Global Cities

The term global city has come to connote a unique urban habitat acting as a portal and stage for world connectivity. It bestows an image that is contemporary, international, multicultural, “wired,” cosmopolitan, congested, polarizing, and commanding geographically boundless (transterritorial) spheres of influence. Global cities are known for their inspiring built environments where art meets function and for their centrality in world affairs. As standard bearers of postmodern lifestyles and consumption, global cities contain the principal command centers for managing world commerce, the nexus of intercultural immersion, world-renowned research campuses, and world stages for art and entertainment. Most also are distinguished as global “gateways” harboring major airports and “load-center” seaports.

As shown by Herman Boschken (2008), the term is anchored in a collective multidimensional vision that empirically describes and sets apart the global city as a complex system stemming from numerous post–World War II changes in world order (1960– present). This global reordering specifically resulted from a cumulative process involving a three-stage, partly overlapping sequence of economic, sociological, and political transformations.

The first stage (starting about 1960) involved the separation of production and consumption on an immense international scale. Through a highly competitive system of remote multinational production sites controlled and coordinated by a new fiscal and logistical command structure, this economic stage originally appeared as a concentration of consumption on American soil offset by a global dispersion of supply (albeit skewed to the Pacific Rim). In addition, as noted by Herman Boschken (1988), it fostered a global maritime transportation infrastructure centered on a few predominately urban load-center seaports distributed worldwide.

This economic stage eventually yielded some visibility to a second transformation (starting in the 1970s) sparked by a revolution in information and media technologies. It materialized as a symbols-driven cosmopolitan consumption, which concentrated on urban entertainment “scenes” and postmodern interest in cultural immersion. The “global lifestyle” had arrived and brought with it mushrooming demand for culturally significant goods from all over the world and a host of quality-of-life urban services, as well as the free movement of foreigners, information, and ethnic lifestyles across national borders.

More recently, these two stages appear to have given ground to a third transformation (starting in the 1980s) involving a realignment of urban politics founded on a new political culture of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism. Inherently urbane, cultural adherents became politically important constituencies in those cities where their collective aspirations for world-class status orchestrated a renaissance in urban development designed for high global connectivity.

Viewed as caldrons of contemporary globalization, global cities today exhibit a developmental process now spanning fifty years and paralleling that of the three-stage transformations. That is, in a highly discriminating fashion, “globalization can [Page 664]be deconstructed in terms of the strategic sites where global processes materialize” (Sassen 1998, 392) and are grounded in what “geographically-situated people do” (Smith and Timberlake 2001, 1657). Global cities have emerged incrementally by brewing and incorporating numerous economic, social, and political forces of a globalizing world.

They also emerged under American influence since the three-stage transformations followed a certain temporal and geographic ordering that, until recently, placed the United States at the center of contemporary globalization and of global-city design and imitation. Moreover, certain North American cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, Philadelphia, and Miami) appeared to be more central and instrumental to globalization's transformational stages than other North American cities.

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