Three Globalizations Shaping the Twenty-first Century: Understanding the New World Geography through Its Cities

Abstract

In this article we attempt to understand the new world geography through its cities by treating corporate globalization from the perspective of cities insofar as they are central to the global networks that make large-scale economic processes possible. To this end, we draw on a conceptual and empirical extension of world city network research to describe the major globalization phases that have been shaping the twenty-first century. After situating our world city network research in the much broader field of research on globalizing cities, we retell the narrative of the extensive, intensive, and Chinese globalization phases as reflected in the office networks of 175 of the world’s largest producer services firms across 707 cities. A purposeful combination of connectivity and multivariate analysis is used to reveal cumulative, interacting, overlapping, and unfolding geographies of global economic patterns. We argue that these three key globalizations are shaping the global context of economic processes in the twenty-first century and describe the urban geography of each of these globalizations to understand their broader meanings within today’s global economy.