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DOI: 10.1177/0042098010392081

2011 48: 2953 originally published online 14 February 2011Urban Stud

Michele AcutoFinding the Global City: An Analytical Journey through the 'Invisible College'

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48(14) 2953–2973, November 2011

0042-0980 Print/1360-063X Online© 2011 Urban Studies Journal Limited

DOI: 10.1177/0042098010392081

Michele Acuto is in the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy, Australian National University, Hedley

Bull Centre, Garran Rd, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, 2601, Australia.E-mail: [email protected].

Finding the Global City: An AnalyticalJourney through the ‘Invisible College’Michele Acuto

[Paper first received, April 2009; in final form, September 2010]

Abstract

Saskia Sassen’s concept of the ‘global city’ has evolved in a complex relation withother urban, economic and social students that deal with these strategic sites of thecontemporary global urban architecture. This multidisciplinary set of authors could bemetaphorically grouped within what John Friedmann described as the ‘invisible college’of world city researchers. In light of this tradition, the global city is described here inits various theoretical guises, in a chronological account from the early 1900s roots topresent-day formulations, in order to establish an eclectic understanding that can speakbeyond the college, opening the dialogue on globalisation and cities beyond urbanstudies. In this sense, the essay describes the ‘global city’ as the status of connectednessto the global attained by some world cities, which rests upon an urban entrepreneurial

spirit that situates these metropolises as the strategic hinges of globalisation.

architecture. This eclectic pool of authors

could be metaphorically grouped within what

John Friedmann (1995, p. 28) described as the

“invisible college of world city researchers”,

which has been constantly expanding from

analytical hypothesis to research paradigm. If

the college has a ‘resident’ faculty that explic-

itly engages in world city studies, many are the

visiting scholars and the external associates

that contribute to it, rendering the world city

narrative one of the most multidisciplinary

among the social sciences. I thus set out here

The phrase ‘global city’ has a deeper resonance

than might appear at first sight. Similar to the

fate of the expression ‘cosmopolitan’, this term

has been abused by many as a buzzword on

which public relations campaigns have been

mounted. Its original role as an analytical

construct, first brought to world-wide fame

by Saskia Sassen’s homonym research in the

early 1990s, has evolved in a complex and

often tacit relation with the work of other

urban, economic and social students that

deal with these pivotal elements of the global





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2954 MICHELE ACUTO

for an analytical journey through this college,

in search for an eclectic understanding of

what the global city is.

In light of this tradition, the global city is

therefore described in its various theoreticalguises through a chronological account from

its early 1900s roots to present-day formula-

tions. Recalling the fundamental significance

of this concept for the contemporary global

scene is the task of this research note, which

seeks to offer a conceptual framework

to open the ‘global city’ construct across

disciplines beyond its traditional urban

studies origins. Hence, this essay describesthe ‘global city’ as an inherently transitory

phenomenon, a status of connectedness to

the global that is attained by world cities and

rests upon an urban entrepreneurial spirit

which positions metropolises as strategic

hinges of globalisation.

The Origins: Studying the City as

‘Social Milieu’

The (global) city has always been there. Ever

since the dawn of civilisation, urbanity has

been part of the human experience and the

historical examples of urban-related narrative

are certainly countless since Thucydides nar-

rated the History of the Peloponnesian War as

an epic clash between two classic city-states

and Augustine illustrated the moral fallacies

and decay of a 5th-century post-imperial

Rome in The City of God , all the way through

Italo Calvino’s chronicles of the habits of

humankind in the allegorical novels of The

Invisible Cities at the beginning of the 1970s.

This list is possibly endless. Yet we do not

need to look too far to find the modern roots

of what one might call ‘world city literature’

within the social sciences. Precisely, we can

look back to early-20th-century Chicago,with its sprawling urban structure and social

contrasts, where several academics from

various local universities developed the

study of the metropolis through a system-

atic sociological framework, as prompted

by Robert Park’s 1915 paper ‘The city’ (Park

et al ., 1925). Building upon earlier planningstudies such as Dana Bartlett’s The Better

City , or the classic Cities in Evolution by

Patrick Geddes, the group of sociologists that

later became known as the ‘Chicago School’

focused on the social contradictions of the

Western metropolis to delineate a ‘human

ecology’ and offered a conceptualisation of

the socioeconomic effects created by rising

urbanism. Scholars that included, amongstothers, Ernest Burgess, Roderick McKenzie

and Louis Wirth described the city as the

‘cradle of civilisation’ and, as the epochal shift

from rural to urban was progressively defin-

ing human relations, selected the “platform

of urbanism” to underline the problems of a

modern—and urbanising—society (Wirth,

1940, p. 744).

The crucial two-fold lesson that these earlytheorists can teach us is both their under-

standing of the city beyond materialistic

structures, as a social milieu, and of urbanisa-

tion beyond migration, as a social revolution.

Wirth justly noted

As long as we identify urbanism with the

physical entity of the city ... we are not likelyto arrive at any adequate conception of

urbanism as a mode of life (Wirth, 1938, p. 4).

Urbanism, he pointed out, has effects that

transcend the mere rural-to-city migration:

it defines the lifestyle and social relations

of contemporary humanity and it sets the

metropolis as “the initiating and controlling

center of economic, political and cultural

life” (Wirth, 1938, p. 2). Thus, quite similar to

what Doreen Massey (1993) has more recently

described as the ‘relational nature’ of placeresulting from the intersection of physical

and social, and what Arjun Appadurai (1996)





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FINDING THE GLOBAL CITY 2955

has defined as ‘localities’, the authors of the

Chicago School—and Wirth in primis—

present us with the image of the city as a

social process. Lewis Mumford, another of the

forefathers of urban studies, reiterated such aview a few years after and, recalling Geddes’s

1915 study, wrote

The central and significant fact about the cityis that [it] functions as the specialized organ

of social transmission (Mumford, 1940, p. 5).

Hence the urban, Mumford says, combines

individuality and localness, which derive

from its own social texture and history, withgreater “marks of the civilization”, character-

ised by the “heritage of larger units, national,

racial, religious, human” (Mumford, 1940,

p. 6). The city, in this view, becomes more

than a simple place—it symbolises humanity

in a microcosm.

Cities, consequently, can be interpreted as

socially constructed transformative milieux

capable of synthesising forces originatingboth from within and without. To put it in

contemporary terms, urbanity synthesises

local and global, certainly as a medium, but

also as an “actively passive” (Thrift, 1983,

p. 38) agent in world affairs. This helps us to

develop a “geographical imagination” that,

as Massey put it, is capable of looking “both

within and beyond the city and hold the two

things in tension” (Massey, 1999, p. 166).

Yet both Geddes and Mumford were missing

the ‘big picture’ that only later authors such

as Hall, Friedmann and Sassen addressed.

