on the domestic markets, making it a global city (Hall, 2001) & (Sassen, 2000).

Environmentally, most cities are faced by different challenges and the way in which a city faces its challenges determines its position to be recognized as a global city (Block, 2008). London city has developed some technical ways through which it faces its challenges like developing environmental excellence which can effectively accommodate climate changes.

These techniques include dividing energy production units and coming up with congestion charge. Most of the environmental challenges which are faced by London city are as a result of purchases and usage of energy (Clark, 2003).

Another reason which qualifies London as a global city is excellence in knowledge. London is recognized by its strong foundation in improving scientific matters and in advancement of its technology. Several scientific events and designs have placed this city on a very competitive edge (Paddison, 2001).

Most of the well known researchers have been promoted in London city through advanced medical and clinical research centres which are equipped by this city with modern laboratories, equipment and staffs. London city has been recognized through by its provision of higher education, which is managed by qualified staffs in its advanced institutes of academics (Winder, 2010).

There are over 50 these advanced institutes in the city, which have made it to offer the most competitive staffs in the world. Students in London are in a position to choose international courses which are above 50000 and recognized globally. This has made the city to accommodate more than 88000 students from all over the world. Therefore, it is explicit that all factors put in to consideration; London qualifies to be termed as a global city (Zukin, 1992).

Reference List

Amin, A. 2006. The good city, Urban Studies 43.5/6, 1009-1023.

Atkinson, R. and Bridge, G. 2004. Gentrification in a global context: the new urban colonialism . London: Routledge

Block, D. 2008. The new economy of the inner city: restructuring, regeneration and dislocation in the twenty-first-century metropolis. London: Routledge.

Block, D. 2007. Multilingual Identities in a Global City: London Stories. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11 (4), 531–534.

Clark, D. 2003. Urban world/global city. London: Routledge.

Cowan, R. 2005. The dictionary of urbanism . Streetwise Press, Chicago, IL.

Eade, J. 2000. Placing London: from imperial capital to global city. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Fyfe, N. & Kenny, J. 2005. The urban geography reader, Routledge, New York, NY.

Hall, T. 2001. Urban geography , 2nd end. Routledge, New York, NY.

Paddison, R. 2001. Handbook of urban studies. London: SAGE.

Sassen, S. 2000. ‘The Global City: Strategic Site/New Frontier’, American Studies , 41, pp. 79-95.

Sassen, S. 2001. The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Winder, G. M. 2010. Global Reach? Reuters News and Network, 1865, 1881, and 1914 London’s. Journal of World History, 21 (2).

Zukin, S. 1992. The Best of Cities, The Worst of Cities. Contemporary Sociology, 21 (4), 481-484.

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IvyPanda. (2018, December 27). What Makes London a Global City? https://ivypanda.com/essays/london-as-a-global-city/

"What Makes London a Global City?" IvyPanda , 27 Dec. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/london-as-a-global-city/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'What Makes London a Global City'. 27 December.

IvyPanda . 2018. "What Makes London a Global City?" December 27, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/london-as-a-global-city/.

1. IvyPanda . "What Makes London a Global City?" December 27, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/london-as-a-global-city/.

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IvyPanda . "What Makes London a Global City?" December 27, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/london-as-a-global-city/.

The Global City: A Photo Essay

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Open Education Sociology Dictionary

global city

Table of Contents

Definition of Global City

( noun ) A city that has international political influence, home to multinational corporations and non-governmental organizations , in addition to a globally influential mass media, and well-developed communication and transportation system.

Global City Pronunciation

Pronunciation Usage Guide

Syllabification : glob·al cit·y

Audio Pronunciation

Phonetic Spelling

• American English – /glOH-buhl sIt-ee/
• British English – /glOH-buhl sIt-ee/

International Phonetic Alphabet

• American English – /ˈgloʊbəl ˈsɪti/
• British English – /ˈgləʊbəl ˈsɪti/

Usage Notes

• Plural: global cities
• world center

Related Videos

Additional Information

• Word origin of “global” and “city” – Online Etymology Dictionary: etymonline.com

Related Terms

• globalization

Works Consulted

Dillon, Michele. 2014. Introduction to Sociological Theory: Theorists, Concepts, and their Applicability to the Twenty-First Century . 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Ferris, Kerry, and Jill Stein. 2010.  The Real World: An Introduction to Sociology . 2nd ed. New York: Norton.

