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Samenvatting World Cities And Urban Inequalities (WUI)
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SV World Cities and Urban InequalitiesLecture 1 – Intro to world cities
Literature
• Major cities house many of the activities most important to the internal life of a nation.
Historically, they have provided their nations with the most significant points of connection
to other nations
• The linkages among cities cutting across nations became a global network → key nodes in
international system are (global) cities, not nations
• The role and status of cities within their nations became a function of the international
connections of the cities. However, the role of these cities relative to each other is not the
same (Paris > Lima)
• What happens in any one part of the world will eventually have some effects everywhere else.
What happens in the leading global cities will have more immediate and profound
consequences for us all.
• The globalisation response: recruit transnational corporations and the specialised firms that
follow these corporations, and provide cultural attractions for international tourists.
• The new global order is based on the ability to store and process information and generate
knowledge.
The development of (world) cities
• First cities in Middle East because of rivers. People started living together in these areas and
started trading there
• Industrial boom/ revolution caused burst of cities around 1800
o Industrial modernity:
▪ The development of the world economy became more determined by mass
production and trade
▪ Rural to urban migration increased
▪ Cities became the nodes of economy and trade
▪ Industrial core vs. supply regions
• Around 1900: globalisation → emergence of world cities
Global urban system
• Consumer modernity (~1990-1970)
o Protectionism (until 1945): een stelsel van maatregelen van de overheid waarbij
getracht wordt bescherming te bieden aan binnenlandse landbouw, producenten en
industrieën.
▪ (because of 2 world wars) Cities only produced for national markets (needs
of their own country) rather than global markets
o This period is described as “Mosaic spatial organisation” → different small islands
(pieces of mosaic): countries; in these countries there are cities that produce for their
own national market
o After 1945: “American invasion”, coca-colonisation
▪ US moved beyond their own national market and produced for a global
market
▪ Political result: general agreement on tariffs and trade (GATT): a legal
agreement minimizing barriers to international trade by eliminating or
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, reducing quotas, tariffs, and subsidies while preserving significant
regulations.
▪ American invasion in Europe (post war revival), aka coca-colonisation
because these products were sold everywhere.
▪ Economic boost until 1970
Towards a global urban system
• Cities in an era of globalisation (after 1970s): five parallel processes:
o New technologies → time and distance decreased
o The centrality of information made possible by instant communication
o An increasing trend toward the standardisation of economic and social products
o Growing cross-national integration
o Mutual vulnerability stemming from greater interdependence
• 1970s economic downturn → economical restructuring where multinationals gained in power
• Changes in spatial organisation as a
result of the New International
Division of Labour (NIDL)
o Nations no longer played an
important role, but the
multinational corporations did
→ Production was no longer
confined to national boarders
→ international division of labour
o Production moved to global south
o R&D and headquarters in remained global north
• Last couple of decades: mosaic of countries and urban systems → one global urban system
where the world cities are important nodes where all the flows come together.
Characteristics of a city
A city is a
• Relatively large,
• Dense,
• And permanent settlement
• Of socially heterogeneous individuals
Characteristics of a world city
• Large population (but not sufficient; Dhaka has a high population but is not a world city)
• Links with the rest of the world (in particular economics)
• Cultural importance
• Administrative importance
• World city is a “fuzzy concept”, much discussion in academic circles
Hierarchical approaches to world cities
Friedman’s 7 theses:
1. Functional thesis: a city’s position is determined by integration within world economy and
the city’s function within NIDL
i. Economies of world cities carry out different roles.
ii. The most important cities have all three functions: head of global headquarters,
financial centres and they are important points in their regional/ national economies.
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, 2. Hierarchical thesis: key cities are “basing points” of global capital linked within complex
spatial hierarchy
i. Within different flows of capital they cluster in world cities. Based on this you can
make a hierarchy: primary cities, secondary and tertiary cities in global north and
south.
