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The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo
Massive and parallel changes have occurred in New York City since the late 1970s and in London and Tokyo since the early 1980s. What transformed these urban centers, with their diverse histories, into "global cities" that share comparable economic and social structures? Saskia Sassen argues that their remarkable similarity arises from their position as command posts in international finance and advanced services for business.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1991
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1047 people want to read
About the author
Saskia Sassen
93 books151 followersSaskia Sassen (born in The Hague, January 5, 1949) is a Dutch sociologist noted for her analyses of globalization and international human migration. She is currently Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Centennial visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Sassen coined the term global city.
After being a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, Sassen held various academic positions both in and outside the USA, such as the Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. She is currently Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Centennial Visiting Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Sassen emerged as a prolific author in urban sociology. She studied the impacts of globalisation such as economic restructuring, and how the movements of labour and capital influence urban life. She also studied the influence of communication technology on governance. Sassen observed how nation states begin to lose power to control these developments, and she studied increasing general transnationalism, including transnationalhuman migration. She identified and described the phenomenon of the global city. Her 1991 book bearing this title quickly made her a frequently quoted author on globalisation worldwide. A revised and updated edition of her book was published in 2001. She currently (2006) is pursuing her research and writing on immigration and globalization, with her "denationalization" and "transnationalism" projects (see Bibliography and External Links, below). Sassen's books have been translated into 21 languages.
After being a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, Sassen held various academic positions both in and outside the USA, such as the Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. She is currently Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Centennial Visiting Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Sassen emerged as a prolific author in urban sociology. She studied the impacts of globalisation such as economic restructuring, and how the movements of labour and capital influence urban life. She also studied the influence of communication technology on governance. Sassen observed how nation states begin to lose power to control these developments, and she studied increasing general transnationalism, including transnationalhuman migration. She identified and described the phenomenon of the global city. Her 1991 book bearing this title quickly made her a frequently quoted author on globalisation worldwide. A revised and updated edition of her book was published in 2001. She currently (2006) is pursuing her research and writing on immigration and globalization, with her "denationalization" and "transnationalism" projects (see Bibliography and External Links, below). Sassen's books have been translated into 21 languages.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
October 11, 2014
The author analyzes a paradoxical geographical trend of the simultaneous dispersal of productions and centralization of producer services. Caused by the centralization of services, a new types of cities—the global cities—emerge, bringing in new economic and social orders.
The triggers of this trend include the shift of emphasis from productions to services, the financial deregulations, new communication technologies and so on. However, the essential mechanism behind it is the increase in geographical mobility of resources and interconnectivity of our global society. Thanks to the deregulation and new technologies, plants can now easily build connections to manufacturing resources, including energy, materials, and capitals. For each step of the manufacturing chains, a plant can move nearer to the vital resources it needs. On the other hand, it is more difficult for the head quarters to connect to increasingly complex producer services, such as accounting, law, advertising, design, architecture, cross-border connections and so on. When the costs of building new connections exceed the benefits of proximity to resources, the head quarters will move to geographic locations where a large amount of services concentrate—the global cities. As more head quarters move in, global cities attract further concentration of more complex services. This “rich-get-richer” preferences of geographical relocations and connections form the hierarchy of global city network.
Within a global city, the same preferences of connections also exist and change the city’s social orders. Unlike the manufacturing productions, which involves enormous works in similar processes, the producer services require business connections between services providers and social connections between experts. Providers and experts with higher degree of connections will attract more connections and thus have higher productivity and higher incomes. This enforce the power-law distribution of wealth, and therefore intensify inequality and polarization in employment and earnings. This new social order will undermine the social stability of the global cities and increase the costs of maintaining the large amount of connectivities and the high degree of complexity. When these costs exceed the benefits of geographical centralization, the global cities may become less economically and socially durable.
The trends discussed above are partially caused by the shift of manufacturing from developed to less-developed countries. However, in the near future, due to the game-changing technologies like assembly robotics and 3D-printing, the manufacturing industries may dramatically shrink or even disappear. At that time, these new economic and social orders will be brought to the global scale, and the global cities will become increasingly critical. Better understandings of the trends discussed in this book can help us better prepare for the future of our global society.