To this extent, the globalising urban society

of the past hundred years needed a more

dynamic understanding of its multiscalar,

contradictory and ever-changing trends—an

analytical step set to come only many years

later. Nevertheless, some form of theory,

albeit often neglected, was already sketchedsoon after Mumford’s major publications.

Urban geographer Edward Ullman had,

in fact, attempted to develop a ‘theory of

location for cities’ as early as 1941, building

upon earlier economic studies undertaken

by Robert Murray Haig (1926) on the basis

of urban concentration and Charles HortonCooley on the effects of transport networks.

The investigation framework developed by

Ullman described the orderly spacing and

reorganisation of urban settlements, seen

as service centres, according to a ‘central

place theory’ that is not static, but “changes

to fit changes in the underlying conditions”

(Ullman, 1941, p. 853). According to Ullman’s

original formulation, three categories can beidentified to describe the ‘factors of urban

causation’ underlying the development of

cities as “focal points in occupation and uti-

lization of the earth” by humankind: cities as

central places, cities as transport hubs, and

cities as repositories of specialised functions

(Harris and Ullman, 1945, pp. 7–9). All of

these, according to Ullman, appear in diverse

combinations and with varying degrees ofimportance from city to city, and underpin

the transient character that constitutes urban

centrality vis-à-vis other settlements.

Analogies with the contemporary func-

tions of the modern metropolis can be

easily drawn here, and especially with the

hypotheses later developed by Friedmann

and Sassen as well as the present sprawl of

urban rankings. If the processes of time/

space compression have shrunk the distances

on a global scale, for instance, this does

not mean that cities are no longer ‘central

places’ in that they perform specialised func-

tions while also providing basic services to

adjoining areas. Rather, it means that some

settlements will be catalysts of interactions

at scales that were almost unthinkable in the

days of Ullman’s study. Despite its potential,

this location theory remained buried in theannals of geography until contemporary

theorists developed a similar framework





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2956 MICHELE ACUTO

and the tenets of central place theory found

renewed and extremely influential appli-

cation in the economic analysis of urban

systems. For what concern our analytical

journey—functions, variable composition,constant needs for urban performances

and positioning—are therefore additional

core elements to be kept in consideration

in the characterisation of contemporary

global cities, since these are, after all, still

‘central’ places.

Situating the ‘World City’ in theWorld System

The understanding of the city posited by the

Chicago School evolved during the following

decades with a marked focus on functionality

and widening analytical viewpoints. Moving

from human relations within the metro-

politan setting and their related problems,

urbanists from various disciplines followed

the examples set by Cooley, Wirth and Ullmanand engaged questions of world organisation.

Progenitor of this macrosociological shift in

the study of the city was Chicago academic

Roderick McKenzie who developed, as early

as 1927, a concept of a ‘global network’ of

cities. By describing the spatial reorganisa-

tion caused by transport and communica-

tion technologies, he highlighted how urban

settlements aligned within hierarchies of

dominance and subordination, with an inner

locus of activity and a dependent periphery.

McKenzie (1927, p.42) explained how the

“world’s centers of gravity are always in

process of change” due to shifting service

bases. This progressive sense of the world city,

perhaps the single most forward-looking

anticipation of contemporary debates along

with Geddes’ 1915 book, would have required

two decades, the 1970s and the 1980s, to re-emerge into coherent urban studies form.

This evidence testifies once again the need

for a contingent and performance-oriented

understanding of the city’s centrality in world

affairs and the necessity for a global city con-

cept that takes into account the processual

(relational some would say) understandingof cities as social media.

While this systemic perspective remained

in hibernation, a milestone text for urban

studies was published in 1966: Peter Hall’s

The World Cities. Taking up Geddes’s sketch

of the nodal settlements within the inter-

national economy, the British urbanist

designed a theoretical framework concerned

with the growth, and consequent problems,associated with the ‘metropolitan explosion’

of the 20th century. In the introductory sec-

tion of this book, Hall outlines the profile

of these cities by distinguishing them from

megalopolises and localised business centres.

Accordingly, ‘world cities’ are: major centres

of political power, mobility, professional tal-

ent, information and culture, as well as great

centres of population that contain a “signifi-cant proportion of the richest members of

the community” (Hall, 1966, pp. 7–9). While

describing these functions, Hall underscored

how the elevated number of urban inhabit-

ants could be a feature, but not a necessary

determinant, of what John Friedmann

(1986) would later call ‘world city status’.

The latter, pointed out Hall, is a function

of all these characteristics, a view that once

again reiterates the contingent nature of

global cities. Giant urban complexes that at

the time did not satisfy Hall’s criteria, such

as Osaka–Kobe or Chicago, were considered

of regional—but not international—sig-

nificance. Conversely, small centres such as

the Dutch Randstad, were seen to be able to

play a world role despite their limited urban

population. Overall, Hall’s focus throughout

the volume remained on the ‘planning’ and‘development’ side of the analysis, offering

an account of how pivotal cities such as





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Tokyo, Paris or New York evolved to their

present prominence and how this rise is

necessarily accompanied by enormous

problems of transport, urban renewal and

local governance.Fundamental, at this stage, was the contri-

bution of Immanuel Wallerstein, the father

of world system theory. Influenced by the

complex exploitation structures illustrated

by Karl Marx, and at the same time bearer

of Fernand Braudel’s historical approach

pinpointed in the longue durée of social

processes, Wallerstein produced a landmark

historical sociology treatise on the emer-gence of the modern world system in three

volumes between 1974 and 1989. Among the

most important contributions of this opus

is the description of terms such as ‘periph-

ery and core’ and ‘unequal exchange’ that

entered the common jargon of economic,

urban, geographical and international stud-

ies. However, despite the key significance

of this formulation, the perspective thatcould make an essential contribution to

the contemporary definition of global city

is a less celebrated one: “A world-system”,

highlighted the author, “is a social system”

(Wallerstein, 1974, p. 229). With Wallerstein,

therefore, we move from a materialistic

understanding of such a system, to a politi-

cal representation of the power hierarchies

created by capitalism and supported by

technological advance, where physical flows

and material arrangements are inextricably

intertwined with social alignments and

marginalisations. This critical contribution

first introduces us to the direct relation-

ship between geographies and practices of

power as concentrated in the cores of an

unequally organised global system. Hence,

Wallerstein’s scholarship is a pivotal sign-

post in our journey, pointing towards theinextricable relationship between cities and

global socio-political practices.

The World City Hypothesis andthe Urban Hierarchy

At the outset of the 1980s, benefiting from

more than a decade of world city analysis,Robert B. Cohen (1981) took the world sys-

tem interpretation of global business sites a

step further. Grounding the linkage between

the organisational structure of multinational

corporations and the networks among cit-

ies in a comparative empirical analysis, he

described a truly global system and its inter-

nal pecking order. To this extent, Cohen’s

study quickly became a landmark in urbantheory as it sought to develop one of the first

urban hierarchies that enlarged the field’s

traditional Western-centric boundaries. Cities

like Singapore and Hong Kong appeared in

this formulation, as the author described

the articulation of this multilayered system

and its possible trends for the years to come.

