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http://usj.sagepub.com/ Urban Studies
http://usj.sagepub.com/content/48/14/2953The online version of this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.1177/0042098010392081
2011 48: 2953 originally published online 14 February 2011Urban Stud
Michele AcutoFinding the Global City: An Analytical Journey through the 'Invisible College'
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What is This?
- Feb 14, 2011OnlineFirst Version of Record
- Sep 22, 2011Version of Record>>
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48(14) 2953–2973, November 2011
0042-0980 Print/1360-063X Online© 2011 Urban Studies Journal Limited
DOI: 10.1177/0042098010392081
Michele Acuto is in the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy, Australian National University, Hedley
Bull Centre, Garran Rd, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, 2601, Australia.E-mail: [email protected].
Finding the Global City: An AnalyticalJourney through the ‘Invisible College’Michele Acuto
[Paper first received, April 2009; in final form, September 2010]
Abstract
Saskia Sassen’s concept of the ‘global city’ has evolved in a complex relation withother urban, economic and social students that deal with these strategic sites of thecontemporary global urban architecture. This multidisciplinary set of authors could bemetaphorically grouped within what John Friedmann described as the ‘invisible college’of world city researchers. In light of this tradition, the global city is described here inits various theoretical guises, in a chronological account from the early 1900s roots topresent-day formulations, in order to establish an eclectic understanding that can speakbeyond the college, opening the dialogue on globalisation and cities beyond urbanstudies. In this sense, the essay describes the ‘global city’ as the status of connectednessto the global attained by some world cities, which rests upon an urban entrepreneurial
spirit that situates these metropolises as the strategic hinges of globalisation.
architecture. This eclectic pool of authors
could be metaphorically grouped within what
John Friedmann (1995, p. 28) described as the
“invisible college of world city researchers”,
which has been constantly expanding from
analytical hypothesis to research paradigm. If
the college has a ‘resident’ faculty that explic-
itly engages in world city studies, many are the
visiting scholars and the external associates
that contribute to it, rendering the world city
narrative one of the most multidisciplinary
among the social sciences. I thus set out here
The phrase ‘global city’ has a deeper resonance
than might appear at first sight. Similar to the
fate of the expression ‘cosmopolitan’, this term
has been abused by many as a buzzword on
which public relations campaigns have been
mounted. Its original role as an analytical
construct, first brought to world-wide fame
by Saskia Sassen’s homonym research in the
early 1990s, has evolved in a complex and
often tacit relation with the work of other
urban, economic and social students that
deal with these pivotal elements of the global
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2954 MICHELE ACUTO
for an analytical journey through this college,
in search for an eclectic understanding of
what the global city is.
In light of this tradition, the global city is
therefore described in its various theoreticalguises through a chronological account from
its early 1900s roots to present-day formula-
tions. Recalling the fundamental significance
of this concept for the contemporary global
scene is the task of this research note, which
seeks to offer a conceptual framework
to open the ‘global city’ construct across
disciplines beyond its traditional urban
studies origins. Hence, this essay describesthe ‘global city’ as an inherently transitory
phenomenon, a status of connectedness to
the global that is attained by world cities and
rests upon an urban entrepreneurial spirit
which positions metropolises as strategic
hinges of globalisation.
The Origins: Studying the City as
‘Social Milieu’
The (global) city has always been there. Ever
since the dawn of civilisation, urbanity has
been part of the human experience and the
historical examples of urban-related narrative
are certainly countless since Thucydides nar-
rated the History of the Peloponnesian War as
an epic clash between two classic city-states
and Augustine illustrated the moral fallacies
and decay of a 5th-century post-imperial
Rome in The City of God , all the way through
Italo Calvino’s chronicles of the habits of
humankind in the allegorical novels of The
Invisible Cities at the beginning of the 1970s.
This list is possibly endless. Yet we do not
need to look too far to find the modern roots
of what one might call ‘world city literature’
within the social sciences. Precisely, we can
look back to early-20th-century Chicago,with its sprawling urban structure and social
contrasts, where several academics from
various local universities developed the
study of the metropolis through a system-
atic sociological framework, as prompted
by Robert Park’s 1915 paper ‘The city’ (Park
et al ., 1925). Building upon earlier planningstudies such as Dana Bartlett’s The Better
City , or the classic Cities in Evolution by
Patrick Geddes, the group of sociologists that
later became known as the ‘Chicago School’
focused on the social contradictions of the
Western metropolis to delineate a ‘human
ecology’ and offered a conceptualisation of
the socioeconomic effects created by rising
urbanism. Scholars that included, amongstothers, Ernest Burgess, Roderick McKenzie
and Louis Wirth described the city as the
‘cradle of civilisation’ and, as the epochal shift
from rural to urban was progressively defin-
ing human relations, selected the “platform
of urbanism” to underline the problems of a
modern—and urbanising—society (Wirth,
1940, p. 744).
The crucial two-fold lesson that these earlytheorists can teach us is both their under-
standing of the city beyond materialistic
structures, as a social milieu, and of urbanisa-
tion beyond migration, as a social revolution.
Wirth justly noted
As long as we identify urbanism with the
physical entity of the city ... we are not likelyto arrive at any adequate conception of
urbanism as a mode of life (Wirth, 1938, p. 4).
Urbanism, he pointed out, has effects that
transcend the mere rural-to-city migration:
it defines the lifestyle and social relations
of contemporary humanity and it sets the
metropolis as “the initiating and controlling
center of economic, political and cultural
life” (Wirth, 1938, p. 2). Thus, quite similar to
what Doreen Massey (1993) has more recently
described as the ‘relational nature’ of placeresulting from the intersection of physical
and social, and what Arjun Appadurai (1996)
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FINDING THE GLOBAL CITY 2955
has defined as ‘localities’, the authors of the
Chicago School—and Wirth in primis—
present us with the image of the city as a
social process. Lewis Mumford, another of the
forefathers of urban studies, reiterated such aview a few years after and, recalling Geddes’s
1915 study, wrote
The central and significant fact about the cityis that [it] functions as the specialized organ
of social transmission (Mumford, 1940, p. 5).
Hence the urban, Mumford says, combines
individuality and localness, which derive
from its own social texture and history, withgreater “marks of the civilization”, character-
ised by the “heritage of larger units, national,
racial, religious, human” (Mumford, 1940,
p. 6). The city, in this view, becomes more
than a simple place—it symbolises humanity
in a microcosm.
Cities, consequently, can be interpreted as
socially constructed transformative milieux
capable of synthesising forces originatingboth from within and without. To put it in
contemporary terms, urbanity synthesises
local and global, certainly as a medium, but
also as an “actively passive” (Thrift, 1983,
p. 38) agent in world affairs. This helps us to
develop a “geographical imagination” that,
as Massey put it, is capable of looking “both
within and beyond the city and hold the two
things in tension” (Massey, 1999, p. 166).
