When I first chose to use global city (1984), I did so knowingly-it was an attempt to name a difference: the specificity of the global as it gets structured in the contemporary period. Thus choosing how to name a configuration has its own substantive rationality. There are other closely linked terms which could conceivably have been used: the old and by now classic term world cities,2 “supervilles” (Braudel 1984), informational city (Castells 1989). The activity of naming these elements is part of the conceptual work. To capture this theoretically and empirically requires, correspondingly, a new type of conceptual architecture.1 Constructs such as the global city and the global-city region are, in my reading, important elements in this new conceptual architecture. The globalization of economic activity entails a new type of organizational structure. Elements in a new conceptual architecture Here I examine the general conceptual and empirical elements that can be applied to a large number of very diverse cities, each with its own empirical specificities. In the case of global cities, the dynamics and processes that get territorialized are global.
I locate the emergence of global cities in this context and against this range of instantiations of strategic scales and spatial units (Sassen 2001 2006a). The dynamics and processes that get terrritorialized at these diverse scales can in principle be regional, national or global. Among these are the sub-national, notably cities and regions cross-border regions encompassing two or more sub-national entities and supra-national entities, i.e., global digitalized markets and free trade blocs. With the partial unbundling or at least weakening of the national as a spatial unit due to privatization and deregulation and the associated strengthening of globalization, come conditions for the ascendance of other spatial units or scales. It is in this context that we see a rescaling of what are the strategic territories that articulate the new system.
This has changed rather dramatically over the last decade as a result of privatization, deregulation, the opening up of national economies to foreign firms, and the growing participation of national economic actors in global markets. The international economic system was ensconced largely in this inter-state system. But to a large extent these took place within the inter-state system, where the key articulators were national states. There have long been cross-border economic processes-flows of capital, labor, goods, raw materials, and tourists. One of the key properties of the current phase is the ascendance of information technologies and the associated increase in the mobility and liquidity of capital.
Each phase in the long history of the world economy raises specific questions about the particular conditions that make it possible.
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