Introduction

From the moment the term was initially coined, world cities have been associated with the concentration of power and wealth within a global context (Geddes 1968; Hall 1966). Such centres; ‘cities with international destinies’, have always been at the core of the world economy (Braudel 1984). During the tumultuous decades following 1960, changes in the organization of international economic activity and in the nature of advanced corporate and financial services have prompted scholars to identify a system of world cities that appear to operate as global nodes for international business decision-making and corporate strategy formulation (Cohen 1981). This international urban system has been recognized in the world city hypothesis as a hierarchy of urban places ranked on the basis of their integration with the world economy. At the apex of the hierarchy are the global cities: sites of rapidly increasing concentrations of corporate power, international finance, and higher-order producer services (Friedmann 1986).

Although its principal exponents have always insisted that the world city concept was not a theory but a hypothesis in need of empirical verification, the world city idea, and its associated assumptions about the nature of urban development, has been absorbed rapidly into the lexicon of urban studies. This in itself should occasion little surprise; the concept has provided a useful heuristic for those struggling to conceptualize the complex linkages of the new global economy.

My purpose in this chapter is to go some way to redressing two imbalances in the current literature about world cities. Specifically, I want first to focus not so much on the global as upon the local. In particular, I want to focus upon how large cities — some of which may be world cities however we define them — are administered and governed. All too often structures of city governance are either taken as a ‘given’, or are ignored altogether. They are almost never looked at in a comparative perspective although, importantly, the ‘politics of urban planning and development’ is included as one of the six themes in an SSRC collaborative investigation of New York, London, Paris and Tokyo (Mollenkopf 1993). In short, I want to put politics and government back into the world cities agenda.

The second imbalance I wish to address is the failure of much contemporary work to look seriously and systematically at large cities and at world cities in less developed contexts. As I have complained elsewhere (Ward 1993), so much urban analysis ignores the experiences and processes occurring in those contexts, despite the fact that this is where urbanization is occurring most dramatically, and that these centres are frequently the production loci for the so-called new international division of labour (Morris and Lowder 1992).

The studies that have been stimulated by John Friedmann's world cities hypothesis have been largely contemporary in nature, the chief exception being Anthony King's (1990) work on London as an imperial city. This general concern for the present is no accident and represents the derivation of the original study from Friedmann's initiative in linking urban hierarchies to the ‘new international division of labour’ (Fröbel et al. 1980). Studies of the latter argued that the world economy was entering a new era with the relocation of industrial production to the Third World, with world cities acting as the basing points of capital in this new globalized organization of production. However, the basic assumption of a social discontinuity between the present and what has gone before is in contradiction with the overall framework that world-systems analysis is sometimes thought to provide for world city studies. For this theoretical schema the emphasis is on a basic structural continuity in a single capitalist world-economy that can be traced back to around 1500 (Wallerstein 1983). Here I will approach the study of world cities from an explicitly world-systems perspective, which means, minimally, setting contemporary world cities into their longue durée context. If there are any benefits to be gained from this exercise it is likely that they will be two-way: as well as extending concern for world cities beyond their contemporary existence we will be focusing on the role of cities in the world-economy, a topic relatively neglected in world-systems analysis (the work of Fernand Braudel (1984) is a major exception).

At one time a beneficiary of tariffs which encouraged the formation of an import substitution manufacturing zone in southern Ontario, Toronto's subsequent rise to world city status has been based on the city's disproportionate national share of business and commercial services. Growing out of the intensive manufacturing of the Fordist era, the city's globally oriented service sector is the legacy of a now defunct Keynesian interventionism that sought to promote national economic development through a comprehensive industrial policy. This chapter explores the recent transformation of Toronto to the status of a world city by examining these sectoral shifts and the long-standing and pivotal role of finance capital in the national economy. The emergence of a new economic space of predominantly finance-based accumulation has coincided with the cultural transformation of the city through increased international and internal migration, and has provoked conflict over the direction of local economic development.

David Gordon (1988) reminds us that the historical process of the integration of the world economy is far from complete. But as many observers have noted, there has been a considerable expansion of the global circulation and investment of capital and of the movement of migrant populations (Sassen 1988, 1991; Stafford 1992). These phenomena can be connected to the period of almost continuous economic crisis that began in the 1970s and which spurred foreign direct investment (FDI) and saw the rise of competing industrial capitals in the newly industrialized countries (NICs).

Introduction

In this chapter I want to address a number of issues: the notion of the world or global city as a representation; the location and context within which this representation has been constructed and circulated; whether the concept represented by the terms ‘world city’ and ‘global city’ is the same and the terms interchangeable, or whether each signals a different set of assumptions and contextual presuppositions with which the object is defined.

