Reconsidering the global city debate

This study addresses the global city debate, in which much has been said, but little is known. This debate revolves around the impact of economic globalization on urban labour markets in the advanced economies, and was initiated by Saskia Sassen's global city theoretical framework. This framework was first published in 1991 in The Global City. New York, London, Tokyo. However, the arguments from which it was built can be found in earlier work on this subject (Sassen-Koob, 1984a, 1984b, 1985, 1986; Sassen, 1988), and it has remained unchanged to date (Sassen, 2001, 2006a, 2007, 2012). Sassen deemed that the integration of these arguments into an all-encompassing framework was necessary because, as the quote above reveals, the old concepts by which ‘sociologists have tended to study cities (…) are no longer sufficient’ (Sassen, 1994: xiii) when it comes to understanding the impact of the current phase of economic globalization on the social and economic reality of contemporary cities.

Although this framework was initially formulated to explain how the current phase of economic globalization has altered the economic base and labour markets of New York, London, and Tokyo, as the subtitle reveals, its scope has widened considerably, to say the least. In the first place, the number of global cities has increased from this initial triad to ‘about 40’ in 2006 (Sassen, 2006a: 142, 2006c: 315), and ‘about seventy worldwide’ in 2012 (Sassen, 2012: 7). Secondly, and more important for the issue addressed in this study, the global city theoretical framework has now evolved into ‘an analytical construct that allows one to detect the global as it is filtered through the specifics of a place’ (Sassen, 2006c: x; italics added). As such, it has inspired dozens of studies on the impact of economic globalization on hundreds of urban labour markets in the advanced economies, which range from the usual suspects like New York to cities much lower down the urban hierarchy.