Yet both Geddes and Mumford were missing
the ‘big picture’ that only later authors such
as Hall, Friedmann and Sassen addressed.
To this extent, the globalising urban society
of the past hundred years needed a more
dynamic understanding of its multiscalar,
contradictory and ever-changing trends—an
analytical step set to come only many years
later. Nevertheless, some form of theory,
albeit often neglected, was already sketchedsoon after Mumford’s major publications.
Urban geographer Edward Ullman had,
in fact, attempted to develop a ‘theory of
location for cities’ as early as 1941, building
upon earlier economic studies undertaken
by Robert Murray Haig (1926) on the basis
of urban concentration and Charles HortonCooley on the effects of transport networks.
The investigation framework developed by
Ullman described the orderly spacing and
reorganisation of urban settlements, seen
as service centres, according to a ‘central
place theory’ that is not static, but “changes
to fit changes in the underlying conditions”
(Ullman, 1941, p. 853). According to Ullman’s
original formulation, three categories can beidentified to describe the ‘factors of urban
causation’ underlying the development of
cities as “focal points in occupation and uti-
lization of the earth” by humankind: cities as
central places, cities as transport hubs, and
cities as repositories of specialised functions
(Harris and Ullman, 1945, pp. 7–9). All of
these, according to Ullman, appear in diverse
combinations and with varying degrees ofimportance from city to city, and underpin
the transient character that constitutes urban
centrality vis-à-vis other settlements.
Analogies with the contemporary func-
tions of the modern metropolis can be
easily drawn here, and especially with the
hypotheses later developed by Friedmann
and Sassen as well as the present sprawl of
urban rankings. If the processes of time/
space compression have shrunk the distances
on a global scale, for instance, this does
not mean that cities are no longer ‘central
places’ in that they perform specialised func-
tions while also providing basic services to
adjoining areas. Rather, it means that some
settlements will be catalysts of interactions
at scales that were almost unthinkable in the
days of Ullman’s study. Despite its potential,
this location theory remained buried in theannals of geography until contemporary
theorists developed a similar framework
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2956 MICHELE ACUTO
and the tenets of central place theory found
renewed and extremely influential appli-
cation in the economic analysis of urban
systems. For what concern our analytical
journey—functions, variable composition,constant needs for urban performances
and positioning—are therefore additional
core elements to be kept in consideration
in the characterisation of contemporary
global cities, since these are, after all, still
‘central’ places.
Situating the ‘World City’ in theWorld System
The understanding of the city posited by the
Chicago School evolved during the following
decades with a marked focus on functionality
and widening analytical viewpoints. Moving
from human relations within the metro-
politan setting and their related problems,
urbanists from various disciplines followed
the examples set by Cooley, Wirth and Ullmanand engaged questions of world organisation.
Progenitor of this macrosociological shift in
the study of the city was Chicago academic
Roderick McKenzie who developed, as early
as 1927, a concept of a ‘global network’ of
cities. By describing the spatial reorganisa-
tion caused by transport and communica-
tion technologies, he highlighted how urban
settlements aligned within hierarchies of
dominance and subordination, with an inner
locus of activity and a dependent periphery.
McKenzie (1927, p.42) explained how the
“world’s centers of gravity are always in
process of change” due to shifting service
bases. This progressive sense of the world city,
perhaps the single most forward-looking
anticipation of contemporary debates along
with Geddes’ 1915 book, would have required
two decades, the 1970s and the 1980s, to re-emerge into coherent urban studies form.
This evidence testifies once again the need
for a contingent and performance-oriented
understanding of the city’s centrality in world
affairs and the necessity for a global city con-
cept that takes into account the processual
(relational some would say) understandingof cities as social media.
While this systemic perspective remained
in hibernation, a milestone text for urban
studies was published in 1966: Peter Hall’s
The World Cities. Taking up Geddes’s sketch
of the nodal settlements within the inter-
national economy, the British urbanist
designed a theoretical framework concerned
with the growth, and consequent problems,associated with the ‘metropolitan explosion’
of the 20th century. In the introductory sec-
tion of this book, Hall outlines the profile
of these cities by distinguishing them from
megalopolises and localised business centres.
Accordingly, ‘world cities’ are: major centres
of political power, mobility, professional tal-
ent, information and culture, as well as great
centres of population that contain a “signifi-cant proportion of the richest members of
the community” (Hall, 1966, pp. 7–9). While
describing these functions, Hall underscored
how the elevated number of urban inhabit-
ants could be a feature, but not a necessary
determinant, of what John Friedmann
(1986) would later call ‘world city status’.
The latter, pointed out Hall, is a function
of all these characteristics, a view that once
again reiterates the contingent nature of
global cities. Giant urban complexes that at
the time did not satisfy Hall’s criteria, such
as Osaka–Kobe or Chicago, were considered
of regional—but not international—sig-
nificance. Conversely, small centres such as
the Dutch Randstad, were seen to be able to
play a world role despite their limited urban
population. Overall, Hall’s focus throughout
the volume remained on the ‘planning’ and‘development’ side of the analysis, offering
an account of how pivotal cities such as
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FINDING THE GLOBAL CITY 2957
Tokyo, Paris or New York evolved to their
present prominence and how this rise is
necessarily accompanied by enormous
problems of transport, urban renewal and
local governance.Fundamental, at this stage, was the contri-
bution of Immanuel Wallerstein, the father
of world system theory. Influenced by the
complex exploitation structures illustrated
by Karl Marx, and at the same time bearer
of Fernand Braudel’s historical approach
pinpointed in the longue durée of social
processes, Wallerstein produced a landmark
historical sociology treatise on the emer-gence of the modern world system in three
volumes between 1974 and 1989. Among the
most important contributions of this opus
is the description of terms such as ‘periph-
ery and core’ and ‘unequal exchange’ that
entered the common jargon of economic,
urban, geographical and international stud-
ies. However, despite the key significance
of this formulation, the perspective thatcould make an essential contribution to
the contemporary definition of global city
is a less celebrated one: “A world-system”,
highlighted the author, “is a social system”
(Wallerstein, 1974, p. 229). With Wallerstein,
therefore, we move from a materialistic
understanding of such a system, to a politi-
cal representation of the power hierarchies
created by capitalism and supported by
technological advance, where physical flows
and material arrangements are inextricably
intertwined with social alignments and
marginalisations. This critical contribution
first introduces us to the direct relation-
ship between geographies and practices of
power as concentrated in the cores of an
unequally organised global system. Hence,
Wallerstein’s scholarship is a pivotal sign-
post in our journey, pointing towards theinextricable relationship between cities and
global socio-political practices.