If, for the present, we accept that there is indeed some reality which the term ‘world city’ represents, I want to look at this principally as a cultural space and see what recent work in social and cultural theory suggests about it, and how this theory might be deployed to say something about the spaces and built environments of the world city. What is the significance of such a world city as a real or potential site for the construction of new cultural and political identities, or for processes of cultural transformation in general? And what relevance might it have, either for the persistence or modification of existing local, regional, or national identities and cultures, or alternatively, for the construction of new transnational ones? Let me begin by clarifying the terms I have introduced.

In March 1993, less than a month before the World Cities in a World-System conference, a full-page advertisement in the New York Times asked rhetorically why the Japanese transnational corporation Nissan Shatai is trying to evict eighty ethnic Korean families from the village of Utoro near Kyoto in Japan. The villagers are descendants of conscripted labourers brought from Korea during the Second World War. Despite having lived in Japan for decades, the family members cannot vote and suffer discrimination of the sort that faces immigrant workers in many countries. The land on which their homes stand was sold by Nissan to developers in 1987, and efforts have been made to clear the site since then. With its cross-national message — written in English by ethnic Koreans living in Japan, addressed to American car buyers — this advertisement constitutes a powerful metaphor for our chapter.

By taking their plight to the readers of the New York Times, the Koreans blur familiar concepts: global, local, foreign, and domestic. Although this is a local — even parochial — story (how many readers of the advertisement could even locate Kyoto on a map of South-east Asia?), it possesses global veracity, as the organized racism leading to brutal attacks on ‘guest-workers’ in Germany indicates.

Last November in the Mississippi Delta, William White, an African-American tractor driver on the old Miley Plantation, harvested a few hundred acres of cotton. Several months later in the Los Angeles downtown garment district, a man's dress shirt was made from some of this same cotton. Rosa Gomez, an undocumented Guatemalan immigrant put the final stitches into the shirt, operating a state-of-the-art Japanese-produced sewing machine. Ms Gomez had recently arrived in Los Angeles, only one month after her family fled economic deprivation and political terror in the barrios of Guatemala City. They left their homeland about the same time that the cotton was being harvested near Clarksdale, Mississippi. Now the Guatemalan seamstress completed the shirt in a cramped, hot, noisy factory employing about thirty other Latino men and women, run by Mr Su-Hoon Kim, himself an immigrant from Korea. Mr Kim's factory is located in a high-rise building owned by an Anglo family that has long been part of the Los Angeles political élite. Mr Kim, one of a dozen small Asian-American subcontractors in this building, makes shirts for a major US sportswear company which markets them under its brand name at malls and department stores across North America, and exports them under its label to Europe and Japan.

As an interlocking system of production and markets, the global economy is a discovery of the 1970s (Barnet and Müller 1974). At the time there was a good deal of controversy over the so-called ‘new international division of labour’ (Fröbel et al. 1980) and a centuries-old ‘world system’ (Wallerstein 1974). Research paradigms were being born.

The significance of these theoretical developments for the study of urbanization was not recognized until the early 1980s (Cohen 1981; Friedmann and Wolff 1982). Ten years have passed since then, and this chapter is an attempt to survey what we have learned and to assess where we stand in the study of world cities. I begin with a discussion of some conceptual issues: what is the ‘theoretical object’ of world cities research? How shall we define the elusive notion of world city? I then launch into an extended review of the literature, including theoretical developments in the 1980s and empirical studies in the early 1990s. The third section takes a closer look at the notion of a structured hierarchy of world cities and argues the need to remain ever alert to economic and political changes that may lead to the rise and fall of world cities that are linked to each other in ‘antagonistic co-operation’.

Place and production in the global economy

One of the central concerns in my work has been to look at cities as production sites for the leading service industries of our time, and hence to recover the infrastructure of activities, firms, and jobs that is necessary to run the advanced corporate economy. Specialized services are usually understood in terms of specialized outputs rather than the production process involved. A focus on the production process in service industries allows us (a) to capture some of the locational characteristics of these industries; and (b) to examine the proposition that there is a producer services complex which, while catering to corporations, has distinct locational and production characteristics. It is this producer services complex more so than headquarters of firms generally that benefits and often needs a city location.

We see this dynamic for agglomeration operating at different levels of the urban hierarchy, from the global to the regional. At the global level, a key dynamic explaining the place of major cities in the world economy is that they concentrate the infrastructure and the servicing that produce a capability for global control. The latter is essential if geographic dispersal of economic activity — whether factories, offices, or financial markets — is to take place under continued concentration of ownership and profit appropriation.

