Global cities

The Global City: introducing a Concept
SASKIA SASSEN

Professor of Sociology University of Chicago

EACH PHASE IN THE LONG history ofthe world economy raises specific questions about the particular conditions that make it possible. One ofthe key properties ofthe 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, 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 re-scaling 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; crossborder 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.' In the case of global cities, the dynamics and processes that get territorialized are global. 27

SASKIA SASSEN is the Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, and Centennial Visiting Professor