Notes on A Global City

A Global City – Saskia Sassan

Ø  World economy shaped life of cities – transforming changes

- dismantling of industrial centres powerful in UK, USA and Japan

- Accelerated industrialized in third world countries

- Rapid internationalization of the financial industry into worldwide network of transactions

Ø  1945 – conditions of 1945 Bretten Woods agreement (dominated by US) were disintegrating

Ø  Breakdown created a VOID into which stepped the large US transnational industrial firms and banks

Ø  Management of international economic order – run from these firms.

Ø  1980s third world debt crisis market share loses from foreign competition

Ø  However, the international economy formed a duality. Spatially disposed, yet globally integrated organisation of economic activity.

Ø  Now cities functioning new way:

1. Command points in organisation of world economy

2. Key locations for finance

3. As sites of production of innovations

4. Markets for the products and innovations produced

Ø  CITIES control vast resources FINANCE SPECIALISED SERVICE INDUSTRIES. Have restructured the urban social and economic order

Ø  Global cities undergone change in economic base, spatial organisation and social structure

Ø  Territorial dispersal of current economic activity creates a need for expanded central control and management

Ø  It is because of these territorial dispersed facilitated by telecommunication that agglomeration of certain centralising activities has sharply increased.

Ø  Global cities are particular sites of production:

1. Production of specialised services by complex organisations

2. Production of financial innovations and making of markets

Ø  Key dynamic is the place of global cities in the world economy is their capability for producing global control

Ø  Focus on the PRACTICE of global control: producing and reproducing the organisation and management of a global production system and a global market for finance

Ø  Focus on marketplaces and production sites

Ø  Chicago – heart of agro industrial complex, a vast regional economy – how has the decline affected Chicago?

Ø  Technology has not ended 19^th century forms of work but shifted a number of activities in manufacturing into domain of services

Ø  Skilled workers = machine shop floor activities = computers. Transfers.

Ø  Advanced services – not dependant on consumers but need to be located to other key input firms. E.g. An accounting firm