This book is an outcome of a conference that we organized in 1993 on World Cities in a World-System. Held at the Center for Innovative Technology, adjacent to Dulles International Airport, near Washington DC, the conference brought together a group of speakers and an audience with a very broad range of perspectives on world cities. We were very pleased with the outcome. The phenomenon of world-city formation has raised a number of important theoretical issues and practical questions that all benefit from a wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary dialogue. This volume is based on a selection of the papers that were presented at the conference. Both the conference and this volume are the result of the contributions of many individuals. We would particularly like to thank John Friedmann for his organizational help and his gracious consent to our use of his work as both a focus and a foil. Ian Watson provided invaluable contributions both as a research assistant and conference organizer. The College of Architecture and Urban Studies and the Department of Urban Affairs and Planning at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University provided financial support.

Introduction

In the decade since John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff (1982) launched the world city hypothesis with their ‘agenda for research and action’ on what one might call the political economy of the global urban system, much attention has been focused on the still smallish group of global control centres of the world economy. The hypothesis itself stimulated a fair level of academic work and debate, although somewhat less than might have been hoped in view of the increasingly intense integration of the world capitalist system. Moreover, this system is structured by inequality between immense power and profound weakness, in which vast wealth coexists with, and depends on, deepening immiseration and marginalization within world cities as much as any other class of city or territorial unit. In the words of Friedmann and Wolff (1982: 322):

The phenomenon of ‘globalization’, itself necessarily now the subject of intense debate, more nuanced conceptualization, and more refined application (e.g. King 1991; Robertson 1992), has heightened awareness of the increasing concentration of formative political, economic, social, and cultural processes and practices on a world scale.

Evidence of the globalization of the world economy is everywhere, from supermarket shelves to clothes tags. Similarly, the dominance of a relatively small number of cities within world affairs is continually scrolled through newcasts, business reports, and popular media. At face value, there is nothing very special in this: it is widely accepted as part of the conventional wisdom about the state of the world today. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals both the globalization of the economy and its associated patterns of urbanization to involve much more than meets the eye in the supermarket or on the television news. Both rest on a complex web of interdependent and quite stealthy processes that are, collectively, of fundamental importance to the political economy of contemporary societies. In this book, the nature of world cities and their relationships with one another and with the world economy are examined within various conceptual frameworks and analysed at several spatial scales. This chapter introduces the major themes of the book, setting them within the context of different perspectives on globalization and on world cities.

Perspectives on globalization

During the 1970s and 1980s there was an important shift from an international to a more global economy. In the international economy goods and services are traded across national boundaries by individuals and firms from different countries, and the trade is closely regulated by sovereign nation-states.

Introduction

Much of the literature generated out of the powerful ‘world cities hypothesis’ (more accurately, a set of complex and suggestive hypotheses) framed by Friedmann and Wolff (1982) and Friedmann (1986, see appendix) has tended to emphasize similarities among world cities, attributing these congruencies to global changes in economic organization, labour flows, and finance capital. Sassen (e.g. 1988) has made significant contributions to this new literature by examining the flows of capital and labour between countries of the Third World and the largest American cities, and her most recent book (1991) has highlighted similarities in such historically and culturally divergent settings as New York, London, and Tokyo, attributing them to the global processes of economic restructuring and the impact of transnational finance capital and the ‘trade’ in money.

In the past decade there have also been some excellent studies of the effects of global economic restructuring on specific world cities. On New York, for example, there is, in addition to Sassen (1989), the article by Ross and Trachte (1983) and a book edited by Mollenkopf and Castells (1991). Early on, Soja, Morales, and Wolff (1983) tried to trace the effects of the international economy on Los Angeles; and Allardice et al. (1988) and Squires et al. (1987) have published somewhat less satisfying studies of the changing economy of Chicago.

Introduction

The world city paradigm posits a distinct role for certain cities in articulating regional and national economies in the global system (Friedmann 1986). World cities develop hierarchical relationships that rise and fall over time according to their control and mediary functions in the system. As commanding nodes in the world economy, world cities are defined by dense patterns of interaction between people, goods, and information. A rapidly expanding and sophisticated global network of transport services and infrastructure facilitates this interaction. In turn, the globalization of finance, production, labour, service, cultures, and information has given impetus to, and has helped to shape, extraordinary advances in transport provision. Thus, the role of transport in the evolving world city system is both crucial and fundamental.

Although much research has addressed world city formation and the genesis, growth, and change of the world city system, we still do not have a clear appreciation and understanding of either the dynamics or the role of transport in shaping world cities. Few studies have examined theoretically or empirically how, why, or where transport linkages function in the world city system. Moreover, little attention has been paid to the way control and mediary functions of world cities are helping to shape global, regional, and local transport networks and services.