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The World City Hypothesis PDF
The World City Hypothesis PDF
John Friedmann
Some fifteen years ago, Manuel Castells (1972) and David Harvey
(1973) revolutionized the study of urbanization and initiated a
period of exciting and fruitful scholarship. Their special
achievement was to link city forming processes to the larger
historical movement of industrial capitalism. Henceforth, the city
was no longer to be interpreted as a social ecology, subject to natural
forces inherent in the dynamics of population and space; it came to
be viewed instead as a product of specifically social forces set in
motion by capitalist relations of production. Class conflict became
central to the new view of how cities evolved.
Only during the last four or five years, however, has the study of
cities been directly connected to the world economy.’ This new
approach sharpened insights into processes of urban change; it also
offered a needed spatial perspective on an economy which seems
increasingly oblivious to national boundaries. My purpose in this
introduction is to state, as succinctly as 1 can, the main theses that
link urbanization processes to global economic forces. The world
city hypothesis, as I shall call these loosely joined statements, is
primarily intended as a framework for research. It is neither a theory
nor a universal generalization about cities, but a starting-point for
political enquiry. We would, in fact, expect to find significant
differences among those cities that have become the ‘basing points’
for global capital. We would expect cities to differ among themselves
according to not only the mode of their integration with the global
economy, but also their own historical past, national policies, and
cultural influences. The economic variable, however, is likely to be
decisive for all attempts at explanation.
The world city hypothesis is about the spatial organization of the
new international division of labour. As such, it concerns the
contradictory relations between production in the era of global
management and the political determination of territorial interests. It
helps us to understand what happens in the major global cities of the
world economy and what much political conflict in these cities is
Development urrd Churtae (SAGE, London, Beverly Hills and New Delhi), Vol. 17
(1986). 69-83
70 John Friedmann
London’ I Brussels* I l l
Paris* 11 Milan 111
Rotterdam I l l Vienna* Ill
Frankfurt I11 Madrid* I l l
Zurich I l l Johannesburg I l l
New York I ’Toronto I l l Sao Paulo 1 Buenos Aires* 1
Chicago I I Miami I l l Rio de Janeiro I
Los Angcles 1 Houston 111 Caracas* i l l
San Francisco 111 Mexico City* I
Tokyo* 1 Sydney I l l Singapore* I I I Hong Kong 11
Taipei * I I I
Manila’ 11
Bangkok* I1
Seoul* I I
National Capital.
Population size categories (rccent estimates, referring to metro-rcgion):
1 10-20 million; I I 5-10 million; 111 1-5 million.
a. Selecrion criteriu inclrtde: major financial centre; headquarters for TNCs
(including regional headquarter$); international institutions; rapid growth of business
services sector; important manufacturing centre; major transportation node;
population size. Not all criteria were used in every case, but several criteria had to be
satisficd before a city could be idcntified as a world city of a particular rank. No city
from a country ol’ the ‘peasant periphery’ was included, though questions might be
raiscd about Bombay. But India, like China, is at thc present time only weakly
integrated with the world market economy. Also eliminated from consideration were all
centrally planned economies which are integrated into the Soviet block and are not part
o f t h e capitalist world system.
In principlc. it would have been possible to add third- and even fourth-order cities to
our global hierarchy. This was not done, however, since our primary interest is in the
identification of only the most important centres of capitalist accumulation.
b. Core countries are here identified according to World Bank criteria. They include
iiinctccn so-called industrial market economies. Semi-peripherul couti/ries include for
the most part upper middle income countries having a significant measure of‘
industrialization and an economic system based on market exchange.
The complete spatial distribution suggests a distinctively linear
character of the world city system which connects, along an East-
West axis, three distinct sub-systems: an Asian sub-system centred on
the Tokyo-Singapore axis, with Singapore playing a subsidiary role as
regional metropolis in Southeast Asia; an American sub-system based
on the three primary core cities of New York, Chicago and Los
The World City Hypothesis 73
===+
EXODUS of high-
wage manufacturing
and routine
information
processing to low-
wage areas
INFLUX of foreign
workers and-
absorption into low-
wage employment
I wish t o thank Edward Soja and Coetz Wolff for the close reading they have given the
earlier version of this paper and for their many helpful suggestions.
I . See Browning and Roberts (1980), Cohen (1981), Portes and Walton (1981),
Friedinann and Wolff (1982), Walton (1982), Soja, Morales and Wolff (1983). Ross
and Trachte (1983), Thrift (1984), Hill and Feagin (1984), Glickman (1984), arid thc
article by Sassen-Koob in this issue.
2. The sectoral theory of economic growth, such as that of Colin Clark which
culminates in the growth of the ‘secondary’ sector of manufacturing, must therefore
be at lcast partially revised. So far as metropolitan economies are concerned.
manufacturing has bccome less important than in the past, and the so-callcd
The World City Hypothesis 81
quaternary sector of advanced business services now accounts for most of the
observed differential growth in income and employment (Gershuny, 1983).
3. This is not to claim that international labour migrations d o not occur elsewhere
as well. Most significant are labour flows to the oil-rich countries of the Arabian
peninsula and the migrations from the countries of the Sahel to the coastal states of
West Africa.
Capital cities of the peasant periphery frequently display social, economic, and
physical characteristics that are structurally similar to those of world cities in the semi-
periphery. What they often d o not have in common is the latter’s economic power.
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82 John Friedmann