Anticipating much of the research that will

later be developed by scholars such as Peter

Taylor and Michael Timberlake, Cohen made

a two-fold contribution to the invisible col-

lege: he kick-started the urbanist movement

concerned with building a systematic hier-

archical taxonomy of metropolitan centres

of the world economy, while also marking a

definitive shift from the local (micro) view-

point, to the global (macro) study of cities.

Cohen’s methodological advance was fol-

lowed shortly afterwards by another systematic

contribution by American world system theo-

rist Christopher Chase-Dunn. Chase-Dunn

published in 1985 a cross-national quantita-

tive study on the system of cities where the

‘central places’ were seen as “centers of capital

accumulation and geopolitical power”, con-

stituting a single world-wide structure which

has continued to operate ever since the early

days of history involving no dramatic changesbut rather trends and cycles (Chase-Dunn,

1985, p. 269).1 Chase-Dunn’s and Cohen’s





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2958 MICHELE ACUTO

pieces were instrumental in highlighting the

networked qualities of world cities. Similarly,

they provided a legacy of empirical baggage

to those scholars who were at that moment

venturing into the complexities of globalnetworks, which were to be largely theorised

by Manuel Castells in The Rise of the Network

Society (1996), designed by building upon his

earlier The Informational City (1989). This

text was the first of a trilogy dedicated by the

Spanish sociologist to the rise of what he called

the ‘information age’ where networks consti-

tute the new social morphology of human

society. Castells’ focus is on the “space offlows” (Castells, 1989, p. 146) that characterise

social relations in the contemporary epoch,

deeply affected by the rise of the World-wide

Web and the new technologies, and that will

fundamentally shape the study of the world

system of cities in the years to come.

It was John Friedmann, however, who

provided a crucial analytical formulation for

the study of the city in the present context.Recalling an initial research project designed

in 1982 with Goetz Wolff and destined to

become “an instant classic” (Brenner and Keil,

2006, p. 57), the urban planner conceptualised

the ‘world city hypothesis’ in a 1986 article

targeted to inspire a systematic study of this

phenomenon. The heuristic essay, intended as

a framework for research, followed the afore-

mentioned tradition of analysts concerned

with the spatial organisation of the new divi-

sion of labour set in motion by the rise of the

capitalist class and sustained by the underly-

ing forces of globalisation. Friedmann listed

several interrelated theses on the nature and

role of world cities, reiterating some of Hall’s

features and merging them with more social

considerations on the spatialisation of world

economy (Friedmann, 1986, pp. 318–326).

Friedmann’s interpretation was rootedin an understanding of the city as defined

in economic terms: key cities are “used by

global capital as ‘basing points’ in the spatial

organization and articulation of production

and markets” making it possible to arrange

world cities in a “complex spatial hierarchy”

based on such organisation (Friedmann, 1986,pp. 320–321). Relations and structure were

described as flexible, depicting a dynamic

hierarchy that further prompts us towards

a particular attention to the variable power-

geometries of the system. This formulation

made extensive usage of the terminology

developed by world system theorists, clas-

sifying metropolises in core and peripheral

countries, underlying how the scales of spatialpolarisation (global, regional, metropolitan)

all inevitably rested upon class polarisation

and describing their position as organising

nodes of global economics. In this view,

Friedmann laid out a map of the system

arranged around three distinct geographical

sub-systems—Asian. American and West

European—linked together on an east–west

axis by the relation of the primary citieswithin these: Tokyo, Los Angeles, Chicago,

London and Paris (see Figure 1).

The ‘Global City’ Model and theEarly 1990s

The ‘world city hypothesis’ created an unprec-

edented plethora of followers who engaged

in the systematic and empirical classifica-

tion of such a system, broadening both the

breadth of urban settlements considered and

the types of ‘world city function’ scrutinised.

Geographers, sociologists and urbanists from

all over the academic landscape took up the

complex task of ‘mapping’ such a variable

and hierarchical metropolitan structure.

Scholars like Michael Timberlake, Peter

Taylor, Jonathan Beaverstock and Richard

Smith became authoritative voices, nowregarded as some of the highest experts

in this field, alongside those evergreen





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classics such as Hall and Harvey. Yet, as often

happens in the social sciences, this main-stream approach soon met the emergence of

a comparable but contrasting formulation:

the ‘global city model’ elaborated by Saskia

Sassen at the outset of the 1990s. Coming

from a multicultural education strongly tied

to Latin America and Europe, the American

sociologist developed her landmark work The

Global City on the basis of her previous stud-

ies of social stratification and capital mobility.

Notably, these approaches even featured in

the early stages of Friedmann’s hypothesis,

as he referenced Sassen’s theories on the role

of the management élite as a privileged class

within the restructuring of core world cities

(Sassen-Koob, 1986).

These links notwithstanding, Sassen’s thesis

was markedly divergent from the mainstream

hypothesis, and not just in semantics. As she

would have recalled much later, the choice of‘global’ rather than ‘world’ as an adjective for

the key metropolises was meant to

capture the specific articulation of the world

economy ... today, thereby allowing for thepossibility that cities that are not historically

world cities could nonetheless be global

(Sassen, 2006, p. ix).

Broadening this understanding, Peter Marcuse

and Ronald van Kempen (2000), along with

Brenda Yeoh (1999), introduced the term

‘globalising city’ in order to underscore that

globalisation is not a characteristic of those

‘global cities’ alone, but a more pervasiveprocess present in all urban spaces. For the

purposes of our investigation, however, I

favour here Sassen’s terminology as I do not

believe the author implied such conjecture

in her original thesis, rather highlighting the

particular connection between certain key

metropolises and the broader processes of

globalisation. Consequently

Global city is not a descriptive term [but]

an analytical construct that allows one todetect the global as it is filtered through the

Figure 1. The world city hierarchy.Source: Friedmann (1986, p. 71).






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2960 MICHELE ACUTO

specifics of a place, its institutional orders,

and its sociospatial fragmentations (Sassen,2006, p. x).

Not all world cities necessarily represent

global cities and not all global cities are to be

seen ‘global’ in the same way. ‘Global city’ is

thus a ‘device’ to detect the particularity of

a locality as an element of the “new [global]

socio-spatial order” and, more specifically,

a particular urban space that represents a

“nexus for new politico-economic align-

ments” (Sassen, 2007, p. 122). Hence, the

‘global city’ is an heuristic vantage-point onto

the reconfigurations of the late 20th and early21st centuries.