Wikipedia contributors. (N.d.) Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia . Wikimedia Foundation. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/ ).

Cite the Definition of Global City

ASA – American Sociological Association (5th edition)

Bell, Kenton, ed. 2013. “global city.” In Open Education Sociology Dictionary . Retrieved July 3, 2024 ( https://sociologydictionary.org/global-city/ ).

APA – American Psychological Association (6th edition)

global city. (2013). In K. Bell (Ed.), Open education sociology dictionary . Retrieved from https://sociologydictionary.org/global-city/

Chicago/Turabian: Author-Date – Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition)

Bell, Kenton, ed. 2013. “global city.” In Open Education Sociology Dictionary . Accessed July 3, 2024. https://sociologydictionary.org/global-city/ .

MLA – Modern Language Association (7th edition)

“global city.” Open Education Sociology Dictionary . Ed. Kenton Bell. 2013. Web. 3 Jul. 2024. < https://sociologydictionary.org/global-city/ >.

What makes a city “global”?

Essay, 2012, 4 pages, grade: b, zubeda issa mohammed (author).

Abstract or Introduction

Nowadays globalization occurs in places where a mass of people work and live in cities. However, for a city to achieve the title of being global, it must have values and ideas that will have an impact of the rest of the world. “Global city is a term that raises an understanding for the cognoscenti” (Low, 2005: p218). Low (2005) further says that a global city is a city that is well thought out to be an important node in the world’s economic system. A global city has wealth, power and influence to other countries as well as hosts the largest capital markets. Moreover, a city that has wealthy multinational companies, good infrastructure, better economy, well-educated and diverse populations and powerful organizations as well as a good political structure that are linked to the other parts of the world like nowhere else is considered to be global (Badcock, 2002: p31). A global city, therefore, is the world’s most important and influential city that covers the dimensions of the globalization. These dimensions are cultural experience, business activity, human capital as well as political engagement. London, New York, Paris, Rome and Tokyo are one of the most well-known global cities as it provides global competitiveness for its citizens and companies.

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Essay about Global Cities

The term “global city” was first used by Saskia Sassen, a well-known world specialist in urban strategies. It is also referred to as “world city” or world-class city”. This is a term which she describes or categorizes a city/ies which has a great deal of effect and influence on global affairs. Such cities create a “hub” for economic, political and cultural changes all across the globe.

The concept of a global city should be taken as a component of a global network of strategic sites. No global city exist as a single entity but serves as a function of cross-border networks, having “production functions” in their economic, political, cultural and even lifestyle areas being interlinked with other global cities.

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There are various criteria that categorize a city as a global city. Two main criteria are economic production function, which has to do with the city having the resources and capabilities necessary in managing its global operations of firms and markets, both local and foreign/multi-nationals. Global cities are able to ensure the existence, reproduction and renovation of these resources and capabilities through various forms of leadership and international economic diplomacy.

The political production function on the other hand pertains to producing or strengthening the professional elites, and creates a conducive environment for these national, and or foreign corporate professionals. Such a conducive environment is achieved by global cities since these are partly denationalized, furthering its ability to attract large foreign businesses and related expatriate communities.

In addition to these two main criteria, “culture production function” is also an important global ingredient. It must have a world-class culture, with world-renowned cultural institutions such as museums and universities, including its Lifestyle issues. It has a lively cultural scene, hosting film festivals, premieres, a thriving music or theatre scene such as that in Broadway. There is also an increasing presence of the servicing class which caters for the lifestyle of the new professionals and managerial elites. Such as nannies, housekeepers, etc. which serves as an indicator of a global city. It is also marked by physical expansions for its urban glamour zone (See “What you need to be a Global City”).

Other key important characteristics which global cities share include international, first-name familiarity. Such cities have gained world-wide popularity that the mere mention of its name is accepted and equated to its country, such as when one mentions Paris; it is automatically understood to mean Paris, France. Tokyo is readily assumed to mean Tokyo, Japan without mentioning the country or political subdivisions. It must also have a great influence and participation in world affairs.

