The Global City

Introduction

Saskia Sassen, a Dutch-born sociologist working in the United States, published the book in 1991 (second edition 2001). She argues that the global dispersal of factories and offices made central coordination more important, not less, and that this work – finance, law, accounting, consulting, advertising – concentrates in a few cities, of which New York, London and Tokyo were the leading examples in the 1980s. These cities form a transnational network, often more closely tied to each other than to their own national hinterlands. Sassen shows that their economy also depends on a large, often immigrant low-wage workforce in cleaning, catering and care. Her term “global city” became a basic concept of urban studies.