Sassen’s formulation allowed for variations

in the nature of the different cities, which

in turn epitomised not only nodal points as

Friedmann originally conceived them, but

also strategic sites of advanced production

whose principal output—mainly responsible

for their global status—is principally repre-

sented by services. Thus, in order to capturethis specificity, she focused her study on the

practice of global control as performed in

these cities (Sassen, 1991). These particular

localities, of which New York, London and

Tokyo symbolised the apex, are characterised

by the agglomeration of central command

functions (legal, economic, managerial, plan-

ning, executive, etc.) necessary to corporate

organisations in order to operate acrossmultiple global locations. Hence, in contrast

with Castells’ understanding of power as dis-

located and decentralised through networks,

Sassen illustrates how such networks are the

means of power, which is on the contrary

seen as concentrated by those groups who

take advantage of command and control

functions embedded in specific central places

(Allen, 1999, p. 202).

This focus on the practice, the heterogene-ous nature, the activity and the multiplicity of

functions between key metropolises is Sassen’s

fundamental input to the theorisation of the

city in world affairs. However, while the world

city literature was developing in the ‘invisible

college’ led by Friedmann and Sassen, another

less celebrated but crucial publication saw thelight in 1992: The 100 Mile City , written by

architect and designer Deyan Sudjic. Distant

from most of the debates highlighted thus far,

Sudjic’s contribution was unique. Instead of

discussing networks, systemic analyses and

economic relations, the author narrated the

processes of city-building and the mutation

of the urban landscape, providing the ‘world

city audience’ with a powerful reminder: oneshould not forget the physical existence of the

metropolis, which could easily be lost among

academic quarrels upon questions of place,

flows, social relations, scale and globalisation.

In this enterprise, Sudjic is accompanied by

another key author, Anthony King, who shares

with him the interest in urban physicality,

although in a more historical perspective, and

who published a few years earlier the bookGlobal Cities on the internationalisation of

London (King, 1990).2 In a time of abstraction

and empirical dismantling of the metropolis

as an aggregate of functions, they bring us

back to the bricks, highways and metallic

skeleton of the city itself, represented through

Sudjic’s metaphor of a non-linear electric

force field powered by the often unpredictable

and sudden energy of mobility (Sudjic, 1992).

Another one-of-a-kind text, Mike Davis’ more

recent Planet of Slums (2006), also represents

an even more critical view on urbanisation

and on the social contradictions arising

from the contemporary condition of cities

across the world, offering us crucial insights

into the ‘dark sides’ of the global city narra-

tive and unravelling the growing problems

arising from the urbanisation of the globe.

As Davis’ inflammatory narrative stresses withpowerful images, we need to pay attention to

the social contradictions created by the urban





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age. To this extent, a critical consideration is

compulsory. The definition of ‘global city’

does not have a necessarily positive quality:

being ‘global’ entails both pay-offs and high

prices for those who compose metropolitancommunities. Global cities are equally sites

of opportunities and relegation, ridden by

social inequality as much as open to extreme

mobility, characterised by billionaire élites

and wretched ghettos, whose ‘right to the city’

is often systematically denied (Harvey, 2008;

Brenner et al., 2009).

In a similar fashion, the recent volume

The Endless City embodies the markedlymultidisciplinary and post-eulogistic nature

that inquiries into the global city presently

need. Product of the new dynamic project

‘The Urban Age’ set up at the London School

of Economics by British urbanist Ricky

Burdett, this collection of eminent voices from

different fields such as architecture, sociology,

human geography and design, traces the eclec-

tic path required to appreciate the multifacetednature of 21st-century urbanity, charged with

social contradictions and challenges (Burdett

and Sudjic, 2008). In fact, as Deyan Sudjic,

co-editor of the volume with Burdett, pointed

out in his earlier The 100 Mile City

to accept that the city has a dark side, of

menace and greed, does not diminish itsvitality and strength. In the last analysis, it

reflects man and all his potential (Sudjic, 1992p. 309).

To this extent, critical materialist accounts are

necessary building-blocks of our multidisci-

plinary endeavour, as they call for the physi-

cality of the global city not to be forgotten

among scholarly abstractions, considering

the ‘grounded’ essence of urbanity as a source

and object of globalisation as well as a site

of challenging global questions. The urbanstructure thus transcends mere materiality,

becoming an object of political contention,

social engineering and segregation. If the

‘world city’ scholarship has to speak beyond

its confines, then its material component

must not be left out of sight, since it con-

tributes to construct social relations andpolitical interactions and because it is the

object of such relations in an inextricable

structuration.

The ‘Dual City’ Issue

Considering the physical reconfigurations

of global cities also leaves room for further

speculation: in the 21st century, these metrop-olises have become so central to neo-liberal

globalisation, the prevalent ‘world order’ of

the present times, that their organisation is

a “key spatial manifestations of capitalism”

providing the dominant forces and élites of

our time with a much-needed “spatial fix” in

a world of flows (Massey, 2007, p. 9). Some

places such as London have maintained their

centrality throughout several centuries, whileothers such as Shanghai have risen and fallen

several times. If a city is to be ‘global’, then it

necessarily needs to strike a balance between

such forces and avoid succumbing to global

fluxes or local degeneration, achieving what

Hall (1998) called ‘urban order’—a particular

mix of social institutions and physical infra-

structure that allows the locality to flourish.

Those flourishing metropolises that the

British urbanist described in their ‘golden

ages’ all had—and indeed have—a common

determinant: they struck a balance between

‘external’ and superimposed forces that were

connecting the city with the world, and their

‘internal’ context filled with contradictions

and planning quandaries. If a metropolis in

the present age has to influence the global,

and compete in the highly variable urban

hierarchy, it needs to maintain the delicateinterplay between local and global at a man-

ageable level. In a system characterised by





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globalision and unevenness, global cities are

increasingly required to do much more than

just local management: they need to attract

capital as well as mobility ‘highways’ and

therefore co-ordinate the daily unfolding ofthese across their conurbation, while also

maintaining their pull over them. In order

to do this, today’s global cities need to be

entrepreneurial cities.

This notion was originally developed in

David Harvey’s (1989) analysis of the urbani-

sation of capital. Harvey was well aware of

the mutually constitutive relations between

the political sphere and the urban processesthroughout time, and how incoherently the

study of the former had become separated

from the socio-geographical inquiries into

the latter. As a response to this scholarly

sectoralism, he described how the ‘managerial’

approaches to urban governance so typical of

the 1960s were, at the end of the 1980s, giv-

ing way to ‘entrepreneurial forms of action’

born out of the spirit of capitalism and werecapable of reorienting urban governance

towards novel forms of performance and

prompting urbanities to ‘take the initiative’ in

the economic realm (Harvey, 1989; Hall and

Hubbard, 1998). Globalising cities are entre-

preneurial cities because they purposefully

undertake political and economic activities,

rather than simply reacting to the features

of their surrounding environment. In this

sense, global cities are not passive elements

in a world of flows, but are also hubs, motors

and magnets of these, and thus key agents of

the world system.

