Territory, the State and Urban Politics by Andrew Wood Andrew Jonas

Author:Andrew Wood, Andrew Jonas [Andrew Wood, Andrew Jonas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409484745
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2013-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

Revisiting World and Global City Theory and its Critiques: A ‘Coxian’ Perspective

Whilst New York, Paris, London and Tokyo have a long history of urbanization and have long been at the heart of an abundant literature on the urban, since the mid-1980s they have been redefined and understood by a number of scholars as a new ‘type’ of cities called ‘world’ or ‘global cities’, which are characterized by their very high concentration of the world’s advanced producer services, in particular financial and related industries. These are the new drivers of late capitalism under conditions of rapidly increasing globalization, financialization and deregulation of the world economy. Particularly seminal to the development of a vibrant scholarship around this new ‘type’ of city were the contributions of Friedmann and Wolff (1982; see also Friedmann 1986), who emphasized the functions of command and control of the global economy located in certain cities – defined in particular in terms of the number of transnational corporate headquarters that these cities are home to – which give them a privileged position in the new international division of labor. These world cities are viewed as the key urban nodes through which an increasingly global rather than international economy articulates itself, replacing an old, less integrated and interconnected system organized around national economies. Many scholars operating within the rich world city literature have worked toward shedding light on what exactly are the conditions and factors that lead to the location and concentration of corporate headquarters in these particular cities rather than elsewhere (see, for example, Taylor et al. 2002, on inter-city connectivity and Derruder et al. 2008, on airline networks, or Beaverstock and Smith 1996, on migration patterns of highly-skilled workers). Another key element that has emerged through this scholarship is the role of advanced producer services and, very importantly, financial and related services (Cohen 1981) and their very strong clustering pattern (Thrift 1987; Daniels 1991; Moulaert 1991; Taylor and Walkers 2001) in determining how places rank in the urban hierarchy of world cities (Lyons and Salmon 1995; Beaverstock et al. 1999), potentially lending them the status of what Sassen named ‘global cities’ (1991). In her seminal book, The Global City, Sassen argues that in a world characterized by the increasingly global reach of markets, the need for centralizing corporate functions of coordination and control – including, crucially, financial activities – in a few powerhouses, is also increasingly pressing.

The contribution of the world and global city scholarships to our understanding of late capitalism is as extensively acknowledged as its criticisms. From a political geographer’s standpoint the very limited attention paid to the relationship between these cities, their national space economies and their central states constitutes a major lacuna. The assumption often is that such cities operate in a de-territorialized global economy organized through urban networks, rather than within particular national and regional space economies regulated by a state apparatus or supranational authorities (as in the case of the European Union). With some noteworthy exceptions such as Brenner’s endeavor (1998) to

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