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11 Brown J. World Aff. 27 (2004-2005)
The Global City: Introducing a Concept

handle is hein.journals/brownjwa11 and id is 279 raw text is: The Global City: Introducing a Concept SASK A SASSEN Professor of Sociolog- University of Chicago EACH PHKSE IN THE LONG history of the world economy raises specific questions about the particular conditions that make it possible. One of the key properties of the current phase is the ascendance of information technologies and the associated increase in the mobility and liquidity of capital. There have long been cross-border economic pro- cesses--flows of capital, labor, goods, raw materials, tourists. But to a large extent these took place within the inter-state system, where the key articulators were national states. The international economic system was ensconced largely in this inter-state system. This has changed rather dramatically over the last decade as a result of privatization, 27 deregulation, the opening up of national economies to foreign firms, and the growing participation of national economic actors in global markets. It is in this context that we see a re-scaling of what are the strategic territories that articulate the new system. With the partial unbundling or at least weakening of the national as a spatial unit due to privatization and deregulation and the associated strengthening of globalization come conditions for the ascendance of other spatial units or scales. Among these are the sub-national, notably cities and regions; cross- border regions encompassing two or more sub-national entities; and supra-national entities, i.e. global digitalized markets and free trade blocs. The dynamics and processes that get terrritorialized at these diverse scales can in principle be regional, national or global. I locate the emergence of global cities in this context and against this range of instantiations of strategic scales and spatial units.' In the case of global cities, the dy- namics and processes that get territorialized are global. S 4sKiA S.kssL- is the Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, and Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Her nenv book is Denationalization: Territor& Authority and Rights in a Global Digital Age (Princeton University Press 2005). Copyright © 2005 by the Brown Journal ofWorld Affair WINTER/SPRING 2005 - VOLUME XI, ISSUE 2