The system of world cities (세계 3대 도시)

The system of world cities

Source: Adapted from Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) 2010 ranking http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/

출처 : The Geography of the World Economy by Paul Knox (6th) (2014) - 191page

CORPORATE CONTROL CENTERS AND WORLD CITIES

The United States provides a good example of the changing geography of corporate head-
quarters. Historically, the most striking feature of the geography of corporate headquarters
in the USA had been the dominance of the Manufacturing Belt in general and of New York
and Chicago in particular. Elsewhere, the pattern of headquarters offices had tended to reflect
the geography of urbanization, so that the more important “control centers,” in terms of
business corporations, had been the major entrepôts and central places that developed under
earlier phases of economic development, as points of optimal accessibility to regional
economies.

With advanced capitalism the relative importance of the control centers of the Manu-
facturing Belt has decreased somewhat, with cities in the Midwest, and in the south and the
west increasing their share of major company headquarters offices. Atlanta, Dallas, Houston,
Minneapolis, and St. Louis have been the major beneficiaries of this shift, although no new
control centers have emerged to counter the dominance of New York. One interpretation of
this shift is that it is simply a reflection of changes in the central place system: High-order
urban areas tend to be higher order business control centers because of their reserves of
entrepreneurial talent, the array of support services they can offer, and their accessibility in
both a regional and a national context.

In overall terms, “there has been a process of cumulative and mutual reinforcement between
relatively accessible locations and relatively effective entrepreneurship” (Borchert, 1978: 230;
emphasis added). This has made for a high degree of inertia in the geography of economic
control centers and this, in turn, has consolidated the economic position of the metropolitan
areas of the northeast through the multiplier effects of concentrations of corporate
headquarters, whereby the vitality of the corporate administrative sector contributes to the
growth and circulation of specialized information concerning business activity, which generates
further employment in a relatively well-paid sector and sustains the area’s attractiveness forheadquarters offices.

The concentration of corporate headquarters offices has contributed to the emergence of a
few places within the international urban system as world cities, dominant centers and sub-
centers of transnational business, international finance and international business services—
what Friedmann (1986) called the “basing points” for global capital. These world cities, it
should be stressed, are not necessarily the biggest within the international system of cities in
terms of population, employment or output. Rather, they are the “control centers” of the world
economy: Places that are critical to the articulation of production and marketing under the
contemporary phase of world economic development. Because these properties are difficult to
quantify, it is not possible to establish a definitive list or hierarchy of world cities. It is possible
to identify world cities on the basis of their role in articulating the functions of the world
economy associated with financial markets, major corporate headquarters, international
institutions, communications nodes and concentrations of business services (Figure 7.4). On
this basis, all three of the dominant world cities—New York, London and Tokyo—are located
in core countries, while, importantly, four of the seven major world cities—Hong Kong,
Singapore, Shanghai and Dubai—are not. The relative importance of secondary and minor
world cities is very much a function of the strength and vitality of the national economies that
they articulate.

Despite the limitations of attempting to portray the system of world systems on a map, and
the impossibility of capturing the major economic and other interconnections among them,
following Friedmann, it is possible to discern a linear character to the world city system that
connects, along an east–west axis, three distinct but interrelated subsystems: An Asia-Pacific
subsystem centered on the Tokyo-Shanghai-Hong Kong-Singapore-Sydney axis, with Seoul,
Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, and Jakarta as important secondary world cities, and quite a few minor
world cities such as Taipei, Bangkok, and Melbourne growing in global importance; an
American subsystem based on the primary world cities of New York and Chicago, linked to
secondary world cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco in the west, Toronto in the
north and Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and São Paulo in the south, which brings Canada and
Central and South America into the U.S. orbit; and a European subsystem focused on London
and Paris, with linkages across a large number of secondary and minor world cities from Madrid
to Moscow and from Brussels to Milan.

Friedmann, and later Sassen (2001), contributed to a better understanding of the global
context for how, for example, business services tend to agglomerate in particular corporate
control centers, and particularly in world cities. This work, however, tended to result in a
focus on the agglomeration within individual world cities such as New York, London, and
Tokyo. Following Castells’ (2000) notion of a “space of flows,” Taylor’s (2004) world city
network concept additionally stresses the importance of the interrelationships between world
cities. For Taylor, the agglomeration of business activities in particular world cities is less
important than the global connectivity of these cities. In fact, Taylor’s conceptualization of
world cities in the world economy fits nicely with Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory
that forms an important underlying explanatory framework for this book (see Chapter 2):

Wallerstein’s (1979a) description of core processes can be interpreted as city-making processes
(both produce spatially clustered high-tech outcomes), and peripheral processes—the development
of underdevelopment . . . In the contemporary world-economy, therefore, the core is defined by
the processes of new work that are constituting the world city network, and the periphery is the
rest of the world beyond the world city network. The semi-periphery is defined in Wallersteinian
terms as locales where core and periphery processes are approximately balanced; these are cities
in the erstwhile “third world” that are now part of the world city network but are also “mega-
cities” (pernicious population “town” growth that is a periphery process). This is what makes
cities such as São Paulo, Mexico City, Mumbai, Johannesburg and Bangkok among the most
interesting settlements in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
(Taylor, 2007: 296)