The World City Hypothesis andthe Urban Hierarchy
At the outset of the 1980s, benefiting from
more than a decade of world city analysis,Robert B. Cohen (1981) took the world sys-
tem interpretation of global business sites a
step further. Grounding the linkage between
the organisational structure of multinational
corporations and the networks among cit-
ies in a comparative empirical analysis, he
described a truly global system and its inter-
nal pecking order. To this extent, Cohen’s
study quickly became a landmark in urbantheory as it sought to develop one of the first
urban hierarchies that enlarged the field’s
traditional Western-centric boundaries. Cities
like Singapore and Hong Kong appeared in
this formulation, as the author described
the articulation of this multilayered system
and its possible trends for the years to come.
Anticipating much of the research that will
later be developed by scholars such as Peter
Taylor and Michael Timberlake, Cohen made
a two-fold contribution to the invisible col-
lege: he kick-started the urbanist movement
concerned with building a systematic hier-
archical taxonomy of metropolitan centres
of the world economy, while also marking a
definitive shift from the local (micro) view-
point, to the global (macro) study of cities.
Cohen’s methodological advance was fol-
lowed shortly afterwards by another systematic
contribution by American world system theo-
rist Christopher Chase-Dunn. Chase-Dunn
published in 1985 a cross-national quantita-
tive study on the system of cities where the
‘central places’ were seen as “centers of capital
accumulation and geopolitical power”, con-
stituting a single world-wide structure which
has continued to operate ever since the early
days of history involving no dramatic changesbut rather trends and cycles (Chase-Dunn,
1985, p. 269).1 Chase-Dunn’s and Cohen’s
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2958 MICHELE ACUTO
pieces were instrumental in highlighting the
networked qualities of world cities. Similarly,
they provided a legacy of empirical baggage
to those scholars who were at that moment
venturing into the complexities of globalnetworks, which were to be largely theorised
by Manuel Castells in The Rise of the Network
Society (1996), designed by building upon his
earlier The Informational City (1989). This
text was the first of a trilogy dedicated by the
Spanish sociologist to the rise of what he called
the ‘information age’ where networks consti-
tute the new social morphology of human
society. Castells’ focus is on the “space offlows” (Castells, 1989, p. 146) that characterise
social relations in the contemporary epoch,
deeply affected by the rise of the World-wide
Web and the new technologies, and that will
fundamentally shape the study of the world
system of cities in the years to come.
It was John Friedmann, however, who
provided a crucial analytical formulation for
the study of the city in the present context.Recalling an initial research project designed
in 1982 with Goetz Wolff and destined to
become “an instant classic” (Brenner and Keil,
2006, p. 57), the urban planner conceptualised
the ‘world city hypothesis’ in a 1986 article
targeted to inspire a systematic study of this
phenomenon. The heuristic essay, intended as
a framework for research, followed the afore-
mentioned tradition of analysts concerned
with the spatial organisation of the new divi-
sion of labour set in motion by the rise of the
capitalist class and sustained by the underly-
ing forces of globalisation. Friedmann listed
several interrelated theses on the nature and
role of world cities, reiterating some of Hall’s
features and merging them with more social
considerations on the spatialisation of world
economy (Friedmann, 1986, pp. 318–326).
Friedmann’s interpretation was rootedin an understanding of the city as defined
in economic terms: key cities are “used by
global capital as ‘basing points’ in the spatial
organization and articulation of production
and markets” making it possible to arrange
world cities in a “complex spatial hierarchy”
based on such organisation (Friedmann, 1986,pp. 320–321). Relations and structure were
described as flexible, depicting a dynamic
hierarchy that further prompts us towards
a particular attention to the variable power-
geometries of the system. This formulation
made extensive usage of the terminology
developed by world system theorists, clas-
sifying metropolises in core and peripheral
countries, underlying how the scales of spatialpolarisation (global, regional, metropolitan)
all inevitably rested upon class polarisation
and describing their position as organising
nodes of global economics. In this view,
Friedmann laid out a map of the system
arranged around three distinct geographical
sub-systems—Asian. American and West
European—linked together on an east–west
axis by the relation of the primary citieswithin these: Tokyo, Los Angeles, Chicago,
London and Paris (see Figure 1).
The ‘Global City’ Model and theEarly 1990s
The ‘world city hypothesis’ created an unprec-
edented plethora of followers who engaged
in the systematic and empirical classifica-
tion of such a system, broadening both the
breadth of urban settlements considered and
the types of ‘world city function’ scrutinised.
Geographers, sociologists and urbanists from
all over the academic landscape took up the
complex task of ‘mapping’ such a variable
and hierarchical metropolitan structure.
Scholars like Michael Timberlake, Peter
Taylor, Jonathan Beaverstock and Richard
Smith became authoritative voices, nowregarded as some of the highest experts
in this field, alongside those evergreen
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FINDING THE GLOBAL CITY 2959
classics such as Hall and Harvey. Yet, as often
happens in the social sciences, this main-stream approach soon met the emergence of
a comparable but contrasting formulation:
the ‘global city model’ elaborated by Saskia
Sassen at the outset of the 1990s. Coming
from a multicultural education strongly tied
to Latin America and Europe, the American
sociologist developed her landmark work The
Global City on the basis of her previous stud-
ies of social stratification and capital mobility.
Notably, these approaches even featured in
the early stages of Friedmann’s hypothesis,
as he referenced Sassen’s theories on the role
of the management élite as a privileged class
within the restructuring of core world cities
(Sassen-Koob, 1986).
These links notwithstanding, Sassen’s thesis
was markedly divergent from the mainstream
hypothesis, and not just in semantics. As she
would have recalled much later, the choice of‘global’ rather than ‘world’ as an adjective for
the key metropolises was meant to
capture the specific articulation of the world
economy ... today, thereby allowing for thepossibility that cities that are not historically
world cities could nonetheless be global
(Sassen, 2006, p. ix).
Broadening this understanding, Peter Marcuse
and Ronald van Kempen (2000), along with
Brenda Yeoh (1999), introduced the term
‘globalising city’ in order to underscore that
globalisation is not a characteristic of those
‘global cities’ alone, but a more pervasiveprocess present in all urban spaces. For the
purposes of our investigation, however, I
favour here Sassen’s terminology as I do not
believe the author implied such conjecture
in her original thesis, rather highlighting the
particular connection between certain key
metropolises and the broader processes of
globalisation. Consequently
Global city is not a descriptive term [but]
an analytical construct that allows one todetect the global as it is filtered through the
Figure 1. The world city hierarchy.Source: Friedmann (1986, p. 71).
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2960 MICHELE ACUTO
specifics of a place, its institutional orders,
and its sociospatial fragmentations (Sassen,2006, p. x).
Not all world cities necessarily represent
global cities and not all global cities are to be
seen ‘global’ in the same way. ‘Global city’ is
thus a ‘device’ to detect the particularity of
a locality as an element of the “new [global]
socio-spatial order” and, more specifically,
a particular urban space that represents a
“nexus for new politico-economic align-
ments” (Sassen, 2007, p. 122). Hence, the
‘global city’ is an heuristic vantage-point onto
the reconfigurations of the late 20th and early21st centuries.
