"The Global City: Introducing a Concept" - Saskia Sassen (2005)

The following is a review/summary of Sassen's text entitled "The Global City: Introducing a Concept"

Sassen begins by highlighting the 'global' of a global city - "the specificity of the global is as it gets structured in the contemporary period". She goes onto state that a global city differs to a 'world city' which is a city that has been seen over centuries - i.e. in earlier Asian and European colonies.

The Global City Model: Organising Hypotheses 

There are 7 hypotheses Sassen touches on to give a 'precise representation' of the model:

1. Geographic dispersal of businesses economic activities - the more dispersed the more complex and strategic its central functions are
2. Increased complexity of central functions led to outsourcing becoming the norm. This is especially common among global firms
3. These specialised firms then undertake complex tasks and with short deadlines leads to the need for a broader scope of expertise
4. More outsourcing by HQs led to less tasks they had to complete and therefore made them subject to agglomeration economies - this underlines the advantages global cities possess (a highly specialised and network service sector
5. Global service standards required from specialised firms led to increased cross-border transactions which may have been the beginning of the transnational urban system
6. Increased high-level professionalism and high-profit making specialised firms widens spatial and socioeconomic inequality in these cities
7. Leading on from the above point, this leads to wide-spread informalisation of many economic activities

Recovering Place and Work Process

• Sassen notes that global cities control, as they have the resources necessary, global economic activities - therefore the focus of needs goes onto practises and place
• "Focusing on work processes brings with it an emphasis on economic and spatial polarisation because of the disproportionate concentration of very high and very low income jobs in the major global city sector"
• Additional emphasis needs to be placed on geography - "recapturing the geography of a place involved in globalisation allows us to recapture people, workers, communities and work cultures"

Worldwide Networks and Central Command Functions

• Business networks thrive in cities due to agglomeration economies when simultaneous global communication is possible
• Extent of dispersal (control, ownership and profit) is a key variable contributing to central concentration of functions 
• Geographic dispersal and concentration is key in the global economic system - for example firms who are majorly dispersed face new concentration needs, especially when their affiliates involve foreign countries with different legal and accounting needs
• Stocks led to massive increase in international transfer of funds
• Centrality in global cities of central command functions (top level financial, legal, accounting, managerial, executive and planning) exists although they have still embedded national corporate structures
• Global markets still require central places of work - generally in cities (most innovative, speculative and internationalised)

Impacts of New Communication Technologies on Centrality

• Cities provide economies with massive concentration of information, technology and marketplace - therefore 'centrality'
• - How does technology of communication alter the role of centrality and hence cities as economic entities? Due to communication technology the CBD does not totally portray centrality, today there are 3 forms of centrality:

1. The CBD
2. The Metropolitan area - grid nodes of intense business activities, also regional grids connected through transport communication and information technology
3. 'Transterrestrial' centre - via telematics and intense economic transactions (e.g. Paris, New York, Tokyo, London, Sydney, Hong Kong, Zurich and Los Angeles)

• These developments of new communication technology has not, as it was expected to, decreased inequality - especially by non-global cities. The same hierarchical and spatial inequalities exist
• Cities connected to global economy tend to be disconnected from their region

The Global City as a Nexus for new Politico-Cultural Alignments

• Sassen states that "cities are a site for new types of political operations and for a new whole range of new cultural and subjective operations"
• Loss of political power at the national level produces the possibility for new forms of power and politics at sub-national levels
• Immigration is a major trans-national political issue - politics originates largely in the major cities, similarly to global cities
• Who manages the connection between global cities - they are not geographically labelled and have no over-arching government. This is why strategic terrain and connection is a series of conflict and contradiction