Summary World cities and urban inequalities
Lecture 1
Curtis, S. (2016). Global cities and global order: theorizing Global
Cities (Chapter 3).
One of the key features of the developmental trajectory of the existing literature on global cities
has been its economism: a particular theoretical bias that privileges the study of global cities in
terms of their economic functions within the global economy.
Transhistorical or Late-Modern Phenomenon?
Each stage of economic and social development has its own tools and concepts. Theories of
earlier phases of the city were built with the tools and concepts of those times. It is questioned if
the tools and theories used to understand ‘former city types’ (e.g. industrial city) are still
adequate to understand contemporary processes of urbanization. Some scholars state that we
have embarked upon a new stage of planetary urbanism: spaces that lie beyond the traditional
city cores have become integral parts of the worldwide urban fabric (oceans, rainforests, deserts
etc. are increasingly interconnected), and submarine cables, satellites, and other infrastructural
technologies form an integral part of the new global urban networks This development
questions the efficacy of the older modernist concepts for understanding the city.
There has been an evolution of the concept of global cities, which shows a shift from the original
interest in the political and cultural features to global economic functions. Originally, global
cities were seen as urban centres whose cultural force dominates the world (Goethe; emphasis
on cultural influence), and are seats of (inter)national government, headquarters and trade
unions (Hall; expand beyond culture, include political power and influence). However, for Hall,
world cities are not necessarily capital cities, as he also highlights the development of
metropolitan regions (Randstad Holland). These moves begin the tradition of seeing global cities
as intrinsically bound up with the world economy (entities operating primarily in the economic
sector of international systems, and may be separate from centres of political power).
Another key feature is that population size and density are not seen as useful ways in which to
understand global cities. Being a capital city of a nation-state is also no guarantee of global city
status. What matters is connectivity and function, not size, status, or traditional political power
in the narrow sense. It is the range and extent of a city’s influence over global flows, and the
particular, specialized function that a city performs in the world economy, that are important. To
facilitate these connections, powerful corporate actors and technological infrastructure are
important. What distinguishes the leading cities is the very high number of network connections
that they have developed, and their control over the infrastructure and processes of the space of
flows. They are the command and control centres of the post-industrial, informational
economy.
Taylor: the world city literature as a cumulative and collective enterprise begins only when the
economic restructuring of the world economy makes the idea of a mosaic of separate urban
systems appear anachronistic and irrelevant.
Theories of the global city
The world city hypothesis
1950-1980: Cities were seen as hierarchically organized within national boundaries: they
formed national urban systems. When choosing to adopt a systems approach for the study of
,cities, cities were viewed as interdependent, with the activities of firms with multiple locations
across the system enmeshing them in an interlocking network structure (which is the
framework into which the concept of the ‘world/global city’ would be inserted).
The international element (which was missing due to the focus on national systems of cities)
was brought back by John Freedman’s World City Hypothesis. There was a strong emphasis
upon the economic aspects of the relationships between cities, only now reconceptualized at a
scale beyond the national. Friedmann was responding to the changing structure of the world
economy: formation of global financial markets, emergence of offshore banking, the rise of the
multinational corporation as an organizational form, and the emergence of a new international
division of labour (manufacturing jobs moved from core to periphery).
Friendmann’s international perspective is linked with the dependency theory and world systems
approach (Wallerstein), focussing on, amongst other things. The new international division of
labour and the underdevelopment of the periphery.
Friedmann: a hierarchical urban studies thesis linked to a world systems framework The
world systems approach views the world economy as a globally integrated market, and
downplays perspectives that view the national economies of single states as distinct economic
units. Friedmann added the insight that global economic processes are organized through cities
(cities are places where people and products link themselves to the wider world and its
markets). Rather than cities simply responding to their own internal dynamics, or to the smaller
national systems of which they are also a part, they adapt to, and are shaped by, external
international economic forces.
According to Friedmann, cities form a spatial hierarchy. He realized that the national urban
systems were not closed systems, but must be understood in terms of their relationship to the
world economic system in which they are embedded. If a city (e.g. New York) sat at the top of a
national urban hierarchy, there were reasons why this was so that could not simply be explained
by looking at the national urban system. For example, New York received inputs from outside of
that system as a result of its important economic, cultural, and political ties in the wider world.
Therefore, cities such as New York should be studied for their role in linking the world economy
to particular regional and national economies.
Friedmann identifies a number of levels in his spatial hierarchy, linked to the idea of the world
economy as consisting of a core, semi-periphery, and periphery (Wallerstein). Friedmann’s core
cities are ‘basing points’ for capital: the places where dominant economic players organize
world production and marketing. It is the way that other cities link to such core cities to gain
access to this capital, knowledge, and organizational power that creates a spatial hierarchy of
cities.
Coming to the hierarchy/distribution, Friedmann considered the relative weight of different
cities in a number of respects: as financial centres, as hosts of corporate headquarters and
international institutions, business services and manufacturing, of their position in the global
networks of transportation, and of their relative population size.
Friendmann’s conceptualization of world cities is highly functionalist: how different cities take
on essential roles that the world economy, as a system, requires for its operation (New York:
provides head quarters for firms that organize global production; London: financial centre,
organizing flows of capital). Some researchers speak of urban specialization: cities that take up
specialized tasks within the world economy (London: financially specialized; Houston: industry;
Detroit: automobile sector) a global city develops its specialization in relation to other global
cities in the system, and also in relation to its own particular history, resources, and
geographical location.
,Globalization and the global city
Global cities have been linked to globalization: cities form the points of articulation through
which a series of transnational flows (of people, capital, goods, ideas etc.) move unevenly around
the world.