Sassen’s formulation allowed for variations
in the nature of the different cities, which
in turn epitomised not only nodal points as
Friedmann originally conceived them, but
also strategic sites of advanced production
whose principal output—mainly responsible
for their global status—is principally repre-
sented by services. Thus, in order to capturethis specificity, she focused her study on the
practice of global control as performed in
these cities (Sassen, 1991). These particular
localities, of which New York, London and
Tokyo symbolised the apex, are characterised
by the agglomeration of central command
functions (legal, economic, managerial, plan-
ning, executive, etc.) necessary to corporate
organisations in order to operate acrossmultiple global locations. Hence, in contrast
with Castells’ understanding of power as dis-
located and decentralised through networks,
Sassen illustrates how such networks are the
means of power, which is on the contrary
seen as concentrated by those groups who
take advantage of command and control
functions embedded in specific central places
(Allen, 1999, p. 202).
This focus on the practice, the heterogene-ous nature, the activity and the multiplicity of
functions between key metropolises is Sassen’s
fundamental input to the theorisation of the
city in world affairs. However, while the world
city literature was developing in the ‘invisible
college’ led by Friedmann and Sassen, another
less celebrated but crucial publication saw thelight in 1992: The 100 Mile City , written by
architect and designer Deyan Sudjic. Distant
from most of the debates highlighted thus far,
Sudjic’s contribution was unique. Instead of
discussing networks, systemic analyses and
economic relations, the author narrated the
processes of city-building and the mutation
of the urban landscape, providing the ‘world
city audience’ with a powerful reminder: oneshould not forget the physical existence of the
metropolis, which could easily be lost among
academic quarrels upon questions of place,
flows, social relations, scale and globalisation.
In this enterprise, Sudjic is accompanied by
another key author, Anthony King, who shares
with him the interest in urban physicality,
although in a more historical perspective, and
who published a few years earlier the bookGlobal Cities on the internationalisation of
London (King, 1990).2 In a time of abstraction
and empirical dismantling of the metropolis
as an aggregate of functions, they bring us
back to the bricks, highways and metallic
skeleton of the city itself, represented through
Sudjic’s metaphor of a non-linear electric
force field powered by the often unpredictable
and sudden energy of mobility (Sudjic, 1992).
Another one-of-a-kind text, Mike Davis’ more
recent Planet of Slums (2006), also represents
an even more critical view on urbanisation
and on the social contradictions arising
from the contemporary condition of cities
across the world, offering us crucial insights
into the ‘dark sides’ of the global city narra-
tive and unravelling the growing problems
arising from the urbanisation of the globe.
As Davis’ inflammatory narrative stresses withpowerful images, we need to pay attention to
the social contradictions created by the urban
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FINDING THE GLOBAL CITY 2961
age. To this extent, a critical consideration is
compulsory. The definition of ‘global city’
does not have a necessarily positive quality:
being ‘global’ entails both pay-offs and high
prices for those who compose metropolitancommunities. Global cities are equally sites
of opportunities and relegation, ridden by
social inequality as much as open to extreme
mobility, characterised by billionaire élites
and wretched ghettos, whose ‘right to the city’
is often systematically denied (Harvey, 2008;
Brenner et al., 2009).
In a similar fashion, the recent volume
The Endless City embodies the markedlymultidisciplinary and post-eulogistic nature
that inquiries into the global city presently
need. Product of the new dynamic project
‘The Urban Age’ set up at the London School
of Economics by British urbanist Ricky
Burdett, this collection of eminent voices from
different fields such as architecture, sociology,
human geography and design, traces the eclec-
tic path required to appreciate the multifacetednature of 21st-century urbanity, charged with
social contradictions and challenges (Burdett
and Sudjic, 2008). In fact, as Deyan Sudjic,
co-editor of the volume with Burdett, pointed
out in his earlier The 100 Mile City
to accept that the city has a dark side, of
menace and greed, does not diminish itsvitality and strength. In the last analysis, it
reflects man and all his potential (Sudjic, 1992p. 309).
To this extent, critical materialist accounts are
necessary building-blocks of our multidisci-
plinary endeavour, as they call for the physi-
cality of the global city not to be forgotten
among scholarly abstractions, considering
the ‘grounded’ essence of urbanity as a source
and object of globalisation as well as a site
of challenging global questions. The urbanstructure thus transcends mere materiality,
becoming an object of political contention,
social engineering and segregation. If the
‘world city’ scholarship has to speak beyond
its confines, then its material component
must not be left out of sight, since it con-
tributes to construct social relations andpolitical interactions and because it is the
object of such relations in an inextricable
structuration.
The ‘Dual City’ Issue
Considering the physical reconfigurations
of global cities also leaves room for further
speculation: in the 21st century, these metrop-olises have become so central to neo-liberal
globalisation, the prevalent ‘world order’ of
the present times, that their organisation is
a “key spatial manifestations of capitalism”
providing the dominant forces and élites of
our time with a much-needed “spatial fix” in
a world of flows (Massey, 2007, p. 9). Some
places such as London have maintained their
centrality throughout several centuries, whileothers such as Shanghai have risen and fallen
several times. If a city is to be ‘global’, then it
necessarily needs to strike a balance between
such forces and avoid succumbing to global
fluxes or local degeneration, achieving what
Hall (1998) called ‘urban order’—a particular
mix of social institutions and physical infra-
structure that allows the locality to flourish.
Those flourishing metropolises that the
British urbanist described in their ‘golden
ages’ all had—and indeed have—a common
determinant: they struck a balance between
‘external’ and superimposed forces that were
connecting the city with the world, and their
‘internal’ context filled with contradictions
and planning quandaries. If a metropolis in
the present age has to influence the global,
and compete in the highly variable urban
hierarchy, it needs to maintain the delicateinterplay between local and global at a man-
ageable level. In a system characterised by
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2962 MICHELE ACUTO
globalision and unevenness, global cities are
increasingly required to do much more than
just local management: they need to attract
capital as well as mobility ‘highways’ and
therefore co-ordinate the daily unfolding ofthese across their conurbation, while also
maintaining their pull over them. In order
to do this, today’s global cities need to be
entrepreneurial cities.
This notion was originally developed in
David Harvey’s (1989) analysis of the urbani-
sation of capital. Harvey was well aware of
the mutually constitutive relations between
the political sphere and the urban processesthroughout time, and how incoherently the
study of the former had become separated
from the socio-geographical inquiries into
the latter. As a response to this scholarly
sectoralism, he described how the ‘managerial’
approaches to urban governance so typical of
the 1960s were, at the end of the 1980s, giv-
ing way to ‘entrepreneurial forms of action’
born out of the spirit of capitalism and werecapable of reorienting urban governance
towards novel forms of performance and
prompting urbanities to ‘take the initiative’ in
the economic realm (Harvey, 1989; Hall and
Hubbard, 1998). Globalising cities are entre-
preneurial cities because they purposefully
undertake political and economic activities,
rather than simply reacting to the features
of their surrounding environment. In this
sense, global cities are not passive elements
in a world of flows, but are also hubs, motors
and magnets of these, and thus key agents of
the world system.