The triggers of this trend include the shift of emphasis from productions to services, the financial deregulations, new communication technologies and so on. However, the essential mechanism behind it is the increase in geographical mobility of resources and interconnectivity of our global society. Thanks to the deregulation and new technologies, plants can now easily build connections to manufacturing resources, including energy, materials, and capitals. For each step of the manufacturing chains, a plant can move nearer to the vital resources it needs. On the other hand, it is more difficult for the head quarters to connect to increasingly complex producer services, such as accounting, law, advertising, design, architecture, cross-border connections and so on. When the costs of building new connections exceed the benefits of proximity to resources, the head quarters will move to geographic locations where a large amount of services concentrate—the global cities. As more head quarters move in, global cities attract further concentration of more complex services. This “rich-get-richer” preferences of geographical relocations and connections form the hierarchy of global city network.
Within a global city, the same preferences of connections also exist and change the city’s social orders. Unlike the manufacturing productions, which involves enormous works in similar processes, the producer services require business connections between services providers and social connections between experts. Providers and experts with higher degree of connections will attract more connections and thus have higher productivity and higher incomes. This enforce the power-law distribution of wealth, and therefore intensify inequality and polarization in employment and earnings. This new social order will undermine the social stability of the global cities and increase the costs of maintaining the large amount of connectivities and the high degree of complexity. When these costs exceed the benefits of geographical centralization, the global cities may become less economically and socially durable.
The trends discussed above are partially caused by the shift of manufacturing from developed to less-developed countries. However, in the near future, due to the game-changing technologies like assembly robotics and 3D-printing, the manufacturing industries may dramatically shrink or even disappear. At that time, these new economic and social orders will be brought to the global scale, and the global cities will become increasingly critical. Better understandings of the trends discussed in this book can help us better prepare for the future of our global society.
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May 18, 2022Es trampa, no va de ciudades.
December 31, 2017
An insightful theoretical overview of the transition of urban economies from an industrial powerhouses to hubs of financial coordination. Perhaps most importantly, it explains how and why this increasing global interconnectedness has ironically heightened the importance of proximity and place, and thus geographic dynamics like gentrification and income polarization.
October 21, 2023
In my view, this is a case of an extremely well executed study that is presented incredibly poorly. My expectations for the book were only partially met in the extremely scant 18-page epilogue in a book that is roughly 366 pages long. I would have loved to have seen precisely those insights take centerstage in the book, only unapologetically, and with a greater commitment to connecting them to overarching theoretical concerns. An otherwise outstanding research project has, in my opinion, been stymied in part by the author's reluctance to earnestly implement in the rich qualitative studies they have undertaken, but deprived the reader of.
An overwhelming bulk of the pages are dedicated to the dry and ultimately contextually useless rattling off of quantitative findings that are already summarized in the extremely copious tables printed on every other page. While no doubt essential to establishing certain claims, not nearly enough space is reserved for synthesizing the findings or even settling the question of what concrete claim the figures are really supposed to support, let alone how they fit into the bigger picture. Over half of these discussions could have been reserved for appendices--or removed outright--and this would indeed be the only measure that would ensure that the reader could make good use of the information, at least without having to strain oneself considerably for very little payoff. This was despite the clear efforts to perform this summarization, which in practice only served to make the text repetitive without really aiding the construction of an organized thread running through the book. This is compounded three times, as the same pattern is replicated for each of the three cities under study.
Part of this stems from a poorly defined thesis, which is made all the more disappointing by the fact that the author seems, on the contrary, to have an incredibly compelling story to tell to this end, but--as is made explicit to the author--was discouraged on numerous occasions from telling. This is not X, Y, or Z's book! Their misgivings need not take center stage, and they certainly should not structure it by any means.
Ultimately, the book and studies have the potential to become an ambitious, albeit salient and major contribution to the field. But at this stage, it manifests more like a series of somewhat superficial empirical studies that are only loosely and intermittently connected to broader implications for the notion of global cities and--what is really the interesting part--global capitalism.
