Introduction

The final decades of the last century saw a profound shift in thinking about large-scale economic process: the traditional idea of ‘international economy’ was challenged by the concept of ‘global economy’. Much more than a semantic tweak, the new terminology implies a reassessment of states as the key institution for understanding contemporary economic change. In these more ‘transnational times’, other players come to the fore, notably ‘multinational corporations’ morphing into ‘global corporations’ but also major cities reinterpreted as ‘global cities’. Such changes are commonly known as globalization, a keyword that has dominated much thinking about living in the twenty-first century and what it portends. Our focus in Volume I is on cities in globalization, a specific selection of readings that showcase the global and world city literatures with particular reference to research and debates on the basic economic meaning of cities today.