Global cities, centripetal wealth transfer and uneven development

Abstract

While much of global or world city research is framed as urban studies, in this chapter I apply an economic geographical perspective to scrutinize the role of these cities in uneven economic development. A concern with the role of specific cities in the organization of economic globalization marked the beginning of global city research (Hymer 1972; Cohen 1981; Friedmann and Wolff 1982; Friedmann 1986; Sassen 1988), and Sassen (2001, pp. 359 and 361) recapped in the second edition of The Global City that ‘[t]he key indicator of global city status is whether a city contains the capabilities for servicing, managing, and financing the global operations of firms and markets. . . . The question is whether coordination and specialized servicing of global firms and markets is taking place’. Over time, however, this economic geographical perspective faded into the background. Instead of examining global cities as ‘highly concentrated command points in the organization of the world economy’ (Sassen 1991, p. 3), their analysis was increasingly moved to the field of urban studies (Parnreiter 2013). Together with the increasing dominance of quantitative studies on the form and changes of the world city network (Taylor 2001; Taylor and Derudder 2016), this shift has caused an unfortunate move away from what had originally been a central interest of global city research, namely, the critical analysis of the geographies of power in globalization processes. Sassen, who describes herself as a ‘political economist interested in the spatial organization of the economy and in the spatial correlates of economic power’ (Sassen 1998, p. 182), reiterated in the second edition of The Global City that the notion of global cities has been elaborated as a critical inquiry into ‘questions of power and inequality’ (Sassen 2001, p. 351). She contends that global cities represent spatial correlates of economic power; they are a ‘spatialization of inequality’ (Sassen 1998, p. 182).