World Cities

World Cities

In his 1915 work Cities in Evolution, Patrick Geddes introduced the term world cities to refer to the worlds' largest cities, their economic importance, and, very briefly, the relationship between these important cities. However, it was Peter Hall's 1966 The World Cities that launched the term into the mainstream. By comparing the attributes of cities such as such as London, Paris, New York, and Tokyo, Hall situates these cities atop an urban hierarchy. Hall sees world cities as being the centers of national and international politics, trade, financial services, education, communication, culture, and technology. Unlike the work of more contemporary authors, Hall's world cities are inextricably linked to the nations in which they are located. Thus, world cities act as the gates through which goods and services flow as they leave and enter the country, with these city hubs allowing host nations to promote national interests both within the country and internationally. Hall's notion of power is not related to some cities directly controlling other cities, but rather to powerful states using their biggest and most important cities to influence the economic, cultural, and political development of less powerful states.

World City Hypotheses

While Geddes and Hall got the world city ball rolling by introducing rankings, the transformation from thinking about cities as tools of their host states to considering the role of world cities in the emerging global economy began with the work of Canadian neo-Marxist economist Stephen Hymer. Writing in response to the rise of multinational corporations, in 1972 Hymer suggested that multinational corporations need to conduct much of their business in person. As such, corporation headquarters were, and would become, increasingly located in major cities so as to be close to important government, media, and economic decision makers. As these top international business leaders began to congregate, a world city system would also start to rise, dominated by New York, London, Paris, Bonn, and Tokyo. For Hymer, these world cities are powerful because they contain a large number of corporate leaders who set the goals and directions of the global economy independent of the goals of the host nation-state. It is crucial to note that Hyman, like all later theorists, does not claim that cities are single entities with distinct preference sets, but rather that some cities contain more decision-making corporate leaders. Thus decisions about the global economy are made in[Page 719]London and New York rather than by London and New York.

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