3. Global-local thesis: global control functions of WCs are directly reflected in structure/
dynamics of the local company
i. Corporate HQ, finance, management, media
ii. Polarisation of workforce: Economists refer to the polarization of the labor force
when middle-class jobs—requiring a moderate level of skills, like autoworkers'
jobs—seem to disappear relative to those at the bottom, requiring few skills, and
those at the top, requiring greater skill levels.
iii. In the local economy of the city you can determine whether or not it is a WC where it
is a part of the global economy
4. Sites for concentration/ accumulation of international capital
i. International capital flows to the city because it is interesting to invest in (as a bank or
large multinational)
5. Destination for large numbers of domestic/ international migrants
i. Work can be found in the world cities so many people move there. Both high-skilled
and low-skilled workers
6. World city formation brings into focus major contradictions of industrial capitalism
i. Polarization on three scales: global, regional, metropolitan
7. World city growth generates social costs that exceed fiscal capacity of the state
i. Rapid need for housing, education, healthcare, etc. → social costs
ii. Global cities also want to attract the global elite and offer good services for them
Sassen (influenced by Friedman)
• Global cities are more than financial/ command centres → global service centres that satisfy
financial and business needs
• Global cities not only are for the coordination of the global economy, but also for the
production of this economy
• Focus on how certain cities get marginalised and excluded by the development of exclusive
sets of networked global cities
• Focus on the practices within these cities – the activities involved in producing and
reproducing the global production system and the global labour force
Critique on early world cities literature
• Mainly based on financial/ economic variables to determine whether a city is a world city
• Focus on hierarchy of world cities (“space”) (how high do they score on the ranking and
requirements) rather than relation between them/ urban system (“flows”)
• Limited empirical evidence: “the dirty little secret of world cities research”
• Only looking for the urban impacts of globalisation in the big world cities, instead of
focusing on smaller cities
Network approaches to world cities
Castells- space of flows
• World cities as networked, as hubs and nodes in global spaces of flows
• Switch from what cities contain, to their connections with other cities (relational approach)
• Not necessarily cities, but people/ businesses within cities can be “connected” or
“disconnected” to global networks
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, Taylor and colleagues
• Critiques existing empirical work which measure city attributes rather than their global
relationships
• Cities should not be viewed as bounded places, but as ongoing processes, comprised of
various flows
• Empirical studies of networks (airline routes, internet pathways, global office networks)
• GaWC research network (global and world cities research network)
Non-world cities
• The poor city → not interesting to invest; no consumers
• The collapsed city → collapse of civil society, social anarchy
• The excluded city → high risk for investors so they are being bypassed (Pyongyang); no
global connections
• The resisting city → high risk
Concluding remarks
• Globalisation and NIDL important drivers for the emergence of world cities
• Earlier work: identify the characteristic symbols of world cities and show the uneven
development within or among cities (hierarchical thinking)
• Later work: described networks of cities and the relationships among them
• Definition/ ranking of world cities complex
Q&A
World cities within a capitalist system:
• World cities thinkers = mostly neo-Marxist thinkers:
o Social life of the city, as well as the city itself, are fundamentally conditioned by the
economic system, in the form of the ‘capitalist mode of production’.
o Focus on the economic forces which determine the distribution and organization of
production, consumption and exchange under the capitalist mode of production.
• Neoliberal policies
o ‘wealth creation’, individualism, privatization, financialization, deregulation,
hyperrationality, dedifferentiation and the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces
o City economies focus on finance and servicing globalization, with those sectors
becoming ever more concentrated in the urban centres/city-regions
World cities and global command centres:
• Capitalism is envisioned as a single ‘world’ economy that is commanded and controlled by a
limited set of ‘global cities’ or ‘global command centres.’
• Network based approach (Taylor): What matters is the worldwide connectivity,
not the site-specific agglomeration, of business-service firms; and especially the
quality and intensity of those connections.
Taylor’s interlocking network model:
• a network level (the global economy)
• a nodal level (world cities)
• a sub-nodal level (firms providing the APS)
• According to Taylor’s specification, it is at the latter level that WCN formation
takes place: financial and business service firms have created global networks of
offices in cities around the world.
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