This is all the more important when we
consider one of the central controversies in
the invisible college: the so-called question
of the dual city. Brought to the centre of the
urban studies debate by John Friedmann’s
‘world city hypothesis’ and by Saskia Sassen’slate 1980s studies, this idea postulates that
with global city formation comes urban social
polarisation. Several authors throughout the
1980s, not least Sassen and Friedmann, argued
that the shifts in occupational structures and
industrial bases of the economy were resulting
in a ‘hourglass’ effect, which is embodied bythe expansion of low- and high-income social
groups and the consequent shrinking of the
middle class. This thesis rapidly achieved well-
deserved attention thanks to the publication
of John Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells’s
edited volume Dual City: Restructuring New
York (1992) and Sassen’s first edition of The
Global City (1991). In the former, the Big
Apple was problematised as “two cities, notseparated and distinct but rather deeply
intertwined products of the same underlying
processes” (Mollenkopf and Castells, 1992,
p. 11). Social polarisation, created by the
capitalist society and the expanding reach of
global networks, was splitting the city into
two intertwined halves, between a small élite
at the top and a large underclass at the bot-
tom. As Sassen explained, globalising citiesare perhaps the most vulnerable to this class
divergence because of their economic struc-
ture progressively dominated by financial,
business and producer services, along with
their increasing demand for low-skilled jobs
readily available through immigration.
Several authors picked up this trend, which
rapidly became, as Janet Abu-Lughod (1999)
pointed out in her 1990s landmark study of
three major American cities, ‘one of the most
interesting subsets’ of global city research.
A plethora of empirical studies rapidly
followed suit to test the polarisation hypoth-
esis and unpack the urban dynamics of social
stratification in the major post-industrial
Western cities. The assumption, of course,
has not been free from critics that saw in the
‘dual city’ what Peter Marcuse (1989) called
a “muddy metaphor” for a much more com-plicated process reflecting spatial reorganisa-
tions in these cities. Chris Hamnett (1994), in
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FINDING THE GLOBAL CITY 2963
particular, offered several rebuttals to Sassen’s
contention, rejecting to varying degrees the
bifurcation of class structures as a too nar-
row perspective and pointing out how her
original work lacked an engagement with theeffects of unemployment and non-industrial
development.
Seeking solutions to these and many other
theoretical (as well as empirical) puzzles,
much of the scholarship has to date shifted
towards considering inequality rather than
polarisation as the key problem arising from
the restructuration of the urban economy
and the globalisation of many metropolises.Focusing on the globalising impact of dis-
parities in both social structures and their
related urban textures, many have now moved
from the predominantly positivist basis of
the dual city formulation to a more critical
form of urban theory rooted in a multifac-
eted problematisation of inequality in cities
under contemporary socioeconomic condi-
tions.3
This approach to the dual city puzzlehas of course its roots in the post-1968 work
of radical and Marxist scholars who, aware
of the centrality of cities in a capitalist-led
global scenario, engaged with what Castells
(1977) called “the urban question” on the
city’s positioning, and thus the social proc-
esses underpinning not solely the geographi-
cal pull of the urban for humanity, but also
the functional ‘social content’ (Lefebvre,
1991) of the urban scale in respect to such
systems. This points us towards understand-
ing how the urbanisation of capital and the
socioeconomic restructuring of cities need an
appreciation of the separations inherent in
such globalising trends beyond income and
class stratification, as well as in relation to the
broader power-geometries of our time. This
contextualisation, in turn, prompts us to con-
sider the dynamics and dilemmas of unequalspatial organisation in the metropolis, mov-
ing from a ‘dual city’ view to a more complex
description of the multiplex urban divisions
of ‘quartered’ cities, to borrow from Marcuse’s
(1989) image, constituted by a multitude of
co-existent social divisions.
In the tradition set out by Harvey’s ever-popular Social Justice and the City (1976),
several scholars have to date been looking
at inequality through the lenses not solely
of social polarisation but also of its physical
manifestation through processes of urban
gentrification, spatial displacement and
locational redistribution These spatial effects
of globalisation and urbanisation have been
object of scrutiny of an influential studyby Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin
(2001), which has described this dissociat-
ing trend with the image of the ‘splintering
city’. Focusing specifically on infrastructural
developments, the authors underlined how
the networked nature of the metropolis is
being “unbundled in ways that help sustain
the fragmentation of the social and material
fabric of cities” (Graham and Marvin, 2001,p. 33). The contemporary urban condition
of global and globalising metropolises is
thus an increasingly unbundled one, char-
acterised by the emergence of widespread
“bypass strategies” targeted towards linking
“valued and powerful” users and places,
to elude less relevant urban areas and grid
the key functional elements of the city in
“premium networked spaces” (Graham and
Marvin, 2001, p. 139). This fragmentation and
rebundling of urban spaces, in turn, produces
the emergence of global enclaves in a vicious
cycle of urban splintering. Importantly for
our case, very little evidence has been found
in global and globalising cities to disprove
this consideration, as these post-industrial
metropolises have seen many of the splin-
tering processes described by these authors
unravelling through their structures in recentdecades. Although much of this discussion
concentrated on the testability of the thesis on
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2964 MICHELE ACUTO
wide ranges of settlements, a growing portion
of urban studies has embraced Graham and
Marvin’s consideration of the spatial differ-
entiation of urban textures under conditions
of neo-liberal globalisation. Post-industrialmetropolises, pivots of the latter, are certainly
the most prone amongst cities to this shat-
tering trend. Moreover, the ‘splintering city’
claim has the privilege of bringing back to
the centre stage of global city research the
materiality of the urban in its relationship
with the questions of inequality raised by the
dual city thesis.
The unequal socio-spatial restructurationsof the global city described by the splinter-
ing and dual theses are, in this sense, not just
a product of exogenous forces and purely
accidental social dynamics. As this literature
tells us, today’s post-industrial metropolises
are seeing a substantial amount of conscious
splintering, which is all the more mutually
reinforcing as cities copy each others’ models
and seek to surpass each others’ abilities toattract people, capital and flows. Inequality
can in fact be the result, if not the goal, of
deliberate socio-spatial strategies. This is
a consideration vividly represented, for
example, in Mike Davis’ popular depiction
of the sadistic ‘downtown war on the poor’
underpinning the 1980s reorganisation of Los
Angeles, as epitomised by the installation of
‘bumproof’ barrel-shaped bus benches and
overhead park sprinklers to prevent home-
less people from sleeping in ‘public areas’ of
the city (Davis, 1990). In this sense, we need
not to forget the materiality of the scalar
structuration of the metropolis, and its social
contradictions. Just as Norman Klein pointed
out in the case of the spectacular urbanism
of the Vatican and Las Vegas, “by decod-
ing scripted space, we learn how power [is]
brokered between the classes in the form ofspecial effects”, where some of the contem-
porary socio-spatial revolutions of the urban
age can become “gentle repression posing
as free will” (Klein, 2004, p. 11). Hence, by
considering the materiality of the global city
along with its global connectedness, we can
decipher the power geometries unfoldingnot solely amongst cities (as in the more
traditional ‘urban hierarchy’ approaches)
but also within these metropolises and how
these are connected to their positioning in the
world system through their entrepreneurial
governance.
