“World city formation: an agenda for research and action”

This chapter is concerned with the spatial articulation of the emerging world system of production and markets through a global network of cities. World cities lie at the junction between the world economy and the territorial nation state. Being essential to both transnational capital and national political interests, world cities may become bargaining counters in the ensuing struggles. World cities are the control centers of the global economy. Their status, of course, is evolving in the measure that given regions are integrated in a dominant role with the world system. Building upon a broad range of intellectual sources—including radical international political economy, world systems theory, Marxian urban studies, urban systems theory, and radical community studies—John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff’s “agenda for research and action” represented a genuinely original synthesis. The primary social fact about world city formation is the polarization of its social class divisions.