Global city, an urban centre that enjoys significant competitive advantages and

that serves as a hub within a globalized economic system. The term has its origins
in research on cities carried out during the 1980s, which examined the common
characteristics of the world’s most important cities. However, with increased
attention being paid to processes of globalization during subsequent years, these
world cities came to be known as global cities. Linked with globalization was the
idea of spatial reorganization and the hypothesis that cities were becoming key
loci within global networks of production, finance, and telecommunications. In some
formulations of the global city thesis, then, such cities are seen as the building
blocks of globalization. Simultaneously, these cities were becoming newly
privileged sites of local politics within the context of a broader project to
reconfigure state institutions.
Early research on global cities concentrated on key urban centres such as London,
New York City, and Tokyo. With time, however, research has been completed on
emerging global cities outside of this triad, such as Amsterdam, Frankfurt,
Houston, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Paris, São Paulo, Sydney, and Zürich. Such
cities are said to knit together to form a global city network serving the
requirements of transnational capital across broad swathes of territory.

The rise of global cities has been linked with two globalization-related trends:
first, the expansion of the role of transnational corporations (TNCs) in global
production patterns and, second, the decline of mass production along Fordist lines
and the concomitant rise of flexible production centred within urban areas. These
two trends explain the emergence of networks of certain cities serving the
financial and service requirements of TNCs while other cities suffer the
consequences of deindustrialization and fail to become “global.” Global cities are
those that therefore become effective command-and-coordination posts for TNCs
within a globalizing world economy. Such cities have also assumed a governance role
at the local scale and within wider configurations of what some commentators have
termed the “glocalization” of state institutions. This refers to processes in which
certain national state functions of organization and administration have been
devolved to the local scale. An example of this would be London. Since the 1980s
London has consolidated its position as a global banking and financial centre, de-
linked from the national economy.

The global city thesis poses a challenge to state-centric perspectives on

contemporary international political economy because it implies the disembedding of
cities from their national territorial base, so that they occupy an
extraterritorial space. Global cities, it is suggested, have more
interconnectedness with other cities and across a transnational field of action
than with the national economy. Global cities are also said to share many of the
same characteristics because of their connectedness and shared experiences of
globalization. They all exhibit clear signs of deindustrialization. They possess
the concentration of financial and service industries within their spatial
boundaries, as well as the concentration of large pools of labour. On the downside,
many also share experiences of class and ethnic conflict. They often have segmented
labour markets in which employees of key industries enjoy well-paid and consumerist
lifestyles while a lower stratum of workers staffs less well-paid, more precarious,
and less attractive positions within the urban economy. It has been further argued
that the promotion of global cities runs the risk of economically marginalizing
nonurban populations within the national economy.
Although global cities are interconnected, embedded as they are in global
production and financial networks, they are also locked into competition with one
another to command increasing resources and to attract capital. To successfully
compete, local governments have been keen to promote their cities as global. Such
cities have been marketed as “entrepreneurial” centres, sites of innovation in the
knowledge economy, and as being rich with cultural capital. A common strategy has
been to stress the multiethnic qualities of a city, for example. This is intended
to stress its cosmopolitan and global character and to disassociate the city from
its actual territorial, ethnic, or cultural setting. Such cities also regularly
compete to host world events of considerable prestige that present further economic
opportunities, such as the Olympic Games.