The Contemporary Scholarship:Consolidation and Alternatives
At the dawn of the third millennium, after
nearly 80 years of world city scholarship,
the literature on this bewildering phenom-
enon had come a long way from the early
days of Geddes’ pioneering work. After
the establishment of key hypotheses on the
nature, function and internal changes of the
strategic sites of world affairs, it seemed timefor consolidation and development with
an eye to the upcoming century. It was this
spirit that pervaded the contributions of the
key authorities within this field: Friedmann
(1995) looked with confidence at the world
city ‘paradigm’ that, in his view, was robust
enough to prompt the scholarly analyses of
the years ahead; Peter Hall (1995) moved
‘towards a general urban theory’ by describ-
ing location, interplay and problems of an
hierarchical urban system dominated by
global cities and regional centres; Taylor, in
collaboration with urban geographer Paul
L. Knox, edited two landmark books for
systemic analysis, gathering many key views
in the college in the volume World Cities in
a World-system (Knox and Taylor, 1995) and
in its follow-up Cities in Globalization (Taylor
et al ., 2007). In the meantime, Castells (1998)completed his trilogy on the informational
society and Sassen (2001 and 2007) revisited
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FINDING THE GLOBAL CITY 2965
her thesis with an updated commentary on
New York, London and Tokyo, while also
moving towards a systematic analysis of flows,
sovereignty and territoriality for a new sociol-
ogy of globalisation.The ‘invisible college’ of world city scholars
also continued to grow in heterogeneity and
multidisciplinarity. British geographer Peter
Taylor, along with some of the ‘new’ voices
in this field such as Michael Hoyler, Kathy
Pain, Ben Derudder and James Faulconbridge,
responded to the many calls for a systematic
study of the world city system and established
the Globalisation and World Cities Network(GaWC) shortly after launching a related
pilot project at the Global Observatory of
Loughborough University. Underscoring
that this field seemed ‘to have drawn the
short straw when it comes to rigorous
research’, Taylor (1997) worked to establish
a monitoring group devoted to the study of
‘hierarchical tendencies amongst world cit-
ies’. To date, GaWC has probably producedthe most impressive collection of data on the
global city phenomenon available at large,
maintaining updated rankings of urban hier-
archies and an impressive database of world
city resources. The founders of this project
even contravened Friedmann’s original view,
according to which compiling a precise
hierarchy would have been a futile enterprise
due to the extreme variability of status with the
system. Disregarding such advice, Taylor and his
team set out to rank metropolises. First, the group
sought to depict a map of the global networked
relations of London vis-à-vis other urban settle-
ments, an approach that subsequently evolved
into a systematic inquiry into ‘world cityness’
across the globe by incorporating infrastruc-
tural approaches (Derudder, 2008; Taylor et al .,
2007) on the relevance of airline data, Internet
and telecommunications and other mobilityfeatures, as well as more complex tabulations
of advanced producer services.
Not surprisingly, GaWC found that the
usual suspects (Tokyo, London, Paris and New
York) scored the highest marks (Derudder et
al ., 2003). This taxonomy has been articulated
through various refinements, introducing acrucial distinction in 2005 between various
levels of ‘world cityness’, and thus compiling
a ranking of alpha, beta and gamma world
cities (Taylor et al ., 1999). This listing was
originally intended as an analytical device to
set out a map of global networks and inter-
city linkages, calculating a city’s status on the
basis of the presence of advanced producer
service firms. However, as with Friedmann’s1986 hypothesis, the study became a
‘must’ among the members of the invisible
college. GaWC—and Taylor in particular—
has recently returned to this early ranking
trend, revising and improving the data collec-
tion and clarifying the top echelons of ‘alpha’
global cities. Reworking the previous urban
hierarchy through this novel classification,
the GaWC has identified a constant ‘leadingduo’ at the top, comprising London and New
York (‘NYLON’). Nonetheless, as Taylor has
himself admitted
The GaWC method of measuring the world
city network produces theoretically informed,
empirically robust assessments of cities inglobalization. But it measures just one process
in city development: the servicing of global
capital (Taylor et al ., 2008).
Needless to say, this research note advocates
a widening of such an approach.
GaWC, for many years the only reference
available to scholars seeking datasets on the
world city phenomenon, has been trailed
by publications from private institutions
such as the Mori Memorial Foundation’s
Global Power City Index, Price Waterhouse
and Coopers ‘Cities of Opportunity’annual report, the Knight Frank ‘Wealth
Report’ in collaboration with CitiBank
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2966 MICHELE ACUTO
and the Mastercard ‘Worldwide Centers of
Commerce’ ranking, as well as more popular
outlets such as Foreign Policy Magazine. As
datasets and analytical eclecticism offered
by contemporary urban theorists were grow-ing exponentially, so was the availability of
case-specific (or region-specific) studies.
Geographers and urbanists across the globe
contributed to the sprawl of literature on
the global network of cities. Numerous new
‘classics’ joined Friedmann’s ‘invisible college’
with prominent studies, while the centre
of the attention gradually shifted towards
East Asia and its rising metropolises such asSingapore and Shanghai (Yeoh, 1999; Olds
and Yeung, 2004). In particular, a key trend
among contemporary scholars is a move
towards a more thorough engagement with
the globalising metropolises of the ‘global
South’ and their socio-spatial development—
a research trend heralded by the increasingly
broad scholarship on East Asia and, in primis,
on China (Friedmann, 2006).To this extent, experts in the field like
Michael Timberlake and Bob Jessop turned
their attention towards the East, follow-
ing the orientation that had characterised
Peter Hall’s first work on the world city. Yet,
Asia is not the only target of this analytical
widening. As demonstrated by the excellent
collection of essays Relocating Global Cities
(Amen et al., 2006), there is now a resonant
group of scholars engaged in studying and
theorising the ‘periphery’ and the processes
of world city formation taking place within
it. Likewise, there is also a growing number
of academics who present alternative views
on the global city. Allen Scott’s (2001) edited
volume Global City-regions, for instance,
embodies the difficulty of drawing defini-
tional boundaries and setting quantitative
limits to world cities, which often representflexible and protean social entities. In this
perspective, Scott proposes the ‘city-region’
rather than the metropolitan area, as an object
of analysis for the urban age. This approach
has developed into a strong component of
world city research, with broadening ties with
planning studies and an increasing focus onurban hierarchies (Pumain, 2006) and novel
forms of metropolitan organisation such as
Peter Hall and Kathy Pain’s (2006) work on
the “polycentric metropolis”.
