Essay
Globalising Cities
Part of a take-home exam. Discussing the concepts of global and globalising cities
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Part of Take-home Exam 2013/14Course: Globalising Cities and Hinterlands
Grade: 97/100
In the course we spent various lectures discussing the merits of the concepts of
„global city‟ and „globalising city‟ in analyses of processes of globalisation and how
these influences cities, particularly cities in the global South.
a. Provide definitions of the concepts of global cities and globalising cities using
course material provided.
Saskia Sassen, in her 1991 book, coined the term „global cities‟. Globalisation, argues
Sassen, has on the one hand brought about new telecommunication and information
technology, and on the other hand given rise to new management practice whereby
the production process is broken down into components dispersed across different
geographical areas. As such, cities came under the pressure to move away from
traditional manufacturing activities to what was termed „producer services‟. This
intensifies with the process of globalisation, and “the more globalized the economy
becomes, the higher agglomeration of central functions in relative few sites, that is,
the global cities […The] “things” a global city makes are services and financial
goods” (Sassen, 1991, p.5, emphasis added). Globalisation has also brought about the
weakening of the nation state as a spatial unit, and thus the focus has shifted to other
units and scales, among which lies the city. During the intensifying process, it has
also created strategic roles for (and as such, a hierarchy of) global cities, headed by
the archetypal Tokyo, London and New York.
The concept of „globalising cities‟, coined by Marcuse and van Kempen
(2000) arose out of the recognition of other, smaller cities that share the same
characteristics as promoted by Sassen. Beaverstock et. al. (1999, p.126), for example,
talk about „world cities‟, which are “„postindustrial production sites‟ where
innovations in corporate services and finance have been integral to the recent
restructuring of the world-economy now widely known as globalization”. They
identify four activities that help them „gauge‟ cities on their “world city-ness”:
accountancy, advertising, banking and legal services. Based on the examination of the
intensity of these so-called „advanced producer services‟, an extended hierarchy of
world cities is produced, with 10 Alpha world cities, 10 Beta world cities, and 35
Gamma world cities. The concept of „globalising cities‟ embraces the transformations
on economic and sociological levels of „the other‟ cities as a result of their exchanges
with the global network. As the process of globalisation itself is fluid and its impact
not fully known, globalising cities have come to be the hosting sites for flows,
, connections, and exchanges that crisscross the global network. As such, all cities are,
arguably, globalising in their own ways.
b. Explain the key conceptual differences between the definitions of the two
concepts of global cities and globalising cities.
The concept of „global cities‟ with its archetypal Tokyo, London and New York,
reflect, among other things, the prevalence of a modernist account of the global
political economy – a grand narrative that reinforces a hierarchy of cities endorsed by
western values. These cities, global as they are perceived to be, become the
benchmark against which others can gauge their performances. Its conceptualisation
arose out of the context of a western-heavy discourse, promoted by powerful social
forces. The fatal fallacy of the modernist account lies precisely in its grand narrative –
that it negates other possibilities, in this case, other accounts of cities in the age of
globalisation.
The discourse within which the „global cities‟ concept is embedded sees
globalisation as a linear and deterministic force. A dichotomy is stricken between the
global and the local, from which urban space is neatly defined as the “optimal scale
for capital accumulation” (Yeoh, 1999, p.609). Nevertheless, globalisation is a
multifaceted process, and the forces of globalisation interact differently with different
localities, that is, it is context dependent. It is also a multiscalar process, as there is
globalisation from above, driven by supranational attempts to converge standards and
practices, as well as globalisation from below, initiated by the normal economic
actors, the entrepreneurs, the informal workers, the migrants etc. and their networks.
Because of the differences specific to the locality, the emerging management of
globalising forces also differ. As such, while “[g]lobalization – as both a cultural and
an economic phenomenon – is a true product of modernity [… and it] means a
modern integrated economy, [it is accompanied by] a postmodern fragmented
political sphere” (Castles, 2004, p.184). Once it is understood as a contingent
process, historically and spatially, “the potential to identify a range of contested
political strategies and alternative spatial imaginaries can be realised” (Larner,
1998, as cited in Yeoh, 1999).
The emerging literature that seeks to see the global-local forces in a less
deterministic way, therefore, seeks to study their interaction with cities. Cities now
can be seen in its various morphed forms: as the magnet for foreign direct investment,
for migrants from elsewhere, skilled or unskilled, as nodes in a global network of
technology and flows of information. It is this conceptualisation that allows for the
transnational exchanges to take centre stage, and thus the „globalising cities‟ concept
to be recognised. These are the cities that emerge out of “a high density of „new‟
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