A global city is the center of a metropolitan area possessing a fairly large population of at least one million people. As a major economic center, it should have an advanced transportation system which includes and international airport, that serves as a host for several international airlines; several freeways and large mass transit network. Global cities are also characterized by advanced communications infrastructure such as fiber optics, Wi-Fi networks, cellular phone services, and other high-speed lines of communications with which national and foreign firms can rely on.

Traditionally, the cities of London, New York city, Paris, and Tokyo known as the “big four” world cities have become the symbols of global capitalism. The goal of building a “world-class” city has become an obsession to some and has gained success in emerging new world-city such as Buenos Aires, Frankfurt, Sydney, and Toronto all of which have become large and influential.

The Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC), in its attempt to categorize world cities ranked cities based on provision of “advanced producer services” in areas of accountancy, finance and law, advertising which are owned by foreign or international firms. GaWC came up with categorization of these world cities in three levels and several sub-ranks. Those that were given much consideration were cities having multi-national companies that provided financial and consulting services rather than being a cultural or political centre. These three major categories are the alpha (full service); beta (major); and gamma (minor) world cities.

The “big four” world-cities received the highest rank, followed by Chicago, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore. Receiving the highest rank among Beta world cities are San Francisco, Sydney, Toronto, and Zurich. Second ranks on this category are Brussels, Madrid, Mexico City, Sao Paulo. These are followed by Moscow and Seoul. Gamma world cities with first ranking are Amsterdam, Boston, Caracas, Dallas, and Geneva among others. Next in rank within this category include Bangkok, Beijing, Montreal, Rome, Stockholm and Warsaw. Last in ranking among minor world cities are Atlanta, Barcelona, Berlin, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Manila, Miami, Shanghai, Munich, Kuala Lumpur, and Istanbul (See “Global City” from Wikipedia).

The inventory done by GaWc in 1999 undoubtedly considered Amsterdam a global city, despite ranking it in the third category. Based on the above mentioned characteristics, Amsterdam fits the category. It is the seat of one of the world’s chief stock exchanges, at the same time boasting of having a major port.

Amsterdam is also world-renown for its diamond-cutting industry, and one of the great commercial, intellectual, and artistic capitals of Europe. What makes it unique is the North Sea Canal which opened in 1876 which accommodates large oceangoing vessels, connected by the older North Holland Canal. In fact, the city is cut by about 40 concentric and radial canals containing streets and crossed by 400 bridges. These canals gave the city its nickname, “Venice of the North”.

The Amsterdam-Rhine Canal connects the city with the Rhine delta, and consequently with the industrial North West Germany. There is considerable transit trade within these canals. Its manufacturing firms include clothing, printed materials and metal goods. This city is a major road and rail hub, with Schiphol airport serving as an established hub for several international airlines. The Amsterdam Area is strategically positioned with a network of air, road, water, rail and cable connections to the rest of Europe. Its international airport and major seaport makes the city a multi-model hub, providing easy global accessibility because of its unique position as a gateway to all major European markets.

Tourism is an important industry since the city offers a unique experience with many old and picturesque houses along the canals which are now mostly used as offices and warehouses. Amsterdam is built on wooden and concrete piles because of its underlying soft ground. It is an ethnically diverse city with new residents from former Dutch colonies such as Indonesia and Suriname.

Amsterdam is home to art works done by world-famous Dutch masters such as Rembrandt, found in Rijksmuseum or National Museum built in 1808 by Bonaparte. Of equally famous are the Van Gogh museum, the house of Anne Frank, and Rembrandt’s house. The Concertgebouw Orchestra provides a lively cultural scene. Cultural institutions include the University of Amsterdam founded as an academy way back in 1632 and achieved university status by 1876, and has been serving as the largest learning center in Netherlands. The Free University (Calvinist) is also found in this city (See “Amsterdam”).