Similarly, Michael Peter Smith put forward
the idea of ‘transnational urbanism’ underlin-
ing how the ‘global city’ is nothing but a social
construct that has been wrongly reified, thus
providing little advancement on the increas-ingly pressing issues of the global urban con-
dition, and reiterating the economicism that
biases this paradigm. He writes that
The quest for a fixed urban hierarchy should
be abandoned ... because of the multipleand often contradictory composition of the
[global] flows (Smith, 2001, pp. 54–58).
It should also be abandoned because of theerroneous unavoidability of social polarisa-
tion that the global city thesis inspires. Urban
studies, suggests Smith, should be reformed
in a transnational sense, stepping beyond
economic-centric explanations and offering
a real response to the challenges of the 21st
century.
On a somewhat analogous note, Doreen
Massey has returned to a direct engagement
with the study of the city as central place in
her critical account of London’s detrimen-
tal search for global status, fittingly titled
World City (2007). In this book, the British
geographer underscores how ‘the City’
has indiscriminately been supported in its
quest for primacy as a world city by those
who think it represents a golden goose and,
blindfolded by such an image, are unable
to see the deleterious effect of such a queston the rest of England. Massey, continuing
her tradition of relational understanding
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FINDING THE GLOBAL CITY 2967
of place, consequently promotes an ideal of
place interlinked with identity formation
and ethical responsibility, which currently
represents an almost unique stance in the
world city scholarship.
A Century of Scholarship
Having journeyed through the century years
of world city scholarship that took us to the
contemporary context of the urban age, it is
now time to look back and sketch an eclectic
working ground of the global city on the basis
of the lessons learned thus far, in order tosketch a concept that can speak outside the
‘invisible college’ to the many disciplines now
involved in the study of the reconfigurations
of the present world system. Let me proceed
in an orderly manner, briefly summing up the
core contributions hitherto identified.
We started with the Chicago School’s
important recognition of the city as a social
entity that transcends a simply aggregateunderstanding of urban relations. Through
the metropolis, social interactions are not
only summed up, but are also changed in a
mutually constitutive ‘dialogue’ between the
individual, the urban and the global. The
global city, in this light, becomes a socially
transformative milieu. Taking a step further,
we can recall Geddes’ and Hall’s specification:
not all cities are the same and some cities have
tighter ties with (and stronger influence on)
the rest of the globe. These strategic urbani-
ties represent the echelon of world cities—the
strategic sites of globalisation. To this extent,
world cities act as central places, gateways
for global and regional flows and sources
of specialised services for the wider public,
beyond their own localities. Consequently,
by connecting this conjecture to McKenzie’s
description of dominance in world organisa-tion, and its later form represented by Sassen’s
‘global control’ capabilities, we can portray
world cities as sites of global co-ordination.
Yet, as both Sassen and McKenzie acknowl-
edge, and as Castells reminds us, these cities’
power is a function of their connection with
those global networks upon which they exer-cise control, therefore making city and system
(seen in its social nature as underscored by
Wallerstein) part of the same structuration:
the city’s influence would not exist without
the thick web of social and material relations
within which it is embedded, but this latter
would not exist either if not for its units’
social action prompted by entrepreneurial
slants. As a direct consequence, it is possibleto identify an order of urban settlements
within such a system, since world cities carry
out different functions and different degrees
of relations, thus aligning in a world ‘urban
hierarchy’ which—due to its mobile basis—is
in constant flux. However, we encounter here
the first divergence with the classical literature
on this phenomenon. Friedmann originally
depicted these metropolises as “spatiallyorganized socioeconomic systems” that rep-
resent “places and sites rather than actors”
(Friedmann, 1995, p. 22). Contrarily to this,
the narrative of the world city depicted thus
far seems to indicate the opposite. Admitting
that certain cities (if not all cities) perform
functions, are capable of innovation and
retain degrees of control, implies, in my view,
a logical corollary: global cities, due to their
presence as loci of purposive action within
the global system and as articulators of global
flows, are not only places but also (entrepre-
neurial) participants in world affairs. They
directly, and very often consciously, maintain
as well as respatialise the world system as
they attempt to maintain their influence or
even enhance their status in it.4 This is fun-
damental because, if with global city status
come global problems such as polarisationand the splintering of urban textures, then
recognising the capacity of cities to act, and
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2968 MICHELE ACUTO
the deeply political nature of their positioning
within the power geometries of the present
world system, allows us to step beyond the
task of recognising their global relevance.
Equally, the picture painted by this criticalstance also sanctions the evolution of global
city scholarship towards an understanding of
the ‘strategic governance potential’ (Healey,
2004) of global cities with regard to issues of
inequality and transnational relations (Amin
and Thrift, 2005) and thus the direct capacity
of the global city to affect inequality, mobility,
international relations and, more generically,
the social and material geographies of theworld system.
The Global City: Finding anEclectic Model
Global cities are thus more than just national
or regional gateways: they are connected to
the widest possible tier of human interactions
and they represent the highest echelon of theglobal urban hierarchy of cities around the
planet. A global city is a type of world city
that exists not solely as an articulatory site of
planetary and regional urban networks, but
also as a functional entity of those globalising
processes of ‘time/space compression’ that
are reconfiguring the geography of social
relations and resulting in a ‘multifaceted
transformation of the parameters of the
human condition’ (Bauman, 1998). It is, quite
simply, in an epoch dominated by capitalism
and growing interconnectedness, a strategic
hinge of globalisation.
More specifically, the global city scholarship
highlighted thus far rests on five essential
features. Accordingly, a global city can be
characterised as a social (urban) entity that
—serves as an articulatory node of globalflows;
—performs multiple and significant world
city functions;
—contains central command roles within such
functions;
—maintains an urban order that balances
aggregation and dispersion; and
—projects such order towards the globalthrough entrepreneurial activities.
This typology implies that every global city
is a world city (but not vice versa) and that
the articulatory role typical of the latter is
performed by the former on a global scale.5
Understanding the difference between ‘glo-
bal’ and ‘world’ cities, which I interpret here
following Sassen’s orientation, is thus a matter
of deeper analytical inquiry and lesser degree
of generalisation. As hinted at by, among
others, Peter Taylor (2004), ‘global cities’ are
nothing but ‘world cities’ with more specific
characteristics. Global city status will be then
attained through the capacity to control
and rearticulate through global networks a
significant number of these. Importantly,
these latter can originate in the city, or
‘traverse’ it, as the urban becomes a facilitatorfor other entities to reach global significance.
Global cities, in this view, become ‘obligatory
passage points’ (Callon, 1986) of manifold
planetary networks, thus occupying a privi-
leged (‘strategic’, as Sassen would put it) posi-
tion in the unfolding of daily relations across
the globe. The global city’s agency, just like
its status, is a “precarious, contingent effect,
achieved only by continuous performanceand only for the duration of that perform-
ance” (Bingham, 1996, p. 647). Cities, to put
it simply, are global hinges as long as they
perform articulatory functions globally;
otherwise, they simply represent nodes in a
world-wide web of social relations.