Finally, one might imagine that the sacrifice of this global picture would come with the concession of having a really strong local theory. The expectation I'd have had here would be, for instance, examining what makes the study geographic at all. Only very rarely does the text engage with the real geospatial fabric of the city itself. Any invocation of the smaller units that make up the cities and how they affect the distribution of the city as a whole really boils down to the same ontological treatment that is reserved for the whole cities themselves: that is, as mere data points. The discussion on gentrification, for instance, is a case that is ripe for further exploration. Why not get down to precisely how and why the cities transform the way they do--not merely to report them as static facts, as is occasionally done--but perhaps to identify those logics and see more precisely how they might come to fruition in other cities. The book approaches, but never arrives, at an analysis like this. It straddles the micro and macro-levels without committing to either and therefore without satisfying the curiosity itch on any. Is this urban studies because it studies the logic of cities that could be applied globally, or is it urban studies because it studies cities as global patterns? I can't really tell and I suspect it's because it strives for both but achieves neither.
An overwhelming bulk of the pages are dedicated to the dry and ultimately contextually useless rattling off of quantitative findings that are already summarized in the extremely copious tables printed on every other page. While no doubt essential to establishing certain claims, not nearly enough space is reserved for synthesizing the findings or even settling the question of what concrete claim the figures are really supposed to support, let alone how they fit into the bigger picture. Over half of these discussions could have been reserved for appendices--or removed outright--and this would indeed be the only measure that would ensure that the reader could make good use of the information, at least without having to strain oneself considerably for very little payoff. This was despite the clear efforts to perform this summarization, which in practice only served to make the text repetitive without really aiding the construction of an organized thread running through the book. This is compounded three times, as the same pattern is replicated for each of the three cities under study.
Part of this stems from a poorly defined thesis, which is made all the more disappointing by the fact that the author seems, on the contrary, to have an incredibly compelling story to tell to this end, but--as is made explicit to the author--was discouraged on numerous occasions from telling. This is not X, Y, or Z's book! Their misgivings need not take center stage, and they certainly should not structure it by any means.
Ultimately, the book and studies have the potential to become an ambitious, albeit salient and major contribution to the field. But at this stage, it manifests more like a series of somewhat superficial empirical studies that are only loosely and intermittently connected to broader implications for the notion of global cities and--what is really the interesting part--global capitalism.
Finally, one might imagine that the sacrifice of this global picture would come with the concession of having a really strong local theory. The expectation I'd have had here would be, for instance, examining what makes the study geographic at all. Only very rarely does the text engage with the real geospatial fabric of the city itself. Any invocation of the smaller units that make up the cities and how they affect the distribution of the city as a whole really boils down to the same ontological treatment that is reserved for the whole cities themselves: that is, as mere data points. The discussion on gentrification, for instance, is a case that is ripe for further exploration. Why not get down to precisely how and why the cities transform the way they do--not merely to report them as static facts, as is occasionally done--but perhaps to identify those logics and see more precisely how they might come to fruition in other cities. The book approaches, but never arrives, at an analysis like this. It straddles the micro and macro-levels without committing to either and therefore without satisfying the curiosity itch on any. Is this urban studies because it studies the logic of cities that could be applied globally, or is it urban studies because it studies cities as global patterns? I can't really tell and I suspect it's because it strives for both but achieves neither.
November 10, 2019
Best book of this year maybe
I could see the whole picture from Macroeconomics and IR arrangement(payment, trade and investment systems) to structure factors(decentralization of manufacture and centralization of post industrial sectors like Fire and service) and the most local elements like spatial arrangement of cities among different demographic groups.
Urbanization today is highly shaped and influenced by the two main driven froce, service+technology (in other world from a urbanization and globalization perspective, service and goods are very different in terms of spatial and demographic arrangements)and the so rapid expension of FIRE industries.
Ps, actually I am worried about this polarization, especially for those big cities in China, where all these things would lead us to?
I could see the whole picture from Macroeconomics and IR arrangement(payment, trade and investment systems) to structure factors(decentralization of manufacture and centralization of post industrial sectors like Fire and service) and the most local elements like spatial arrangement of cities among different demographic groups.