Likewise, the Economic Intelligence Unit’s Global Outlook Country Forecast Ranking of 2005 has named Netherlands as the best country to do business in the euro zone. Every five years, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) draws a list of ten best countries with which to do business and Netherlands is in sixth place, the highest among other countries in the euro zone. Amsterdam as Netherland’s capital is a thriving hub for business and industry. It has continued its traditional openness to the world and thus creating an excellent business environment able to offer a competitive cost to quality ratio, and an elite international network of professional services designed to assist international businesses. It also offers highly educated, flexible and motivated workforce with a high degree of English proficiency compared to other European countries.

International network of service providers in the city allows great outsourcing opportunities. Amsterdam is one of the most ‘wired’ regions in Europe, where the largest Internet exchange on the continent, the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) is located. The area has attracted many international ICT and telecoms companies because of its excellent IT infrastructure. Amsterdam also boasts of a strong creative industry such as advertising, design and publishing.

Guy Hayward has noted Amsterdam’s rise as a key player in the global advertising market. One such example is 180, an Amsterdam-based agency which is snatching multinational clients from traditional groups in London or New York. It has housed diverse nationalities, represented by twenty nationalities in its roughly estimated ninety employees. Such a scenario is not unusual in Amsterdam where other firms are attracting marketers’ attention such as Wiede+Kennedy, and Strawberry Frog ( E. Pfanner, “A World of Expertise at Home in Amsterdam)

 It is a centre for life sciences activities in Europe, with a well established infrastructure, informatics and biomedical research. It has a high standard of expertise in areas including integrative bio-informatics and genomics for the treatment of infectious inflammatory and multi-factoral diseases, oncology, immunology, cardiology, cell and medical biology, including neurosciences. It contains the highest concentration of knowledge within the country.

The Amsterdam Area is one the world’s favorite places to live and work, offering a high quality of life for its constituents. Even foreign visitors and expatriates feel quickly at home. The city has been a ‘melting pot’ for many centuries. The city of Amsterdam has truly gained world-wide popularity with other nationals because of its lively, international, and cosmopolitan atmosphere.

Allowing dual citizenship has made the city home to a number of foreign nationals. The second largest Japanese community in Europe can be found in Amstelveen. A variety of international schools, associations and social centers in Amsterdam Area caters to its large community of expatriates (See “Doing Business in Amsterdam”).

As part of the new city marketing campaign, I amsterdam is the new motto for Amsterdam Area to assert itself continually on the international stage. Showcasing the city’s strengths for centuries are its enterprising, innovative and creative qualities, making its mark on the global level (See “Amsterdam City Marketing”).

• “What you need to be a Global City”. http://www.gurusonline.tv/uk/conteudos/sassen2.asp
• “Global City” From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city
• “Amsterdam”. http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/world/A0803825.html
• Pfanner, E.  “A World of Expertise at Home in Amsterdam”. http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/09/18/business/ad19.php
• “Doing Business in Amsterdam”. http://www.ez.amsterdam.nl/page.php?page=183&menu=99&PHPSESSID=862a6b961a870c6944b16dc2b1be13a5
• “Amsterdam City Marketing”. http://www.amsterdamtourist.nl/encorporate/home/Amsterdam+City+Marketing/xp/content_artikel.ENamsterdamcitymarketing2/default.aspx

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A scientist, a leftist and a former Mexico City mayor. Who is Claudia Sheinbaum?

Who is Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s future first female president?

Ruling party presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum greets supporters after the National Electoral Institute announced she held an irreversible lead in the election in Mexico City, early Monday, June 3, 2024. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

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Presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum arrives at her closing campaign rally at the Zocalo in Mexico City, Wednesday, May 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

A supporter of presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum takes a selfie with a campaign poster during Sheinbaum’s closing campaign rally at the Zocalo in Mexico City, Wednesday, May 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)

Ruling party presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum leaves the polling station where she voted during general elections in Mexico City, Sunday, June 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

Ruling party presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum shows her ID as she leaves a polling station where she voted during general elections in Mexico City, Sunday, June 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Claudia Sheinbaum, who will be Mexico’s first woman leader in the nation’s more than 200 years of independence, captured the presidency by promising continuity.

The 61-year-old former Mexico City mayor and lifelong leftist ran a disciplined campaign capitalizing on her predecessor’s popularity before emerging victorious in Sunday’s vote, according to an official quick count. But with her victory now in hand, Mexicans will look to see how Sheinbaum, a very different personality from mentor and current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador , will assert herself.