This is all the more important when we

consider one of the central controversies in

the invisible college: the so-called question

of the dual city. Brought to the centre of the

urban studies debate by John Friedmann’s

‘world city hypothesis’ and by Saskia Sassen’slate 1980s studies, this idea postulates that

with global city formation comes urban social

polarisation. Several authors throughout the

1980s, not least Sassen and Friedmann, argued

that the shifts in occupational structures and

industrial bases of the economy were resulting

in a ‘hourglass’ effect, which is embodied bythe expansion of low- and high-income social

groups and the consequent shrinking of the

middle class. This thesis rapidly achieved well-

deserved attention thanks to the publication

of John Mollenkopf and Manuel Castells’s

edited volume Dual City: Restructuring New

York (1992) and Sassen’s first edition of The

Global City (1991). In the former, the Big

Apple was problematised as “two cities, notseparated and distinct but rather deeply

intertwined products of the same underlying

processes” (Mollenkopf and Castells, 1992,

p. 11). Social polarisation, created by the

capitalist society and the expanding reach of

global networks, was splitting the city into

two intertwined halves, between a small élite

at the top and a large underclass at the bot-

tom. As Sassen explained, globalising citiesare perhaps the most vulnerable to this class

divergence because of their economic struc-

ture progressively dominated by financial,

business and producer services, along with

their increasing demand for low-skilled jobs

readily available through immigration.

Several authors picked up this trend, which

rapidly became, as Janet Abu-Lughod (1999)

pointed out in her 1990s landmark study of

three major American cities, ‘one of the most

interesting subsets’ of global city research.

A plethora of empirical studies rapidly

followed suit to test the polarisation hypoth-

esis and unpack the urban dynamics of social

stratification in the major post-industrial

Western cities. The assumption, of course,

has not been free from critics that saw in the

‘dual city’ what Peter Marcuse (1989) called

a “muddy metaphor” for a much more com-plicated process reflecting spatial reorganisa-

tions in these cities. Chris Hamnett (1994), in





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particular, offered several rebuttals to Sassen’s

contention, rejecting to varying degrees the

bifurcation of class structures as a too nar-

row perspective and pointing out how her

original work lacked an engagement with theeffects of unemployment and non-industrial

development.

Seeking solutions to these and many other

theoretical (as well as empirical) puzzles,

much of the scholarship has to date shifted

towards considering inequality rather than

polarisation as the key problem arising from

the restructuration of the urban economy

and the globalisation of many metropolises.Focusing on the globalising impact of dis-

parities in both social structures and their

related urban textures, many have now moved

from the predominantly positivist basis of

the dual city formulation to a more critical

form of urban theory rooted in a multifac-

eted problematisation of inequality in cities

under contemporary socioeconomic condi-

tions.3

This approach to the dual city puzzlehas of course its roots in the post-1968 work

of radical and Marxist scholars who, aware

of the centrality of cities in a capitalist-led

global scenario, engaged with what Castells

(1977) called “the urban question” on the

city’s positioning, and thus the social proc-

esses underpinning not solely the geographi-

cal pull of the urban for humanity, but also

the functional ‘social content’ (Lefebvre,

1991) of the urban scale in respect to such

systems. This points us towards understand-

ing how the urbanisation of capital and the

socioeconomic restructuring of cities need an

appreciation of the separations inherent in

such globalising trends beyond income and

class stratification, as well as in relation to the

broader power-geometries of our time. This

contextualisation, in turn, prompts us to con-

sider the dynamics and dilemmas of unequalspatial organisation in the metropolis, mov-

ing from a ‘dual city’ view to a more complex

description of the multiplex urban divisions

of ‘quartered’ cities, to borrow from Marcuse’s

(1989) image, constituted by a multitude of

co-existent social divisions.

In the tradition set out by Harvey’s ever-popular Social Justice and the City (1976),

several scholars have to date been looking

at inequality through the lenses not solely

of social polarisation but also of its physical

manifestation through processes of urban

gentrification, spatial displacement and

locational redistribution These spatial effects

of globalisation and urbanisation have been

object of scrutiny of an influential studyby Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin

(2001), which has described this dissociat-

ing trend with the image of the ‘splintering

city’. Focusing specifically on infrastructural

developments, the authors underlined how

the networked nature of the metropolis is

being “unbundled in ways that help sustain

the fragmentation of the social and material

fabric of cities” (Graham and Marvin, 2001,p. 33). The contemporary urban condition

of global and globalising metropolises is

thus an increasingly unbundled one, char-

acterised by the emergence of widespread

“bypass strategies” targeted towards linking

“valued and powerful” users and places,

to elude less relevant urban areas and grid

the key functional elements of the city in

“premium networked spaces” (Graham and

Marvin, 2001, p. 139). This fragmentation and

rebundling of urban spaces, in turn, produces

the emergence of global enclaves in a vicious

cycle of urban splintering. Importantly for

our case, very little evidence has been found

in global and globalising cities to disprove

this consideration, as these post-industrial

metropolises have seen many of the splin-

tering processes described by these authors

unravelling through their structures in recentdecades. Although much of this discussion

concentrated on the testability of the thesis on





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2964 MICHELE ACUTO

wide ranges of settlements, a growing portion

of urban studies has embraced Graham and

Marvin’s consideration of the spatial differ-

entiation of urban textures under conditions

of neo-liberal globalisation. Post-industrialmetropolises, pivots of the latter, are certainly

the most prone amongst cities to this shat-

tering trend. Moreover, the ‘splintering city’

claim has the privilege of bringing back to

the centre stage of global city research the

materiality of the urban in its relationship

with the questions of inequality raised by the

dual city thesis.

The unequal socio-spatial restructurationsof the global city described by the splinter-

ing and dual theses are, in this sense, not just

a product of exogenous forces and purely

accidental social dynamics. As this literature

tells us, today’s post-industrial metropolises

are seeing a substantial amount of conscious

splintering, which is all the more mutually

reinforcing as cities copy each others’ models

and seek to surpass each others’ abilities toattract people, capital and flows. Inequality

can in fact be the result, if not the goal, of

deliberate socio-spatial strategies. This is

a consideration vividly represented, for

example, in Mike Davis’ popular depiction

of the sadistic ‘downtown war on the poor’

underpinning the 1980s reorganisation of Los

Angeles, as epitomised by the installation of

‘bumproof’ barrel-shaped bus benches and

overhead park sprinklers to prevent home-

less people from sleeping in ‘public areas’ of

the city (Davis, 1990). In this sense, we need

not to forget the materiality of the scalar

structuration of the metropolis, and its social

contradictions. Just as Norman Klein pointed

out in the case of the spectacular urbanism

of the Vatican and Las Vegas, “by decod-

ing scripted space, we learn how power [is]

brokered between the classes in the form ofspecial effects”, where some of the contem-

porary socio-spatial revolutions of the urban

age can become “gentle repression posing

as free will” (Klein, 2004, p. 11). Hence, by

considering the materiality of the global city

along with its global connectedness, we can

decipher the power geometries unfoldingnot solely amongst cities (as in the more

traditional ‘urban hierarchy’ approaches)

but also within these metropolises and how

these are connected to their positioning in the

world system through their entrepreneurial

governance.

