Urbanism and Globalization as a Positive Feedback Loop

In defining a global city, Saskia Sassen focuses only upon how modern cities can be considered “global” because of their place in the global market. Though obviously this globalization has been accentuated with the advent of hyper-fast telecommunications in the modern era, Sassen could strengthen her idea by discussing examples of global cities throughout history. In fact, tracing urban-focused globalization through the history of three cities, Moscow, Istanbul, and Mumbai, shows that these cities have fit quite well into Sassen’s mold of global cities for a long fraction of their history. These cities espoused global city characteristics far prior to when this concept was even discussed. It shows that regardless of a city’s economic presence, or in the case of Soviet Moscow even the economic ideology, global cities do in fact “materialize by necessity in specific places” (1).

This is an interesting conclusion, as it essentially argues that the global nature of certain cities is inherent, or at the very least the result of a long evolution. When the phenomenon of urbanism is discussed, the concept of the worldliness of cities is often brought up because cities act as the petri dish for the commingling of various cultures from across the globe. Different people and cultures are attracted to cities for their global characteristics and in the process further accentuate the worldliness of these cities. This seemingly organic positive feedback loop contributes to our understanding of the “urban” as a complex cultural phenomenon. We see that while cities are necessarily imbued with their cultures and worldliness by humanity, at the same time there is an intangible force which seems to work separate from calculated decisions that is fueled by the inertia of history. This complicates the study of urbanism, suggesting no clear cause-and-effect relationship between cities, urbanism, and globalization. Rather it seems that the urban phenomenon of globalization is a continuous cycle of change and evolution that has interwoven so that the past heavily informs the present so much so that to discount the past is to discount the present and future.