In this sense, defining global cities as those
metropolises that attain a privileged position-
ing in the complex of globalisation proc-esses underpinning the 21st century means
stepping beyond much of the ‘economicism’
(a shorthand for ‘economic determinism’)
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FINDING THE GLOBAL CITY 2969
typical of world city research that, as Pierre
Bourdieu observed in relation to the social
sciences more generally, should be held
accountable for “leading one to reduce the
social field, a multi-dimensional space, solelyto the economic field” (Bourdieu, 1985,
p. 723). This of course does not mean that
financial and economic functions are to be
dismissed. On the contrary, in an era of pro-
found capitalist globalzation, business-related
activities still hold a supremacy in the hierar-
chy of networks running through the Earth
and thus in defining the core hinges of globali-
sation. A roster of key global financial centresmight indeed give us a good approximation of
which cities occupy crucial positions in these
time/space compression processes. Yet, as
much as globalisation is not solely economic,
its engines will perform and control many
more networks than those of global finance.
Recalling the descriptions offered by many
urbanists ranging from Peter Hall to John
Friedmann and Peter Taylor, ‘global city func-tions’ will thus also include roles as centres
of political power, gateways for trade and
commerce (with ports, airports, railways,
commercial routes, etc.), gathering and dis-
semination focal points for information and
culture (with major academic institutions,
museums, Internet servers and providers,
mass media with global reach, etc.), primary
sites of religious cults and hubs for global
mobility and/or tourism. Although top-tier
performances in these criteria are presently
regarded as key indicators of global city
status, their relevance and order, like the
urban hierarchies they support, are in con-
stant flux. They should not be considered as
a definitive checklist for global city status,
nor should their relative importance be
treated as spatially and historically fixed.
The task of empirically quantifying the vari-ous aggregations of these factors is certainly
beyond the reach and scope of this study
(if not of any study), therefore requiring
a certain degree of dependence on the remark-
able work developed by the network analy-
sis projects such as GaWC in the UK, the
Institute for Urban Strategies in Japan orPriceWaterhouseCoopers in New York, in
order to identify global city rankings. Yet this
must be done with the consciousness that new
and relevant services can be developed by
innovative central places at any time, reshuf-
fling the pecking order of the hierarchies and
substituting more classical functions in their
global centrality. Hence, we must not forget
that, as McKenzie intuitively described in1927, the centres of gravity for world affairs
are in a constant process of change and rea-
lignment. Entrepreneurial spirit is thus what
is indispensable for global cities to maintain
their advantaged position among the global
urban hierarchy.
To this extent, global cities are not merely
the result of flows, but also their primary
engines, and would not otherwise exist if notas a part of global networks of strategic sites.
The global city concept, in this view, allows
for a step beyond the dialectic of structure
and agency that has long dominated much of
the social sciences: the city network becomes
a relation of structuration, where the two are
not separated elements of the global scenario,
but mutually constitutive facets in the world-
wide processes of mobility, socialisation and
globalisation.6 ‘Global city’ thus provides us
with an analytical ‘device’ to detect the par-
ticularity of a locality as an element of the
new (global) socio-spatial order (Sassen, 2007,
p. 122), thus grounding all of the process
thinking inspired by globalisation and urbani-
sation in a ‘thing’—as Harvey (1996, p. 435)
would say—of concrete proportions and
everyday dimensions.
This is a crucial move because, as JohnAllen (2003) reminds us à propos the social
sciences in general, many disciplines have
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2970 MICHELE ACUTO
lost the sense in which geography, both
human and physical, makes a difference to
the exercise of power—especially in an age
of globalisation where said geography can be
twisted at unprecedented extremes. To thisextent, identifying global cities is thus not
solely an urbanist exercise, but also a very
political attempt concerned with localising
the ‘whereabouts of power’ (Allen, 2004) in
today’s global architecture. While finding
power itself, as a relational effect of human
relations, might prove to be an impossible
task if not reduced to the sole possession of
capabilities, studying global cities will allowus to reach a better understanding of the
spatial arrangement of power by focusing on
its relational alignments and therefore placing
its practice in a variable world system.
The objective here is thus not to attain a
perfect and everlasting definition, but to offer
a critical analytical tool for novel and political
inquiries into the complexities of the nature
of that exceptional phenomenon representedby the global city. Certainly, as David Bell once
rightly noted, the test of this renewed concept’s
worth “comes in its application to the analysis of
real problems” (Bell, 1975, p. 70). Indeed, there
is very little scope in defining metropolises for
the mere sake of ranking; rather, we should seek
to broaden eclectically our understanding of
what global cities are because an appreciation
of these as strategic sites of globalisation and
active (entrepreneurial) participants in world
affairs opens up immense practical opportuni-
ties. Global cities, understood as innovative,
engaging and competitive agents, might present
much of the contemporary international
scholarship with a solution to those hotly
debated ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel and Webber,
1973)—such as climate change or human secu-
rity—that steps beyond the state-centrism of
the classic social sciences. Metropolises shouldthus be tackled beyond the economicism that
fuels most of the world city literature, with
a focus on how these cities are fundamental
elements of the global scenario not solely for
their networking role, but also for their capac-
ity to shape what humanity looks like in the
21st century. Looking back to the story of the‘invisible college’ is, to this extent, not solely an
analytical exercise, but a necessary endeavour
to come to the realisation of the incredible pos-
sibilities that global cities can offer to the key
questions of our time. In this case, finding the
global city does not mean coming to the end
of our journey. Rather, it is the beginning of a
new practice of urban and international affairs.
As Henry Miller famously put it
One’s destination is never a place but rather
a new way of looking at things (Miller,1957, p. 25).
Notes
1. The title of his paper epitomises this historicistworld system perspective: “The system of
world cities, A.D. 800–1975”.2. Equally important for this mutual social/material relationship is also the developmentof King’s scholarship on the sociologicalprocesses underpinning architecture andspatialisation in world cities (see for example,King, 2004).
3. See for example, the formulation of ‘criticalurban theory’ collected in a recent specialissue of CITY (see Brenner et al., 2009).
4. I have elsewhere tackled the discussion on the
role of global cities as ‘actors’ in more detail(Acuto, 2009 and 2010).
5. In this, I diverge from Sassen’s considerationthat certain urban agglomerates might be ‘globalcities’ but not ‘world cities’ on the grounds thatthe former necessarily require articulationfunctions (of services, capital, information,people or goods) in order to exercise globalcontrol (Sassen, 2001, pp. 348–349).
6. Such mutuality is so accentuated that somescholars, such as Peter Taylor, have tracedthe rationale of the city in its interconnectednature—networks might be the starting-pointto understand cities (Taylor, 2001).
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FINDING THE GLOBAL CITY 2971
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