Introduction

Abstract

‘Global city’ is one of the most successful terms that emerged from urban studies. Originally the focus of planning research concerned with the changing impact of urban settlement on our societies, as in Peter Hall’s The World Cities (1966), the discussion of the globalization of major cities extended in the 1970s and 1980s to a survey of the networked imprint of these places on humanity. What was theorized by scholars like John Friedmann (1986) as a hypothesis on how cities influence the new international division of labour as promoted by the growing clout of neoliberalism on world affairs was to become in the following years a complex research programme with a variety of ramifications. Critical in this expansion was the work of Saskia Sassen, who popularized the term ‘global city’ (1991), first employed by David Heenan (1977), and promoted Friedmann’s plea to link global flows with local social developments. Likewise, of key importance was the Globalization and World Cities network (GaWC) founded by Peter Taylor, who pushed for a formalization of the network analysis of how major cities are intertwined with the global economy as well as with each other. Having emerged as a dominant discussion in urban studies through the mid-1990s, the global city paradigm has progressively expanded in the past two decades to extend beyond geographical and urbanist research and has become an attractive area of research of direct appeal to scholars across most of the social sciences.