The concept of the global city in modern sociology

Abstract

The article deals with the features and content of the global city concept in modern sociological theories. It presents classical sociology ideas about certain socio-historical types of cities as an important stage in the concept of the global city’s formation. The article analyzes the question of the ratio between “world” and “global” in determining the specificity of modern cities to achieve semantic accuracy of the studied concepts. P. Hall’s and M. Friedman’s approaches as the first attempts of systematic study of the relationship between urbanization and globalization are considered. The author focuses on the study of the global cities concept by S. Sassen as a central analytical scheme which is used as the basis by other modern sociologists (P. Hanna, N. Brenner, A. Scott, P. Taylor, etc.) forming their theoretical and methodological constructions. The specificity of the S. Sassen’s “city” definition is presented, the properties characterizing cities as systems are considered: “complexity”, “incompleteness” and “making”. The author analyzes theoretical and methodological foundations of the S. Sassen’s global city concept and presents main research categories: “urban capability”, “place” and “production process”. A comparison of interpretations M. Castells’s and S. Sassen’s global city concept is presented. The hypothesis is formulated about the properties that allow classifying cities as global, including decline in the share of industrial production and focus on the specialized services of manufacturers, concentration of foreign firms and participation in the international real estate market, concentration of the large amount of expertise from various fields and production of innovations. The main problems and prospects of development of the global city concept in the framework of further sociological research are identified.