Urbanization today is highly shaped and influenced by the two main driven froce, service+technology (in other world from a urbanization and globalization perspective, service and goods are very different in terms of spatial and demographic arrangements)and the so rapid expension of FIRE industries.
Ps, actually I am worried about this polarization, especially for those big cities in China, where all these things would lead us to?
January 18, 2023
For my second comp on globalization, which I actually took it and passed it in winter 2022 (forgot to update here). Later on I adopted some of the idea in the Intro to Sociology class. Worthy to read or at least watch some interviews with the author.
July 17, 2021
数据有点旧，但是思路依然很有启发：从capabilities production的角度来看全球化和城市的变化。
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March 22, 2025someone somewhere read this FOR FUN
August 17, 2021
This is an incredible work that touches on so many aspects of the global economy. From the changing relationship between countries, companies, and the economy, to how patterns of corporate consolidation has led to a reconfiguration of jobs and ultimately income distribution, Sassen demonstrates the characteristics of the cities (and neighborhoods therein) that end up dominating their country's economies and how they form a new system that is highly interlocked. The language is incredibly dense, and needlessly complex, which makes it a frustrating read for such an important trend. Still, the patterns of consolidation, agglomeration, and specialization are impossible to ignore or deny.
to-keep-reference
October 18, 2016La primera consecuencia geográfica del pasaje de una economía industrial a otra informacional es una dramática descentralización de la producción. Los procesos de modernización y pasaje al paradigma industrial provocaron la intensa agregación de fuerzas productivas y masivas migraciones de fuerzas de trabajo hacia centros que se volvieron ciudades fabriles, como Manchester, Osaka y Detroit. La eficiencia de la producción industrial masiva dependió de la concentración y proximidad de los elementos a fin de crear el lugar fabril y facilitar el transporte y la comunicación. Sin embargo, la informatización de la industria y la emergente dominación de la producción de servicios ha vuelto innecesaria dicha concentración de la producción. El tamaño y la eficiencia ya no están relacionados linealmente; de hecho, la gran escala se ha vuelto un obstáculo en muchos casos. Los avances en las telecomunicaciones y las tecnologías de la información han posibilitado una deterritorialización de la producción que ha dispersado efectivamente a las fábricas de masas y evacuado las ciudades factoría. La comunicación y el control pueden ser ejercidos eficientemente a la distancia, y en algunos casos los productos inmateriales pueden transportarse por todo el mundo con mínimo costo y demora. Múltiples destrezas diferentes pueden coordinarse en la producción simultánea de una única mercancía, de tal modo que las fábricas pueden estar dispersas en diversos lugares. Incluso en algunos sectores la propia fábrica puede eliminarse desde que sus trabajadores se intercomunican mediante nuevas tecnologías informáticas.
Imperio Pág.223
Sobre el crecimiento de “servicios para productores” en centros concentrados de control, ver Sassen, The Global City, pp. 90-125.
Imperio Pág.224
Imperio Pág.223
Sobre el crecimiento de “servicios para productores” en centros concentrados de control, ver Sassen, The Global City, pp. 90-125.
Imperio Pág.224
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June 20, 2008If you can handle lots and lots of economics and statistics, then I recommend this. However, if you can't, then it could be problematic. On the whole, though, it's a very interesting analysis of how globalization has affected urban economies. A lot of this seems fairly obvious nowadays, especially if you've read a fair amount of contemporary geography, but it's still a very interesting in-depth analysis.
January 20, 2012
I thought this a thinly disguised neo-con celebration of hypercapitalism, "semantic proliferation" and the liberation of individual identity from cultural rootedness in a global economy. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe some day I'll try again. But I remember Sassen being as irritating as Francis Fukuyama.
July 26, 2015
Simply great, insightful book!
February 3, 2023
Basically wrote my thesis with this book 😂 thank god there’s a sassen. Super interesting way to see cities.
It is purely hard power based so if you are looking for cultural things, nope.
It is purely hard power based so if you are looking for cultural things, nope.
October 25, 2008
an important, if not enjoyable book
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews