World City

The term world city was used first by Patrick Geddes in Cities in Evolution (1915) to illustrate urban growth and conurbations in city-regions outside of Great Britain. In this book, Paris, Berlin, and New York were mentioned for their growing suburbs, and other cities, such as Dusseldorf and Pittsburgh, also drew his interest.

The term was reintroduced and given a new meaning in Peter Hall's The World Cities (1966). Hall identified seven world cities or regions—namely, [Page 967]London, Paris, Randstad (Holland), Rhine-Ruhr, Moscow, New York, and Tokyo—where a disproportionate share of the world's most important business was conducted. Hall pointed to political power and trade, including transportation, banking, and finance, as factors that separated the world cities from other great centers of population and wealth. Given that the formation and evolution of national urban systems was a paramount research topic in urban studies during the 1960s, Hall's work was seminal for identifying the world's most politically and economically powerful metropolitan regions. However, he focused more on their growth and urban problems than on the connections or competition among them.

Academic attention to the concept of world cities literally exploded after John Friedmann's (1986) now-classical essay titled “The World City Hypothesis.” Friedmann's argument was built on ideas formulated by R. B. Cohen and John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff that situated major cities within the international division of labor. While arguing for a new research framework in which urbanization processes are linked to global economic forces, Friedmann defined world cities as basing points for global capital in the spatial organization and articulation of production and markets; sites with expanding sectors attached to corporate headquarters, international finance, global transport and communications, and high-level business services; major sites for the concentration and accumulation of international capital; and points of destination for large numbers of both domestic and international migrants. Based on these criteria, he identified 30 world cities and classified them into four hierarchical categories. His list of world cities of the first rank included London and Paris in Western Europe; New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles in North America; and Tokyo in Asia.

In a subsequent article, “Where We Stand: A Decade of World City Research” (1995), Friedmann proposed a slightly changed global urban hierarchy with only London, New York, and Tokyo at the top. Below these top global financial articulations, multinational articulations (e.g., Miami, Los Angeles, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Singapore), important national articulations (e.g., Paris, Zurich, Mexico City, Seoul, and Sydney), and subnational/ regional articulations (e.g., Osaka-Kobe, Seattle, Chicago, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Milan, and the Rhine-Ruhr region) were identified in accordance with the economic power they were alleged to command.

Friedmann's definition of world cities has been widely accepted in urban studies. Nonetheless, modifications have been suggested. For example, some scholars have added cosmopolitan cultures and immigrant communities as distinctive features of world cities. Yet, few major changes have been made. While his definition and list of world cities have survived academic scrutiny, the research methods that Friedmann and his followers, called collectively the World City School, used in identifying and ranking cities have been questioned extensively.

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