Networking the City

Abstract

One of the key themes of the twenty-first century will continue to be globalisation1. The consequences of globalisation for transforming our world's cultures, economies, societies, environments and politics are increasingly important and it is the growing number of worldoriented cities that are in many ways both the producers of, and the foci for, the global trends which help shape the lives of much of the world's population. The global cities of London, New York, Tokyo, Paris and Frankfurt2 are perhaps the most important cities for the world economy. This is because they contain, among other things: international stock exchanges, the headquarters of multinational corporations, trans-national institutions, and the primary offices of global advanced producer service firms in sectors such as accountancy, advertising, banking, insurance, and law. The cities that possess these attributes are called global cities because they dominate the world economy and set the trends for other cities around our planet. However, it is not simply what a city contains that is important, rather it is the joining up of cities through trans-national networks and flows of capital, people, information, practices and economic activity which is increasingly fundamental to the changing geography of the world. In urban geography and urban studies in general the idea that cities (and to a lesser extent other human settlements) are linked together has become something of a new interest. For example, recently Peter Hall (with Pfeiffer) has written about A networked urban world' (2000), John Friedmann (2002) has written about 'Intercity networks in a globalizing era', Saskia Sassen (2002) has edited Global Networks Linked Cities, and Peter Taylor has recently published World City Network (2004). This change in thinking is largely a product of a focus on globalisation and its flows of money, information, knowledge, goods, people, images, cultural practices, etc. which are seen to bring cities together into a world city network. Some have come to argue that through these flows a new trans-territorial network space has emerged that is produced and reproduced through the binding together of cities such as New York, London, Hong Kong and Paris (see Beaverstock et al, 2000a). Clearly the emergence of a world city network is a very important geographical issue and it is the purpose of this article to introduce you to some of the landmark contributions, and some current topical ideas, in the development of our understanding of how cities are becoming increasingly joined up. Let me begin with a popular illustrative example, before turning to the academic literature itself.