The Contemporary Scholarship:Consolidation and Alternatives

At the dawn of the third millennium, after

nearly 80 years of world city scholarship,

the literature on this bewildering phenom-

enon had come a long way from the early

days of Geddes’ pioneering work. After

the establishment of key hypotheses on the

nature, function and internal changes of the

strategic sites of world affairs, it seemed timefor consolidation and development with

an eye to the upcoming century. It was this

spirit that pervaded the contributions of the

key authorities within this field: Friedmann

(1995) looked with confidence at the world

city ‘paradigm’ that, in his view, was robust

enough to prompt the scholarly analyses of

the years ahead; Peter Hall (1995) moved

‘towards a general urban theory’ by describ-

ing location, interplay and problems of an

hierarchical urban system dominated by

global cities and regional centres; Taylor, in

collaboration with urban geographer Paul

L. Knox, edited two landmark books for

systemic analysis, gathering many key views

in the college in the volume World Cities in

a World-system (Knox and Taylor, 1995) and

in its follow-up Cities in Globalization (Taylor

et al ., 2007). In the meantime, Castells (1998)completed his trilogy on the informational

society and Sassen (2001 and 2007) revisited





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her thesis with an updated commentary on

New York, London and Tokyo, while also

moving towards a systematic analysis of flows,

sovereignty and territoriality for a new sociol-

ogy of globalisation.The ‘invisible college’ of world city scholars

also continued to grow in heterogeneity and

multidisciplinarity. British geographer Peter

Taylor, along with some of the ‘new’ voices

in this field such as Michael Hoyler, Kathy

Pain, Ben Derudder and James Faulconbridge,

responded to the many calls for a systematic

study of the world city system and established

the Globalisation and World Cities Network(GaWC) shortly after launching a related

pilot project at the Global Observatory of

Loughborough University. Underscoring

that this field seemed ‘to have drawn the

short straw when it comes to rigorous

research’, Taylor (1997) worked to establish

a monitoring group devoted to the study of

‘hierarchical tendencies amongst world cit-

ies’. To date, GaWC has probably producedthe most impressive collection of data on the

global city phenomenon available at large,

maintaining updated rankings of urban hier-

archies and an impressive database of world

city resources. The founders of this project

even contravened Friedmann’s original view,

according to which compiling a precise

hierarchy would have been a futile enterprise

due to the extreme variability of status with the

system. Disregarding such advice, Taylor and his

team set out to rank metropolises. First, the group

sought to depict a map of the global networked

relations of London vis-à-vis other urban settle-

ments, an approach that subsequently evolved

into a systematic inquiry into ‘world cityness’

across the globe by incorporating infrastruc-

tural approaches (Derudder, 2008; Taylor et al .,

2007) on the relevance of airline data, Internet

and telecommunications and other mobilityfeatures, as well as more complex tabulations

of advanced producer services.

Not surprisingly, GaWC found that the

usual suspects (Tokyo, London, Paris and New

York) scored the highest marks (Derudder et

al ., 2003). This taxonomy has been articulated

through various refinements, introducing acrucial distinction in 2005 between various

levels of ‘world cityness’, and thus compiling

a ranking of alpha, beta and gamma world

cities (Taylor et al ., 1999). This listing was

originally intended as an analytical device to

set out a map of global networks and inter-

city linkages, calculating a city’s status on the

basis of the presence of advanced producer

service firms. However, as with Friedmann’s1986 hypothesis, the study became a

‘must’ among the members of the invisible

college. GaWC—and Taylor in particular—

has recently returned to this early ranking

trend, revising and improving the data collec-

tion and clarifying the top echelons of ‘alpha’

global cities. Reworking the previous urban

hierarchy through this novel classification,

the GaWC has identified a constant ‘leadingduo’ at the top, comprising London and New

York (‘NYLON’). Nonetheless, as Taylor has

himself admitted

The GaWC method of measuring the world

city network produces theoretically informed,

empirically robust assessments of cities inglobalization. But it measures just one process

in city development: the servicing of global

capital (Taylor et al ., 2008).

Needless to say, this research note advocates

a widening of such an approach.

GaWC, for many years the only reference

available to scholars seeking datasets on the

world city phenomenon, has been trailed

by publications from private institutions

such as the Mori Memorial Foundation’s

Global Power City Index, Price Waterhouse

and Coopers ‘Cities of Opportunity’annual report, the Knight Frank ‘Wealth

Report’ in collaboration with CitiBank





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2966 MICHELE ACUTO

and the Mastercard ‘Worldwide Centers of

Commerce’ ranking, as well as more popular

outlets such as Foreign Policy Magazine. As

datasets and analytical eclecticism offered

by contemporary urban theorists were grow-ing exponentially, so was the availability of

case-specific (or region-specific) studies.

Geographers and urbanists across the globe

contributed to the sprawl of literature on

the global network of cities. Numerous new

‘classics’ joined Friedmann’s ‘invisible college’

with prominent studies, while the centre

of the attention gradually shifted towards

East Asia and its rising metropolises such asSingapore and Shanghai (Yeoh, 1999; Olds

and Yeung, 2004). In particular, a key trend

among contemporary scholars is a move

towards a more thorough engagement with

the globalising metropolises of the ‘global

South’ and their socio-spatial development—

a research trend heralded by the increasingly

broad scholarship on East Asia and, in primis,

on China (Friedmann, 2006).To this extent, experts in the field like

Michael Timberlake and Bob Jessop turned

their attention towards the East, follow-

ing the orientation that had characterised

Peter Hall’s first work on the world city. Yet,

Asia is not the only target of this analytical

widening. As demonstrated by the excellent

collection of essays Relocating Global Cities

(Amen et al., 2006), there is now a resonant

group of scholars engaged in studying and

theorising the ‘periphery’ and the processes

of world city formation taking place within

it. Likewise, there is also a growing number

of academics who present alternative views

on the global city. Allen Scott’s (2001) edited

volume Global City-regions, for instance,

embodies the difficulty of drawing defini-

tional boundaries and setting quantitative

limits to world cities, which often representflexible and protean social entities. In this

perspective, Scott proposes the ‘city-region’

rather than the metropolitan area, as an object

of analysis for the urban age. This approach

has developed into a strong component of

world city research, with broadening ties with

planning studies and an increasing focus onurban hierarchies (Pumain, 2006) and novel

forms of metropolitan organisation such as

Peter Hall and Kathy Pain’s (2006) work on

the “polycentric metropolis”.

