ancient cities

Wacquant, Loïc. 2008. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative
Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge, UK:
Polity Press.
Wirth, Louis. 1928. The Ghetto. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Gl o b a l Ci t y
Global cities are key urban nodes that concentrate
command and control functions in the global
economy. They are mechanisms through which
global economic integration takes root because
they play a generative economic role not just
within their national borders but also within
increasingly global networks of production and
consumption. In addition, they usually exhibit a
high degree of ethnic diversity and are marked by
social and spatial fragmentation.
Evolution of the Concept
Building on Peter Hall’s The World Cities (1966),
the most recent popularization of the term derives
from a series of seminal articles of the 1980s and
1990s. John Friedmann and Anthony King developed
their concepts of world or global cities
through empirically grounded research and engagement
with the third world; King examined both the
developed and developing world, and Friedmann
mostly the latter. Starting in the 1990s, attention
turned to the advanced capitalist world, driven
largely by the work of Saskia Sassen. Her 1991
book, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo,
set forth a major research agenda on issues like the
nature and workings of economic globalization,
the role of cross-border finance in urban development,
and social or class polarization, thereby
shifting the focus toward rich and prosperous
cities in democratic nations and inviting a larger
debate.
Sassen’s view of the global city as exemplified
by a particular class of economic activities increasingly
tied to high finance and advanced services is
contested. Similarly, her explanation of social
polarization in global cities has been qualified by
proponents of dualization and fragmentation,
while her initial marginalization and even disregard
for the role of the state in shaping global cities
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has invited sustained criticism. Nevertheless,
Sassen’s research program propelled cities into a
global context and onto the social science and
policy agenda. It also contributed to a rising and
heated debate over the nature and features of globalization
and its impact on the urban realm. With
the growing popularity of the global city paradigm,
even the most conventional topics long studied by
urbanists, ranging from suburbs and midtowns to
real estate, architecture, and urban governance, are
now examined in a global context.
Global cities are considered good cases for
exploring the workings of economic globalization.
The globalization of capital and labor affects both
urban employment patterns and shifts in the sectoral
character of the urban economy in many
European and American cities. Global cities are
those whose growth and character are determined
by the generative economic role they play within
their national borders and within global networks
of production and consumption. Consequently,
global cities are no longer to be seen as fetters on
the national development of their host countries,
as in the past with the dependent urbanization literature,
but more likely to be conceptualized as the
mechanisms through which global economic integration
takes root and greater prosperity is
achieved.
Emerging Analytical Perspectives
At least four main themes have emerged in this
rapidly changing field: (1) a nuanced appreciation
of scale as a means for overcoming relatively schematic
accounts of the local–global relationship,
(2) more detailed examination of the links between
world networks and global cities as a strategy for
describing both cities’ embeddedness and the multiscalar
nature of globalization, (3) increased attention
to the continuing relevance of the state and
levels of development in analyzing global cities, and
(4) efforts to describe and explain the role of historical
trajectories, pathways, and path-dependence
in global city formation.
Scaling the Global in Global Cities
Early approaches to the global city implicitly
or explicitly adhered to a strong globalization
thesis; namely, the unmediated and unilinear