While she hewed close to López Obrador politically and shares many of his ideas about the government’s role in addressing inequality, she is viewed as less combative and more data driven.

Sheinbaum’s background is in science. She has a Ph.D. in energy engineering. Her brother is a physicist. In a 2023 interview with The Associated Press, Sheinbaum said, “I believe in science.”

Observers say that grounding showed itself in Sheinbaum’s actions as mayor during the COVID-19 pandemic, when her city of some 9 million people took a different approach from what López Obrador espoused at the national level.

While the federal government was downplaying the importance of coronavirus testing, Mexico City expanded its testing regimen. Sheinbaum set limits on businesses’ hours and capacity when the virus was rapidly spreading, even though López Obrador wanted to avoid any measures that would hurt the economy. And she publicly wore protective masks and urged social distancing while the president was still lunging into crowds.

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Mexico’s persistently high levels of violence will be one of her most immediate challenges after she takes office Oct. 1. On the campaign trail she said little more than that she would expand the quasi-military National Guard created by López Obrador and continue his strategy of targeting social ills that make so many young Mexicans easy targets for cartel recruitment.

“Let it be clear, it doesn’t mean an iron fist, wars or authoritarianism,” Sheinbaum said of her approach to tackling criminal gangs, during her final campaign event. “We will promote a strategy of addressing the causes and continue moving toward zero impunity.”

Sheinbaum has praised López Obrador profusely and said little that the president hasn’t said himself. She blamed neoliberal economic policies for condemning millions to poverty, promised a strong welfare state and praised Mexico’s large state-owned oil company, Pemex, while also promising to emphasize clean energy.

“For me, being from the left has to do with that, with guaranteeing the minimum rights to all residents,” Sheinbaum told the AP last year.

In contrast to López Obrador, who seemed to relish his highly public battles with other branches of the government and also the news media, Sheinbaum is expected by many observers to be less combative or at least more selective in picking her fights.

“It appears she’s going to go in a different direction,” said Ivonne Acuña Murillo, a political scientist at Iberoamerican University. “I don’t know how much.”

Sheinbaum will also be the first person from a Jewish background to lead the overwhelmingly Catholic country.

Follow the AP’s coverage of global elections at: https://apnews.com/hub/global-elections/

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Tesla sales fall for second straight quarter despite price cuts, but decline not as bad as expected

DETROIT -- Tesla's global sales fell for the second straight quarter despite price cuts and low-interest financing offers, another sign of weakening demand for the company's products and electric vehicles overall.

The Austin, Texas, company said Tuesday that it sold 443,956 vehicles from April through June, down 4.8% from 466,140 sold the same period a year ago. But the sales were better than the 436,000 that analysts had expected.

The better-than-expected deliveries pushed Tesla's stock up 10% Tuesday. The stock is down about 7% so far this year, but it has nearly erased larger losses from prior months. Tesla shares had been down more than 40% earlier in the year, but are up more than 60% since hitting a 52-week low in April.

Demand for EVs worldwide is slowing, but they're still growing for most automakers. Tesla, with an aging model lineup and relatively high average selling prices, has struggled more than other manufacturers. Still it retained the title of the world's top-selling electric vehicle maker.

For the first half of the year, Tesla sold 830,766 electric vehicles worldwide, handily beating China's BYD, which sold 726,153 EVs.

Tesla also sold over 33,000 more vehicles during the second quarter than it produced, which should reduce the company's inventory on hand at its stores.

Tesla's sales decline comes as competition is increasing from legacy and startup automakers, which are trying to nibble away at the company's market share. Most other automakers will report U.S. sales figures later Tuesday.

Tesla gave no explanation for the sales decline, which is a harbinger of what to expect when it posts second-quarter earnings on July 23.

Nearly all of Tesla's sales came from the smaller and less-expensive Models 3 and Y, with the company selling only 21,551 of its more expensive models that include X and S, as well as the new Cybertruck.

The sales decline came despite Tesla knocking $2,000 off the prices of three of its five models in the United States in April. The company cut the prices of the Model Y, Tesla's most popular model and the top-selling electric vehicle in the U.S., and also of the Models X and S.

