The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo

A very good choice for anyone interested in social or/and city matters. Saskia Sassen's (University of Chicago and London School of Economics) books are translated in 16 langueges and her comments have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde Diplomatique and the Financial Times among others. She claims that cities have re-emerged as stategic places for a wide range of projects and dynamics.

Sassen aims to - unpack the concept of "the city" (p. xviii) - as a unit of analysis in sociology and economics from a global perspective. The scope of this endeavor is quite staggering and she has to bring an number of different fields under the same conceptual umbrella in order to capture the elusive character of 'the city'. Her method is the painstaking analysis of a huge amount of data from a vast array of sources. This might seem unnecessary to some people who are more interested in bold visions of the future á la Manuel Castells or Antonio Negri. The thing about Castells or Negri though is that you need a leap of faith to interpret the world according to their views. Sassen is more boring to read but one can always rely on her providing the data leading up to her conclusions. This is crucial to anyone wanting to take a stab at the interdisciplinary phenomenon of the global city and use availible data for comparison. The thorough research foundation of the book makes it easy to link the issues to areas that otherwise would be quite far apart such as urban planning and service management. Personally I think the most important message is that place and location matters maybe even more nowadays than it used to when production and consumption was explicitly bound by the physical limitations of our world. In all I think that this book is a must read for anyone even remotely interested i urban matters. It's a bit tough to get through though and the visual presentation of the data could have been better, hence rendering the book a four rather than a five star grade.

In writing this review, I had to begin with one critical question: why on earth would I review a book already in print for almost four years? What better time than now, when anti-war advocates are seen in many eyes as un-American, to write about a book in which the author discusses the dangers of nationalism and xenophobia in the context of an ever-globalizing economy? In ten essays the doctor of sociology attempts to "expand the analytic terrain within which we need to understand the global economy in order to render visible what is now evicted" from our current picture of the global economy. She writes in such mouthfuls often, yet her textbook style of writing is a welcome break from the sensationalist and anecdotal approach most often utilized in accounts from the anti-globalization perspective. If, in the last ten years, you have followed the globalization debate even just a little, then nothing I write here can spoil the book's ending for you. The ending is inconsequential, however, for it is this native Dutch woman's approach to the globalization topic that matters most. The book is not a story, and thus does not follow a traditional plot line, but it never tries to disguise itself as anything other than a categorical critique of international policy. Nor is the book a moral plea to human rights, an approach that seems an easy trap into which fall most writers with parallel paradigms to Sassen's. She takes an obvious stand against globalization of the economy, but instead of simply stating that globalization is bad, Sassen pulls the reader through 218 pages of hard earned facts and qualified theories about the dangers of globalization. Rather than dwell in idealisms, the University of Chicago professor acknowledges the simple observation that globalization is occurring, and rather than asking for an uncompromising end to globalization, she takes a card from the neoliberals' hand and offers concrete solutions to the globalization problem. While that seems like a rather unexciting prospect in itself, one has to remember that many opponents of globalization get sucked into the blame game mindset and offer few (if any) plausible-- or well backed-up-solutions (see the Global Exchange website if you do not believe me). The remarkable quality of the book is its language. It is written under the assumptions of a human-rights advocate but with the deliberate, yet convincing style of an economist. Its academic quality will turn off a lot of people, but this book was never intended to be bedtime reading material. The normal arguments of the two sides of the issue often give the appearance of two runners in completely different races. Sassen, however, meets her opponents head on, and by using their lexicon and dry grammatical structures, she writes one of the most important books about globalization to this day. Indeed, if there is one real weak point to the book, it is her penchance for writing too dully for even academic writing. She fa

This book is a profound empirical assessment of the changes that have taken place in the world economy since the sixties and the emerging role of core cities therein. One of the more significant changes in the world economy has been, according to the author, that manufacturing activities have been spatially dispersed while at the same time production-related services such as finance, accounting, and management have been spatially centralized. It is this 'combination of spatial dispersion and global integration [that] has created a new strategic role' [p. 3] for such cities as New York, London, and Tokyo. They have become global cities, i.e., 'postindustrial production sites' for a variety of command functions that integrate the global economy in the post Bretton-Woods era. An immense volume of data is presented to substantiate the hypothesis that these three cities, diverse as their historical, cultural, political and economic settings are, have undergone similar transformations: their economic base has shifted from manufacturing to services, in particular to producer services (chs. 5,7); agglomeration economies in favour of these global cities induced the urban hierarchy to become more top-heavy in the U.S., Great Britain, and Japan, respectively (ch. 6); and their urban social structure is characterized by increasing income and employment polarization since there is complementary expansion of jobs at the top-level and in the informal economy (chs. 8,9). Quantitative indicators, almost by definition, do not suffice to vindicate such far-reaching conclusions. Some of them rely on a questionable notion of what is normal, e.g., the indicators of these cities' 'disproportionate share' in worldwide capitalization of equities, due to their stockmarkets, or the 'overrepresentation' of the financial industries' assets and income in these cities [pp. 171-179]. But what is normal about the value of equities and banks' assets being proportional to city size? Other indicators do not necessarily support the hypothesis forwarded. The conclusion that 'the salient difference' between the three global cities and other major cities 'is the extent of concentration of the producer services and finance' [p. 326] is undermined by the observation 'that the producer services as a whole have grown rapidly over the last decade and that they have grown more rapidly in the countries as a whole than in these cities' [p. 138]. The evidence thus suggests that the 'salient difference' may be a temporary phenomenon and can hardly serve to characterize global cities in general. However, these are minor objections against some empirical arguments in favour of the Global City hypothesis. The author, Professor of Urban Planning at Columbia University, provides much more qualitative and quantitative evidence to substantiate her case. It is the outcome of work for years, in collaboration with an impressive number of other reserachers and inst