Saskia Sassen, Cities in Today's Global Age

Saskia Sassen, "Cities in Today's Global Age: An exploration of the new economic role of cities and the networks they form in an increasingly global world" in Connecting Cities: Networks (A Research Publication of the 9th World Congress of Metropolis), Metropolis Congress: 2008.

http://www.saskiasassen.com/publications.php#selected-articles

At the heart of this expanding network of (imperfect) global cities lie two major structural trends.

One of these is that even the most material economic sectors (mines, factories, transport systems, hospitals) today are buying more insurance, accounting, legal, financial, consulting, software programming, and other such services for firms.

And these so–called intermediate services tend to be produced in cities, no matter the non–urban location of the mine or the steel plant that is being serviced. Thus even an economy centred in manufacturing or mining will feed the urban corporate services economy. Firms operating in more routinised and sub–national markets increasingly buy these service inputs from more local cities, which explains why we see the growth of a professional class and the associated built environments also in cities that are not global. The difference for global cities is that they are able to handle the more complex needs of firms and exchanges operating globally.

A second critical trend is that, ultimately, being a global firm or market means entering the specificities and particularities of national economies. This explains why such global actors need more and more global cities as they expand their operations across the world.

Handling these national specificities and particularities is a far more complex process than simply imposing global standards.

This process is easier to understand if we consider consumer sectors rather than the organisational/managerial ones addressed in this piece. Thus even such a routinised operation as McDonald’s adjusts its products to the national cultures in which it operates, whether that is France, Japan or South Africa. When it comes to the managerial and organisational aspects, matters become complicated. The global city contains the needed resources and talents to bridge between global actors and national specifics. Even a highly imperfect global city is better for a global firm or exchange than no such city. And this then explains why the many and very diverse global cities around the world do not just compete with each other but also collectively form a globally networked platform for the operations of firms and markets.

The network of global cities has expanded as more and more firms go global and enter a growing range of foreign national economies. The management and servicing of much of the global economic system takes place in this growing network of global cities and city–regions. And while this role involves only certain components of urban economies, it has contributed to a repositioning of cities both nationally and globally.

The rebuilding of central areas that we see in all of these cities, whether downtown and/or at the edges, is part of this new economic role. It amounts to rebuilding key parts of these cities as platforms for a rapidly growing range of globalized activities and flows, from economic to cultural and political. This also explains why architecture, urban design and urban planning have all become more important and visible in the last two decades. It explains the emergence of strong competition for space and the development of a new type of politics: the right to the city.