The work of Sassen is influenced by Friendmann. A factor that sets her work apart is the
emphasis upon how digital networks are producing new functions for certain cities, and the
emphasis on how certain cities get marginalized and excluded by the development of exclusive
sets of networked global cities. It is significant that, as those cities central to the command and
control of the world economy grow richer, other cities within the same country may become
steadily poorer (e.g. former industrial cities decline, while cities in the same national territory
with significant transnational links grow ever more successful).
Sassen’s Global city is designed as a heuristic device which can reveal the processes working
on cities connecting to the global market. Different cities (like London, New York and Tokyo)
have, despite their different histories and cultures, experiences a similar set of changes over the
last four decades. Sassen states that this parallel development can only be explained by a
common response to global processes
Under globalization, there has been a paradoxical trend of the new economy: the increasing
spatial dispersion of economic activity around the world (as manufacturing relocated to areas of
low-cost labour), while, at the same time, the global economy became ever more integrated.
Sassen’s theory of the global city provides an explanation for this double movement of dispersal
and integration. She argues that the advent of the new international division of labour, the rise of
the new organizational form of the multinational corporation, and the emergence of digital
networks and new working practices, have created a need for a new form of strategic command
and control. The technologically enabled decentralization of the economy undercuts the
traditional controlling and organizing function of the state in economic life. At the same time it
opens up both a space and a need for new forms of global economic governance. This strategic
function is being fulfilled by global cities. The form of decentralized decision-making such
cities offer is a new capacity or capability that can match the speed and flexibility of the
flows of the global economy in a way that the centralized state cannot. It is the
decentralized and fragmented nature of global cities that makes them appropriate for
governance in a world of flows.
According to Sassen, cities have four new global city functions (that go beyond the traditional
role of cities as nodes in international trading and banking systems):
1. Global cities are centres of strategic command and control for global economic activity
2. They are key locations for financial and specialized service firms (replaced manufacturing as
the lead sector of the economy)
3&4. They act as production sites and also as markets for these products and services.
Advanced producer services (such as management, accounting and financial services, real estate
and design) agglomerate in global city centres and reinvigorate the city as a creative milieu
(ignited by innovation created by face-to-face contact). The qualities of this creative milieu leads
to the concentration of state-of-the-art office construction in global city centres high demand
for high-end office buildings, shopping centres, hotels and leisure services the high
remuneration of the skilled professionals working in these business districts has also led to the
gentrification of formerly decaying inner cities. The requirements of both firms and their
wealthy elites also bring low-paid work for unskilled labour (receptionists, maintenance
workers, cleaners, drivers) the extreme economic polarization that results from income
disparities is given form in the social production of a type of cityspace where inequalities and
segmentation are highly visible. This highlights the existence of two ‘types’ of workers in
globalization: the highly mobile international corporate elite, but also the migrants.
, An important part of Sassen’s argument is that global cities take on different complementary
functions in response to the dynamic requirements of the global economy (and thus not
competing with each other). Global cities become a new type of centralized territorial node
through which the flows of the world economy are channelled and articulated.
Network and relational approaches to global cities
The first attempts to understand the rise of the global city were focussed on its economic
functions, later this scope has been broadened (looking at social relations that tie global cities
together, material infrastructure of these transnational spaces and the implications to the
geography of the contemporary world).
Castells’ work on the network society is important. He focusses on the new technologies
associated with the information and communications revolution of the late twentieth century,
which overcome space and time (e.g. it is possible for people to interact without occupying the
same space).
These is a triple-layered picture of the network society: The first layer is composed of the
infrastructural supports for the space of flows (electronic devices, computers, transportation
technologies). The third layer consists of the spatial organization of economic elites and the
networks of places in which they live and work. The middle layer, which incorporates global
cities, connects the two outer layers: it is the space where economic, cultural, and social
activities take place. It links localities to the larger network of which they become a part.
Global cities are the points of control for the global economy.
The focus moves from individual cities to the shifting networks of global cities, and the types
of connections that are made between them.
Global cities do not simply benefit from the coming of post-industrial forms of economy and
society: they are intrinsic to their creation and durability.
Global service firms (which are the producers of Internet content) have an urban geography (the
idea of Internet transcending geography is a myth), a web of relationships between firms which
use each other’s services. The provision of Internet content is a highly specialized activity,
requiring a particular set of knowledge and skills, a network of suppliers etc. Much technical
know-how in the information communications sector has, been concentrated in the San
Francisco and Boston areas, while the ready availability of investment finance in the cities of
New York, Los Angeles, and London was instrumental in making those cities vibrant centres of
Internet content ( example of (the importance of) firms using each other’s services).
There is an unevenness in connectedness (/Internet) on global/local/metropolitan scale a
digital divide, which separates separates the information-rich from vast numbers of rural poor,
the slums of mega-cities, or the disconnected neighbourhoods of global cities.
Castells’ work provided the basis to move beyond hierarchical approaches (Friedmann, Sassen)
to a networked view of global cities Taylor attempted to develop an empirical analysis of
global city networks (as the theoretical literature had outrun its empirical foundations). A
problem was that most data on cities was accumulated by states, which sought to measure city
attributes rather than their global relationships (they measured the nodes, not their networked
relations), which is one of the reasons why hierarchical approaches dominated the literature.
attempt to gather new relational data and develop network models (airline routes, Internet
pathways, locational strategies of global office networks in producer services).
Massey forcefully makes the point that if global cities are to reap the benefits from their
privileged positions, there must also be a consideration of their global responsibilities: their
extensive environmental footprints, their impact on other economies and regions, and their
responsibilities to those who come there.
