The Global City: A Structural Hole in the National Territorial Tissue

Elitza Stanoeva: When you introduced the concept and the theory of the ‘global city’, it was the outcome of your research on the interplay between processes on the global scale such as postKeynesian economic and labour restructuring, and changes on the local scale of the city, e.g. in migration trends and income distribution, as it unfolded in the 1980s. In the second edition of The Global City (2001) you took up the task of testing your research framework vis-avis the decade of the 1990s on the basis of updated empirical data. Later developments prompted you to further elaborate a typology of cities participating in the network of global circuits and to talk of global cities as well as cities that are not such, yet perform functions of global cities. How do economic competition and/or cooperation shape the network of global cities as well as their respective roles today? And if you were to start your research project on global cities today, which cities would you single out as emblematic places where ‘the global hits the ground’? Saskia Sassen: That is an interesting question to ask me... I would select two types of cities: a) those that have long been international in the inter-state system meaning but not global, where I would include cities as diverse as Zurich and Mumbai, and most of the Central and East European major cities, including Sofi a; and b) cities that are not global nor international but that are the main cities in countries until now weakly linked to the traditional international system and the global economy that began in the 1980s (cities in the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, many of the East European cities, and cities in Africa – though not Johannesburg and Cairo, which have long been articulated with both the international system and the new global economy). THE GLOBAL CITY: A STRUCTURAL HOLE IN THE NATIONAL TERRITORIAL TISSUE