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The global city

chapter
posted on 2014-09-12, 13:49 authored by Ben Derudder, Peter J. Taylor, Michael HoylerMichael Hoyler, Frank Witlox
The concept of the “global city” was invented in the 1990s by Saskia Sassen to describe a new type of city that specialized in transnational relations. Initially, the focus was on London, New York, and Tokyo, but the idea was soon generalized by the sociologist Manuel Castells to include a broader range of cities that formed the nodes and hubs in his interpretation of contemporary society as a “network society.” This notion was then expanded to suggest the existence of a “world city network,” emphasizing the global scope of the services offered by contemporary cities. What we now call globalization originated from the combining of the computer and communication industries in the 1970s, which enabled new levels of worldwide contact and organization. This “shrinking” of the world has had profound implications economically, politically, and culturally. One unforeseen effect has been the increasing importance of cities. Although it was initially thought that globalization would reduce the functional importance of cities, the increased worldwide dispersal of human activities has in fact generated new organizational demands to manage, service, and generally facilitate the intensification of global relations.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Published in

Atlas of Cities

Pages

106 - 123

Citation

DERUDDER, B. ... et al., 2014. The global city. IN: Knox, P. (ed.) Atlas of Cities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 106 - 123.

Publisher

Princeton University Press © Ivy Press Limited

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

Closed access. This is a chapter from the book, Atlas of Cities [Princeton University Press © Ivy Press Limited]. The publisher's website is at: http://press.princeton.edu/ Note that the repository version of the chapter contains the text but not the maps.

ISBN

978-0-691-15781-8

Language

  • en

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