The April cuts reduced the starting price for a Model Y to $42,990 and to $72,990 for a Model S and $77,990 for a Model X. Last week, Tesla lopped $2,340 off the $38,990 base price of some newly revamped Model 3s that were in the inventory shipped to its stores.

In addition, Tesla in May offered 0.99% financing for up to six years on the Model Y. In June, it offered interest as low as 1.99% for three years on the rear-wheel-drive Model 3. Typical new-vehicle interest rates average just over 7%, according to Edmunds.com.

Also during the quarter, Tesla knocked roughly a third off the price of its "Full Self Driving" system - which can't drive itself and so drivers must remain alert and be ready to intervene - to $8,000 from $12,000, according to the company website.

Jessica Caldwell, head of insights for Edmunds.com, said Tesla is having trouble in a market where most early adopters already have EVs, and mainstream buyers are more skeptical that electric cars can meet their needs.

Tesla's "haphazard" price cuts don't work as well as they once did because consumers now expect them, she said. "We've seen the automaker exhaust its bag of tricks by lowering prices and increasing incentives to spur demand without much success in the U.S. market," Caldwell said.

Also, Tesla's aging model lineup doesn't look much different than it did years ago she said. And with price cuts, used Tesla prices tumbled. Anyone wanting a Tesla can get a far better deal buying a used one, Caldwell said.

Caldwell doesn't see any big catalyst this year that would boost Tesla sales unless gasoline prices spike, and she said Musk's shift to the right since taking over Twitter has hurt the brand's image.

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note to investors Tuesday that second-quarter sales were a "huge comeback performance" for Tesla. "In a nutshell, the worst is in the rearview mirror for Tesla," he wrote. The company, he wrote, cut 10% to 15% of its workforce to reduce costs and preserve profitability. "It appears better days are now ahead as the growth story returns," Ives wrote.

In its letter to investors in January, Tesla predicted "notably lower" sales growth this year. The letter said Tesla is between two big growth waves, one from global expansion of the Models 3 and Y, and a second coming from the Model 2, a new, smaller and less expensive vehicle with an unknown release date.

Tesla is scheduled to unveil a purpose built robotaxi at an event on Aug. 8.

This story has been corrected to fix Tesla's first half global sales number, which was 830,966 not more than 910,000. It also has been corrected to read that Tesla's second-quarter sales number was 443,956, not from 436,956.

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University of Iowa and Iowa State University drop in U.S. News & World Report global ranks

In the most recent U.S. News & World Report, the University of Iowa fell 45 spots in Best Global Universities Rankings , while Iowa State University's ranking dropped 81 spots.

The University of Iowa ranked 180th in last year's list, but fell to 225th in 2024. Iowa State University was ranked 263rd in 2023 and is now ranked 344th.

The list of the Best Global Universities considered 2,250 college campuses in 104 countries, while last year's list only evaluated 2,000 universities in 95 countries.

The University of Northern Iowa was not included in the ranking either year.  

More: Iowa City is one of 21 communities to receive HUD's multi-million dollar affordable housing grant

U.S. News and World rankings include strict criteria

The U.S. News and World Report's Best Global University rankings assess the quality of international universities based on 13 key metrics.

These metrics include:

Global research reputation (12.5%), Regional research reputation (12.5%), Publications (10%), Books (2.5%), Conferences (2.5%), Normalized Citation impact (10%), Total citations (7.5%), Number of publications that are among the 10% most cited (12.5%), Percentage of total publications that are among the 10% most cited (10%),, International collaboration, relative to country (5%) and Number of highly cited papers that are among the top 1% most cited in their respective field (5%).

More: Iowa City Jazz Festival returns with fireworks and Grammy-nominated acts

Global vs. National rankings

The University of Iowa scored a composite score of 63.8, while Iowa State University scored 59.8.

However, the Global University Ranking is different from the more common National University Ranking f or the United States. The University of Iowa ranks 93rd in national universities, and Iowa State comes in at 115th , respectively. The criteria for ranking positions are different globally and nationally.

University of Iowa spokesperson Steve Schmadeke said in an email to the Press-Citizen that the school focuses more on its global position.

