The eminent global city scholar Saskia Sassen (2010) informs us that the city has become a central strategic site distilling major subjects that confront society. Globalization and the new information technologies are also viewed as being among dominant forces reconfiguring social, economic and political processes (p. 4). This researcher suggests it is these dominant economic and technological forces that have led to the formation of new collectivities, scales and units, such as cities and regions. Thus, the list of articles included in this section speaks to these processes unleashed by globalization and how they have led to an emerging concept of global city. Readers will note MNCs operating under the rubric of globalization have not escaped some of the ethical and social contradictions that are the most distinguishing features of today’s global cities.
Sassen, S. (2010) . The city: its return as a lens for social theory. City, Culture and Society, 1(1), 3-11.
This article posits that today globalization is producing major changes that have become visible most notably in global cities. The challenges, as posited by Sassen (p. 1), is to produce scholarship and analytic tools that explain these complex and multivalent urban instances to allow these instances to be constructed as objects of study. The author suggests that in fact, urbanization of major processes repositions the city as an object of study in ways that could lead to crystal definitions of what exactly is the city. And this researcher would add that these processes have led to the contemporary discourse of the global city.
Grant, R., & Nijman, J. (2002). Globalization and the corporate geography of cities in the less-developed world. In N. Brenner & R. Keil (Eds.), The Global Reader. London: Routledge.