“World city formation: an agenda for research and action”

Abstract

IOur paper concerns the spatial articulation of the emerging world system of production and markets through a global network of cities.' Specifically, it is about the principal urban regions in this network, dominant in the hierarchy, in which most of the world's active capital is concentrated. As cities go, they are large in size, typically ranging from five to fifteen million inhabitants, and they are expanding rapidly. In space, they may extend outward by as much as 60 miles from an original centre. These vast, highly urbanizedand urbanizingregions play a vital part in the great capitalist undertaking to organize the world for the efficient extraction of surplus. Our basic argument is that the character of the urbanizing processeseconomic, social, and spatialwhich define life in these 'cities' reflect, to a considerable extent, the mode of their integration into the world economy.We propose, then, a new look at cities from the perspective of the world economic system-in-formation. The processes we will describe lead to new problem configurations. The central issue is the control of urban life. Whose interests will be served: those of the resident populations or of transnational corporations, or of the nation states that provide the political setting for world urbanization? Planners are directly engaged on this contested terrain. They are called upon to clarify the issues and to help in searching for solutions. Obviously, they will have to gain a solid, comprehensive understanding of the forces at work. And they will have to rethink their basic practices, since what is happening in world cities is in large measure brought about by forces that lie beyond the normal range of politicaland policycontrol. How can planners and, indeed, how can the people themselves, living in world cities, gain ascendancy over these forces? That is the basic question. Towards the end of this paper we shall venture a few observations about the tasks we face and their implications for planning. 'We are greatly indebted to John Walton for his insightful critique of an earlier version of this paper and to our students in the Colloquium on the Future of the City whose skepticism and relentless questioning forced us in a number of instances to reconsider our argument and to sharpen its formulation. Special thanks are due to

Comparative Urbanism: New Geographies and Cultures of Theorizing the Urban

“…These two comparative practices--thinking with shared features and variation across different cities, and drawing cities around the world into analytical juxtaposition through their interconnectedness--were both important in Friedmann and Wolff's (1982) seminal article in which they extended earlier descriptive accounts of world cities (Hall, 1966) to propose that a global network of cities played an important role in articulating the world-economy. They argued (provocatively) that world cities might include, for example, 'Tokyo, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, New York, London, Paris, Randstadt, Frankfurt, Zurich, Cairo, Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mexico City and São Paulo' (Friedmann and Wolff, 1982: 310).…”

“Global and world cities: a view from off the map”

“…On a more positive note, viewed from off the (world cities) map, in its initial versions the world city hypothesis does suggest a range of criteria by which to assess the role and functions of different cities -whether they are centres of decision-making and authority in the registers of economic, cultural and political information (Friedmann and Goetz, 1982;Friedmann, 1986;see, for example, Simon, 1995;Hill and Kim, 2000;Kelly, 2000;Tyner, 2000;Olds and Yeung, 2002). This means that the distinctive role of quite a wide variety of cities can be brought into view using this approach.…”

“…They have been much discussed elsewhere in urban studies, including place-marketing, tourist promotion, subsidies to attract productive enterprises, costly remaking of the urban environment, all relying on often destructive forms of competition between cities and the emergence of copy-cat forms of urban entrepreneurialism (Logan and Molotch, 1987;Harvey, 1989;Berner and Korff, 1995;Hall and Hubbard, 1998;Beauregard and Pierre, 2000;Jessop and Sum, 2000). Critically evaluating these worldcity-making processes and incorporating them into their explanatory frameworks and empirical research (they are notably absent from the key studies within the field: Sassen, 1994; and the GAWC 'global observatory' project at Loughborough) could help to sustain the critical edge of the world cities approach, and also ensure that it remains a 'heuristic' rather than categorizing device (Friedmann, 1995). A greater emphasis on process rather than assigning cities to a category would certainly enable the world cities approach to be more applicable to cities off its maps -but it might also lead us to dismiss the activity of categorizing cities altogether and vastly widen the relevant range of processes, both geographically and functionally (Smith and Timberlake, 1995).…”

Metáforas de las ciudades latinoamericanas ¿Conceptos y adjetivaciones importadas, neutras y despolitizadas?

“…Geddes [1915] también identificó una serie de "ciudades mundiales" por el papel desarrollado en el transcurso de la historia, en las relaciones económicas, sociales, culturales y políticas en escala internacional. John Friedmann (1982Friedmann ( , 1986, por su parte, utilizó el concepto Ciudad mundial para analizar la cambiante organización espacial de la economía mundial y la transformación que esto producía en ciertas ciudades. No sólo se trataba de clasificar ciudades en una jerarquía de lugares centrales en escala planetaria, sino de estudiar la división internacional del trabajo en el capitalismo mundial y las ciudades que ya parecían reemplazar el papel de las economías nacionales.…”