Similarly, Michael Peter Smith put forward

the idea of ‘transnational urbanism’ underlin-

ing how the ‘global city’ is nothing but a social

construct that has been wrongly reified, thus

providing little advancement on the increas-ingly pressing issues of the global urban con-

dition, and reiterating the economicism that

biases this paradigm. He writes that

The quest for a fixed urban hierarchy should

be abandoned ... because of the multipleand often contradictory composition of the

[global] flows (Smith, 2001, pp. 54–58).

It should also be abandoned because of theerroneous unavoidability of social polarisa-

tion that the global city thesis inspires. Urban

studies, suggests Smith, should be reformed

in a transnational sense, stepping beyond

economic-centric explanations and offering

a real response to the challenges of the 21st

century.

On a somewhat analogous note, Doreen

Massey has returned to a direct engagement

with the study of the city as central place in

her critical account of London’s detrimen-

tal search for global status, fittingly titled

World City (2007). In this book, the British

geographer underscores how ‘the City’

has indiscriminately been supported in its

quest for primacy as a world city by those

who think it represents a golden goose and,

blindfolded by such an image, are unable

to see the deleterious effect of such a queston the rest of England. Massey, continuing

her tradition of relational understanding





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of place, consequently promotes an ideal of

place interlinked with identity formation

and ethical responsibility, which currently

represents an almost unique stance in the

world city scholarship.

A Century of Scholarship

Having journeyed through the century years

of world city scholarship that took us to the

contemporary context of the urban age, it is

now time to look back and sketch an eclectic

working ground of the global city on the basis

of the lessons learned thus far, in order tosketch a concept that can speak outside the

‘invisible college’ to the many disciplines now

involved in the study of the reconfigurations

of the present world system. Let me proceed

in an orderly manner, briefly summing up the

core contributions hitherto identified.

We started with the Chicago School’s

important recognition of the city as a social

entity that transcends a simply aggregateunderstanding of urban relations. Through

the metropolis, social interactions are not

only summed up, but are also changed in a

mutually constitutive ‘dialogue’ between the

individual, the urban and the global. The

global city, in this light, becomes a socially

transformative milieu. Taking a step further,

we can recall Geddes’ and Hall’s specification:

not all cities are the same and some cities have

tighter ties with (and stronger influence on)

the rest of the globe. These strategic urbani-

ties represent the echelon of world cities—the

strategic sites of globalisation. To this extent,

world cities act as central places, gateways

for global and regional flows and sources

of specialised services for the wider public,

beyond their own localities. Consequently,

by connecting this conjecture to McKenzie’s

description of dominance in world organisa-tion, and its later form represented by Sassen’s

‘global control’ capabilities, we can portray

world cities as sites of global co-ordination.

Yet, as both Sassen and McKenzie acknowl-

edge, and as Castells reminds us, these cities’

power is a function of their connection with

those global networks upon which they exer-cise control, therefore making city and system

(seen in its social nature as underscored by

Wallerstein) part of the same structuration:

the city’s influence would not exist without

the thick web of social and material relations

within which it is embedded, but this latter

would not exist either if not for its units’

social action prompted by entrepreneurial

slants. As a direct consequence, it is possibleto identify an order of urban settlements

within such a system, since world cities carry

out different functions and different degrees

of relations, thus aligning in a world ‘urban

hierarchy’ which—due to its mobile basis—is

in constant flux. However, we encounter here

the first divergence with the classical literature

on this phenomenon. Friedmann originally

depicted these metropolises as “spatiallyorganized socioeconomic systems” that rep-

resent “places and sites rather than actors”

(Friedmann, 1995, p. 22). Contrarily to this,

the narrative of the world city depicted thus

far seems to indicate the opposite. Admitting

that certain cities (if not all cities) perform

functions, are capable of innovation and

retain degrees of control, implies, in my view,

a logical corollary: global cities, due to their

presence as loci of purposive action within

the global system and as articulators of global

flows, are not only places but also (entrepre-

neurial) participants in world affairs. They

directly, and very often consciously, maintain

as well as respatialise the world system as

they attempt to maintain their influence or

even enhance their status in it.4 This is fun-

damental because, if with global city status

come global problems such as polarisationand the splintering of urban textures, then

recognising the capacity of cities to act, and





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2968 MICHELE ACUTO

the deeply political nature of their positioning

within the power geometries of the present

world system, allows us to step beyond the

task of recognising their global relevance.

Equally, the picture painted by this criticalstance also sanctions the evolution of global

city scholarship towards an understanding of

the ‘strategic governance potential’ (Healey,

2004) of global cities with regard to issues of

inequality and transnational relations (Amin

and Thrift, 2005) and thus the direct capacity

of the global city to affect inequality, mobility,

international relations and, more generically,

the social and material geographies of theworld system.

The Global City: Finding anEclectic Model

Global cities are thus more than just national

or regional gateways: they are connected to

the widest possible tier of human interactions

and they represent the highest echelon of theglobal urban hierarchy of cities around the

planet. A global city is a type of world city

that exists not solely as an articulatory site of

planetary and regional urban networks, but

also as a functional entity of those globalising

processes of ‘time/space compression’ that

are reconfiguring the geography of social

relations and resulting in a ‘multifaceted

transformation of the parameters of the

human condition’ (Bauman, 1998). It is, quite

simply, in an epoch dominated by capitalism

and growing interconnectedness, a strategic

hinge of globalisation.

More specifically, the global city scholarship

highlighted thus far rests on five essential

features. Accordingly, a global city can be

characterised as a social (urban) entity that

—serves as an articulatory node of globalflows;

—performs multiple and significant world

city functions;

—contains central command roles within such

functions;

—maintains an urban order that balances

aggregation and dispersion; and

—projects such order towards the globalthrough entrepreneurial activities.

This typology implies that every global city

is a world city (but not vice versa) and that

the articulatory role typical of the latter is

performed by the former on a global scale.5

Understanding the difference between ‘glo-

bal’ and ‘world’ cities, which I interpret here

following Sassen’s orientation, is thus a matter

of deeper analytical inquiry and lesser degree

of generalisation. As hinted at by, among

others, Peter Taylor (2004), ‘global cities’ are

nothing but ‘world cities’ with more specific

characteristics. Global city status will be then

attained through the capacity to control

and rearticulate through global networks a

significant number of these. Importantly,

these latter can originate in the city, or

‘traverse’ it, as the urban becomes a facilitatorfor other entities to reach global significance.

Global cities, in this view, become ‘obligatory

passage points’ (Callon, 1986) of manifold

planetary networks, thus occupying a privi-

leged (‘strategic’, as Sassen would put it) posi-

tion in the unfolding of daily relations across

the globe. The global city’s agency, just like

its status, is a “precarious, contingent effect,

achieved only by continuous performanceand only for the duration of that perform-

ance” (Bingham, 1996, p. 647). Cities, to put

it simply, are global hinges as long as they

perform articulatory functions globally;

otherwise, they simply represent nodes in a

world-wide web of social relations.

