World Cities

Historical Development of the Term

Although the term world city was used by Goethe, its meaning differed from today's conception of a world city, as it then signified a place of political and cultural importance. World city research in the contemporary study of geography focuses strongly on economic processes, although political, cultural, and social processes inform some aspects of the research. Moreover, the research is strongly shaped by disciplines other than geography, especially urban planning and sociology.

In the 20th century, Patrick Geddes also used the term world city in his book Cities in Evolution, which was published in 1915. However, the [Page 3127][Page 3128]British urban planner Peter Hall provided the first systematic analysis of world cities in 1966, when he published his book The World Cities. Hall analyzed seven cities, which were of overwhelming economic importance in the world economy at the time, but he focused on their internal structures and organization as well as national and regional roles, with relatively little attention to linkages between these world cities. Understanding world cities as part of a network of world cities did not happen until the 1980s, when researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, among them the urban planner John Friedmann, published their hypothesis of a world city network. This reorientation in world city research was a direct response to changes in the world economy since roughly the 1970s, which saw a shift from Fordist production methods to more decentralized and flexible methods as well as a reduction in trade barriers and increased economic globalization.

Figure 1 Global and world cities

Source: Map created by the author. Taxonomy based on Taylor, P. J. (2005). Leading world cities: Empirical evaluations of urban nodes in multiple networks. Urban Studies 42(9), 1593–1608.

A further major development in world city research came in the early 1990s, when the sociologist Saskia Sassen published The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. One of the major contributions of that book was the identification of producer services as command-and-control functions in the world economy. Producer services have subsequently become and continue to be a core analytical component of world city research. The label “global city” was intended to mark a conceptual difference from “world city,” in that a global city is not merely a dominant city in the world but the processes articulated in it are truly global intercity linkages. Various rankings of a world city network were produced using producer services as an analytical cornerstone. This work was significantly advanced by the geographer Peter Taylor and the Globalization and World City (GaWC) Research Group founded in the late 1990s at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom.

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