A Necessity in Certain Places
When considering the concept of urbanism as a cultural phenomenon, the obvious analytical progression is to examine urbanism in the context of a city. However, if we restrict our analysis to only focus upon what happens within the geographic borders of a city, a large amount of valuable information is lost as a result of this myopic framing of the question.
An initially surprising topic which came up many times throughout Humanities 54: The Urban Imagination is the concept of globalization. Saskia Sassen touches upon this theme quite heavily in her essay “The Global City,” where she introduces the concept of a global city and defines common characteristics. Perhaps the most important tenet brought forward through Sassen’s analysis of global cities is “it makes evident that the global city materializes by necessity in specific places…” (1). In this statement, Sassen suggests that there is an organic force to the evolution of global cities. These cities develop in inherently strategic locations to act as the skeleton of a global network.
Sassen frames her discussion on global cities with a heavy economic and market focus; for her, “the role of cities…is that they…enable firms and markets to have global operations” (1). As a result, Sassen’s global cities are highly capitalistic societies which are confined to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when increased telecommunications catalyzed an explosion in the global network and economy. In fact, Sassen claims that certain cities which gained their power prior to the past several decades were not global cities at all.
However, when considering Sassen’s earlier argument that global cities necessarily arise in certain locations, a tension emerges as a result of this focus on recent globalization. Following Sassen’s argument of the necessity of certain places, it would be expected that as long as the globe has been connected in any capacity there have been global cities. And in fact, tracing Sassen’s characteristics further back in history suggests that certain cities exhibited global city attributes well before Sassen’s period of interest. In analyzing the globalization patterns of three cities, Moscow, Istanbul, and Mumbai, we see that these urban centers have been nodes of the global economy for much of their respective histories and that perhaps the concept of global cities is not a recent urban phenomenon at all.