In this sense, defining global cities as those

metropolises that attain a privileged position-

ing in the complex of globalisation proc-esses underpinning the 21st century means

stepping beyond much of the ‘economicism’

(a shorthand for ‘economic determinism’)





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typical of world city research that, as Pierre

Bourdieu observed in relation to the social

sciences more generally, should be held

accountable for “leading one to reduce the

social field, a multi-dimensional space, solelyto the economic field” (Bourdieu, 1985,

p. 723). This of course does not mean that

financial and economic functions are to be

dismissed. On the contrary, in an era of pro-

found capitalist globalzation, business-related

activities still hold a supremacy in the hierar-

chy of networks running through the Earth

and thus in defining the core hinges of globali-

sation. A roster of key global financial centresmight indeed give us a good approximation of

which cities occupy crucial positions in these

time/space compression processes. Yet, as

much as globalisation is not solely economic,

its engines will perform and control many

more networks than those of global finance.

Recalling the descriptions offered by many

urbanists ranging from Peter Hall to John

Friedmann and Peter Taylor, ‘global city func-tions’ will thus also include roles as centres

of political power, gateways for trade and

commerce (with ports, airports, railways,

commercial routes, etc.), gathering and dis-

semination focal points for information and

culture (with major academic institutions,

museums, Internet servers and providers,

mass media with global reach, etc.), primary

sites of religious cults and hubs for global

mobility and/or tourism. Although top-tier

performances in these criteria are presently

regarded as key indicators of global city

status, their relevance and order, like the

urban hierarchies they support, are in con-

stant flux. They should not be considered as

a definitive checklist for global city status,

nor should their relative importance be

treated as spatially and historically fixed.

The task of empirically quantifying the vari-ous aggregations of these factors is certainly

beyond the reach and scope of this study

(if not of any study), therefore requiring

a certain degree of dependence on the remark-

able work developed by the network analy-

sis projects such as GaWC in the UK, the

Institute for Urban Strategies in Japan orPriceWaterhouseCoopers in New York, in

order to identify global city rankings. Yet this

must be done with the consciousness that new

and relevant services can be developed by

innovative central places at any time, reshuf-

fling the pecking order of the hierarchies and

substituting more classical functions in their

global centrality. Hence, we must not forget

that, as McKenzie intuitively described in1927, the centres of gravity for world affairs

are in a constant process of change and rea-

lignment. Entrepreneurial spirit is thus what

is indispensable for global cities to maintain

their advantaged position among the global

urban hierarchy.

To this extent, global cities are not merely

the result of flows, but also their primary

engines, and would not otherwise exist if notas a part of global networks of strategic sites.

The global city concept, in this view, allows

for a step beyond the dialectic of structure

and agency that has long dominated much of

the social sciences: the city network becomes

a relation of structuration, where the two are

not separated elements of the global scenario,

but mutually constitutive facets in the world-

wide processes of mobility, socialisation and

globalisation.6 ‘Global city’ thus provides us

with an analytical ‘device’ to detect the par-

ticularity of a locality as an element of the

new (global) socio-spatial order (Sassen, 2007,

p. 122), thus grounding all of the process

thinking inspired by globalisation and urbani-

sation in a ‘thing’—as Harvey (1996, p. 435)

would say—of concrete proportions and

everyday dimensions.

This is a crucial move because, as JohnAllen (2003) reminds us à propos the social

sciences in general, many disciplines have





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2970 MICHELE ACUTO

lost the sense in which geography, both

human and physical, makes a difference to

the exercise of power—especially in an age

of globalisation where said geography can be

twisted at unprecedented extremes. To thisextent, identifying global cities is thus not

solely an urbanist exercise, but also a very

political attempt concerned with localising

the ‘whereabouts of power’ (Allen, 2004) in

today’s global architecture. While finding

power itself, as a relational effect of human

relations, might prove to be an impossible

task if not reduced to the sole possession of

capabilities, studying global cities will allowus to reach a better understanding of the

spatial arrangement of power by focusing on

its relational alignments and therefore placing

its practice in a variable world system.

The objective here is thus not to attain a

perfect and everlasting definition, but to offer

a critical analytical tool for novel and political

inquiries into the complexities of the nature

of that exceptional phenomenon representedby the global city. Certainly, as David Bell once

rightly noted, the test of this renewed concept’s

worth “comes in its application to the analysis of

real problems” (Bell, 1975, p. 70). Indeed, there

is very little scope in defining metropolises for

the mere sake of ranking; rather, we should seek

to broaden eclectically our understanding of

what global cities are because an appreciation

of these as strategic sites of globalisation and

active (entrepreneurial) participants in world

affairs opens up immense practical opportuni-

ties. Global cities, understood as innovative,

engaging and competitive agents, might present

much of the contemporary international

scholarship with a solution to those hotly

debated ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel and Webber,

1973)—such as climate change or human secu-

rity—that steps beyond the state-centrism of

the classic social sciences. Metropolises shouldthus be tackled beyond the economicism that

fuels most of the world city literature, with

a focus on how these cities are fundamental

elements of the global scenario not solely for

their networking role, but also for their capac-

ity to shape what humanity looks like in the

21st century. Looking back to the story of the‘invisible college’ is, to this extent, not solely an

analytical exercise, but a necessary endeavour

to come to the realisation of the incredible pos-

sibilities that global cities can offer to the key

questions of our time. In this case, finding the

global city does not mean coming to the end

of our journey. Rather, it is the beginning of a

new practice of urban and international affairs.

As Henry Miller famously put it

One’s destination is never a place but rather

a new way of looking at things (Miller,1957, p. 25).

Notes

1. The title of his paper epitomises this historicistworld system perspective: “The system of

world cities, A.D. 800–1975”.2. Equally important for this mutual social/material relationship is also the developmentof King’s scholarship on the sociologicalprocesses underpinning architecture andspatialisation in world cities (see for example,King, 2004).

3. See for example, the formulation of ‘criticalurban theory’ collected in a recent specialissue of CITY (see Brenner et al., 2009).

4. I have elsewhere tackled the discussion on the

role of global cities as ‘actors’ in more detail(Acuto, 2009 and 2010).

5. In this, I diverge from Sassen’s considerationthat certain urban agglomerates might be ‘globalcities’ but not ‘world cities’ on the grounds thatthe former necessarily require articulationfunctions (of services, capital, information,people or goods) in order to exercise globalcontrol (Sassen, 2001, pp. 348–349).

6. Such mutuality is so accentuated that somescholars, such as Peter Taylor, have tracedthe rationale of the city in its interconnectednature—networks might be the starting-pointto understand cities (Taylor, 2001).






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