ancient cities

968 World City
capital, and cultures rather than for their domestic
presence.
Building on Friedmann’s pioneering effort to
rank-order major cities of the world, many world
cities researchers have attempted to identify a global
urban hierarchy that would be indicative, or at least
suggestive, of individual cities’ influence in the current
world economy. However, a lack of data for
measuring and comparing cities’ economic command
at the international level has hampered world
cities research. Some success has been achieved in
establishing a more empirically grounded, if not
sound, hierarchy of world cities through data on the
location of business services and multinational firms
and the network of international air services, yet the
world cities literature is still very vulnerable to criticism
that its propositions lack strong evidentiary
support. Indeed, many global/regional urban networks,
such as the evolving urban system in the
Pacific Asia and the global economic hierarchy of
cities, have been proposed and asserted without
specifying the indicators used. Arbitrary claims
made by local/national politicians and media of
their city’s world city-ness have added confusion to
the already controversial debate over which cities
should be included in the top tier of world cities.
Alongside the endeavor to map out a more
convincing hierarchy of world cities, a great deal
of scholarship has focused on the economic,
social, and spatial restructuring taking place
inside leading world cities, notably London, New
York, and Tokyo. These global cities house,
according to Saskia Sassen, a disproportionate
share of command-and-control functions of the
capitalist world economy, such as corporate
headquarters and advanced business services, that
have facilitated the process of globalization.
Globalization and urban change in these global
cities are mutually constitutive, instead of the
latter being a mere outcome of the former.
Globalization is not only a major source of physical
and socioeconomic changes but also a process
that has been facilitated, or even enabled, by
such change. In the meantime, a growing concentration
of the most powerful individuals and the
highest-paying jobs in global cities has occurred
simultaneously with an expansion of low-paying
jobs and income inequality. A high degree of
socioeconomic polarization is another attribute
of leading world cities.
Critique and New Directions
Serious concerns have been raised that world cities
research has been geographically biased toward
exceptionally large metropolises in the developed
world, leading to a lack of understanding of other
world cities. Indeed, both smaller cities in developed
countries and almost all cities in developing
countries have been neglected, even though many
of these cities are integrated into a global economy.
The call to diversify case-study cities has cast
greater attention on the distinctive experiences of
globalization in cities beyond the top three in the
global urban hierarchy. The fact that urban places
undergo changes in different, but comparable ways
promotes comparative studies as well as case studies
of urban change under various circumstances.
Another criticism of world cities research has
been directed at its methodological bias toward
the hierarchical categorization of cities. While
scholars have attended to the attributes separating
the leading world cities from the second- or lowertier
cities, few have addressed the nature and
form of linkages between world cities. In an
effort to demonstrate changing intercity relations
on a global scale, the Globalization and World
Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC) was created
in 1998 by Peter Taylor and Jon Beaverstock at
Loughborough University. It has established a
large data matrix, named the GaWC 100, of headquarter
and subsidiary locations of the world’s top
100 business service firms, including accountancy,
advertising, banking/finance, insurance, law,
and management consultancy firms. Acknowledging
that these advanced service firms have played a key
role in globalizing the current world economy and
connecting major cities around the world, GaWC
researchers turned these locational data into a matrix
of global service connectivities for 315 world cities.
The data matrix has been an essential element
in mapping a world city network, not a hierarchy,
in which world cities function as the nodes in transnational
economic flows. It is debatable whether
GaWC’s network analyses have demonstrated
global network connectivities, yet the research
group has contributed to our understanding of
world cities by heightening the importance of relations
between cities on a global scale.
A wide range of ongoing efforts have been and
continue to be made to address the aforementioned