The GLOBAL CITY

Facilitator: REPIL, JELYN R.

 QUESTIONS????
What are global cities?
What are the attributes of a global city?
Why globalization is a spatial phenomenon?
How cities served as engines of globalization?
 Defining the Global City
Global cities are “brain hubs” and centers of a
“knowledge economy”.
Sociologist Saskia Sassen popularized this term.
Her The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo
(1990) has shaped the concepts and methods
used to analyze the role of cities and their
networks in the contemporary world.
Sassen’s concept of Global City gives emphasis
on the flow of information and capital.
Global Cities are major nodes in the
interconnected systems of information and
money, and the wealth that they capture is
intimately related to the specialized
businesses that facilitate those flows.

making sense of urban systems and their

global networks
 Globalization as Spatial Phenomenon
 Spatial as it occurs in physical spaces.
- Foreign investments and capital move through a city
- Companies build skyscrapers

 Globalization is spatial because what makes it move is the fact that it is

based in places. In other words, cities act on globalization and
globalization acts on cities:
-Los Angeles, home of Hollywood, is where movies are made for
global consumption
-Tokyo, headquarters of Sony, the company coordinates the sale
of its various electronics goods to branches around the globe
 Attributes of Global City
 SEATS OF ECONOMIC POWER
 New York have the largest stock market in the world
 Tokyo houses the most number of corporate headquarters
 Shanghai plays critical role in the global economic supply
 CENTERS OF AUTHORITY
 Washington DC, not wealthy as New York, but it’s the seat of American Power
 Canberra is Australia political capital: home to country’s politicians and
bureaucrats
 CENTERS OF POLITICAL INFLUENCE
 Cities that house major International Organizations: UN-New York, EU-Brussels
 CENTERS OF HIGHER LEARNING AND CULTURE
The question then becomes how to
identify these cities, and perhaps to
determine to what extent they
function as global cities specifically,
beyond all of the other things that
they do simply as cities.
 1. AT Kearney’s list, developed in conjunction with
the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Global Cities
Index uses criteria across five dimensions:
A. Business Activity (headquarters, services firms,
capital markets value, number of international
conferences, value of goods through ports and
airports)
B. Human Capital (size of foreign born population,
quality of universities, number of international
schools, international student population, number of
residents with college degrees)
C. Information Exchange (accessibility of major TV news
channels, Internet presence (basically number of
search hits), number of international news bureaus,
censorship, and broadband subscriber rate)
D. Cultural Experience (number of sporting event,
museums, performing arts venues, culinary
establishments, international visitors, and sister city
relationships).
E. Political Engagement (number of embassies and
consulates, think tanks, international organizations,
political conferences)
Mori Foundation Global City Power Index (2015)
 Global Power City top 10: (2016)
 1. London,
 2. New York City,
 3. Tokyo,
 4. Paris,
 5. Singapore,
 6. Seoul,
 7. Amsterdam,
 8. Berlin,
 9. Hong Kong,
 10. Sydney.