"Because the global rankings focus on such a narrow scope (one that does not consider student access, success, or outcomes) and have such opaque criteria, the university does not place a high emphasis on them," Schmadeke said. "In contrast, U.S. News collects all of its own data for the Best Colleges and Best Graduate Schools rankings, which rely heavily on student and school-specific data, such as scores on admissions tests, graduation rates, retention rates, class sizes, and financial resources."

The Global University Report relies heavily on academic reputation surveys taken by Clarivate, a British-American publicly traded analytics company, according to the methodology guide . Other lists are directly sourced by the U.S. News and World Report.

How do the University of Iowa and Iowa State University rank among their peers?

In 2014, the Iowa Board of Regents approved a list of peer institutions for each university to use in their reports. The board updated the list of institutions for the University of Iowa and Iowa State University last year.

In the ranking, the University of Iowa ranked below its 10 peers assigned by The Iowa Board of Regents, while Iowa State University ranked in the middle of its peers, with five schools ranking below ISU.

The only Big Ten university and University of Iowa peer in the top 20 of the global list was the University of Michigan, which is ranked number 19. Six of the University of Iowa's peers were ranked in the top 100, and all 10 peers were ranked in the top 150.

Notable rankings in the University of Iowa's peer group:

19. University of Michigan (83.7)

47. University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (76.7)

61. Ohio State University (74.9)

63. University of Minnesota-Minneapolis (74.7)

74. University of Wisconsin-Madison (73.7)

100. University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign (71.9)

225. University of Iowa (63.8)

Notable rankings in Iowa State's peer group:

123. Michigan State University (69.3)

167. Purdue University (67.0)

262. North Carolina State University (62.0)

278. Virginia Polytechnic & State University (61.3)

311. Colorado State University (60.0)

344. Iowa State University (59.8)

Jessica Rish is an entertainment, dining and business reporter for the Iowa City Press-Citizen. She can be reached at [email protected] or on X, formerly known as Twitter, @rishjessica_

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Hillary Clinton: I’ve Debated Trump and Biden. Here’s What I’m Watching For.

By Hillary Rodham Clinton

Mrs. Clinton was the Democratic nominee for president in 2016.

Last week I had the time of my life at the Tony Awards introducing a song from “Suffs,” the Broadway musical I co-produced about the suffragists who won women the right to vote. I was thrilled when the show took home the awards for best original score and best book.

From “Suffs” to “Hamilton,” I love theater about politics. But not the other way around. Too often we approach pivotal moments like this week’s debate between President Biden and Donald Trump like drama critics. We’re picking a president, not the best actor.

I am the only person to have debated both men (Mr. Trump in 2016 and, in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary race, Mr. Biden). I know the excruciating pressure of walking onto that stage and that it is nearly impossible to focus on substance when Mr. Trump is involved. In our three debates in 2016, he unleashed a blizzard of interruptions, insults and lies that overwhelmed the moderators and did a disservice to the voters who tuned in to learn about our visions for the country — including a record 84 million viewers for our first debate.

It is a waste of time to try to refute Mr. Trump’s arguments like in a normal debate. It’s nearly impossible to identify what his arguments even are. He starts with nonsense and then digresses into blather. This has gotten only worse in the years since we debated. I was not surprised that after a recent meeting, several chief executives said that Mr. Trump, as one journalist described it, “could not keep a straight thought” and was “all over the map.” Yet expectations for him are so low that if he doesn’t literally light himself on fire on Thursday evening, some will say he was downright presidential.

Mr. Trump may rant and rave in part because he wants to avoid giving straight answers about his unpopular positions, like restrictions on abortion, giving tax breaks to billionaires and selling out our planet to big oil companies in return for campaign donations. He interrupts and bullies — he even stalked me around the stage at one point — because he wants to appear dominant and throw his opponent off balance.

These ploys will fall flat if Mr. Biden is as direct and forceful as he was when engaging Republican hecklers at the State of the Union address in March. The president also has facts and truth on his side. He led America’s comeback from a historic health and economic crisis, with more than 15 million jobs created so far, incomes for working families rising, inflation slowing and investments in clean energy and advanced manufacturing soaring. He’ll win if that story comes through.

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