Saskia Sassen Article

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Saskia Sassen Article

• The Global City

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Levels of Analysis

• Sassen prompts us to think differently about the
  importance of place in the global economy
• Recall OBrien and Williams and the notion of
  deterritorialization
• Compression of time and space

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Saskia Sassen

• Sassen acknowledges that something has changed in
  this historical period to make it distinct
• But she doesnt accept that place no longer
  matters it matters differently
• Weve seen a geographic realignment of how the
  global economy is organized

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Saskia Sassen

• Globalization does mean that economic activities
  are dispersed
• But with this dispersal comes highly
  concentrated, specialized nodes of activity,
  typically in large urban centres
• The global city

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Saskia Sassen

• firms and markets that operate in multi-sited
  national and global settings require central
  places where the top-level work of running global
  systems gets done. (p. 2)
• information technologies and industries designed
  to span the globe require a vast physical
  infrastructure containing strategic nodes with
  hyperconcentrations of material facilities (p.
  2)

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Saskia Sassen

• So even as industries embrace information
  technologies and telecommunications
  infrastructures that allow them to have a global
  reach, weve still seen a sharp growth in the
  central business districts of leading cities and
  international business centres
• New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Paris,
  Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Sao Paulo, Toronto, Sydney,
  etc.

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Saskia Sassen

• This trend of concentration of activity in cities
  goes against what many predict about the
  territorial dispersal associated with the global
  economy
• The global economy of our era is more complicated
  than conventional wisdom suggests

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Saskia Sassen

• Missing from the conventional view of the global
  economy is an account of where the management,
  control, and support of the global economy occurs
• Legal, accounting, banking, insurance, and real
  estate services are key supports for dispersed,
  multinational manufacturing and finance concerns
  they collect in cities

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Saskia Sassen

• Interestingly, these global cities are linked to
  each other
• The intensity of transactions between them has
  increased significantly
• This may occur to the detriment of other cities
  or regions in countries where global cities are
  located
• Paris versus Marseilles

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Saskia Sassen

• The dominant narrative about globalization
  excludes the placeboundedness of significant
  components of the global information economy it
  thereby also excludes a whole array of activities
  and types of workers from the story of
  globalization that are in their own way as vital
  to it as are international finance and global
  telecommunications. (p. 11)

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Saskia Sassen

• The example of Toronto
• Financial district extensive building in the
  1980s, which could have gone on outside of the
  city cheaper, spread out, landscaped
• Opted instead for a dense concentration in the
  city Why?