Global City Challenges: A Sympathetic Postscript

Abstract

Reflecting on what might be left to say at the end of this important and necessary book might start with a determination of its positioning in a larger debate. Probably to the astonishment of its originators — among them John Friedmann, Goetz Wolff, Peter Hall, Peter Taylor, Saskia Sassen — the concept of global and world cities has proven to be one of the most enduring ideas in the field of urban studies. An idea allegedly first sketched on the back of an envelope by Friedmann after perusing an in-flight magazine with its maps of carrier connections, has grown to be the centerpiece of a growing body of work in the social sciences on the role of major, internationalized cities, in the original formulation command centers of the global economy or basing points of global capital, riven with economic polarization, social fragmentation and political strife. The history of the ‘paradigm’ is aptly sketched out in Parnreiter’s opening chapter to this volume. It has been subject to quite a few summary treatments in the past (e.g. Brenner and Keil 2006; Brenner and Keil 2011). More recently, the range of publications has been dramatically widened by encyclopedic collections that have cast light on all manner of aspects related to world city formation and global city relations (e.g. Derudder et al., 2011; Taylor et al., 2013). I am making no difference here between global and world which I consider a tactical, not a strategic differentiation.