ON THE CONCEPT OF GLOBAL CITY REGIONS

Edward W. Soja
http://artefact.mi2.hr/_a04/lang_en/theory_soja_en.htm
In just the past few years a remarkable demographic boundary has been
surpassed. For the first time in history, the majority of the worlds population
now lives in sprawling metropolitan regions of more than one million
inhabitants. This does not just mean that most people on earth live in urban
settlements, for this has probably been true for many decades. The significant
new threshold that has been reached involves an extraordinary concentration
of population and, almost surely, an even greater concentration of social,
economic, political, and cultural power, in around 400 expansive urbanized
areas that have recently come to be described as global city regions.1
What are global city regions and why have they become so prominent in the
contemporary world? What distinguishes global city regions from related
concepts such as world city or global city? How do global city regions relate to
such concepts as glocalization and scalar restructuring? I will address these
questions by looking at each of the three components of the term: global + city
+ region. I begin with a discussion of globalization and its effects on cities and
metropolitan areas, tracing how the concept of global city regions has emerged
in part from the globalization discourse. This is followed by a more specific look
at the new urbanization processes that have been transforming the modern
metropolis over the past thirty years, linking the concept of global city region
to what I have described as the postmetropolitan transition. 2 The third defining
feature re-combines the global and the urban in the framework and context of
what has been called the New Regionalism. I will argue that the regional
component of the concept of global city regions is its most distinctive and
analytically significant feature.
Globalization Effects
Cities have been globalizing for many centuries. London and Amsterdam, for
example, were global cities in the 16th century and still earlier cases of urban
globalization can be found in commercial, imperial, and religious cities around
the world. The link between globalization and urbanization processes is
therefore not new, but there has been a growing realization that starting at
least as early as the 1960s there has been a pronounced acceleration in the
globalization of capital, labor, and culture and that this intensified globalization
has been having significant effects on cities and urban life all over the world.
Analyzing the impact of globalization on cities is thus the first step in
understanding the concept of global city regions.
The effects of globalization on cities and urban development can be seen at
two levels. Within cities and metropolitan regions, globalization has been
playing a role in reconfiguring the social and spatial organization of the modern
metropolis and in changing some of the basic conditions of contemporary
urban life. Increasing global flows of labor and capital and the concentration of
these flows in certain urban areas have contributed to the expansion of
metropolitan populations to hitherto unheard of sizes, with several urbanized

regions (or city regions) in East Asia now containing more than fifty million
inhabitants. Beyond contributing to this expansion in population size,
globalization has also fostered the creation of the most culturally and
economically heterogeneous cities the world has ever known.
There has also been a significant change in the external relations of cities, in
large part due to the geographically uneven effects of globalization and the
impact of new information and communications technologies. Cities have
experienced an expansion in the geographical scope of their interactions and
become hierarchically structured based not simply on population size but on
the degree of city-centered control over transnational flows of capital, labor,
information, and trade. As cities interact increasingly according to their relative
positions within this global hierarchy, inter-urban linkages more frequently
transcend national boundaries and substitute long distance ties for those with
more close by cities.
One of the first scholars to notice this ongoing internal and external
reconfiguration of cities and its links to globalization processes was the
planning theorist John Friedmann.3 A longtime leader in the field of urban and
regional development, Friedmann in the late 1970s took stock of the major
trends affecting cities and regions around the world and, with Goetz Wolff,
published an article in 1982 entitled World City Formation: An Agenda for
Research and Action.4 This work would initiate a lively debate on the
globalization of cities that would eventually play an important role in the
development of the concept of global city region.
Friedmanns world city hypothesis, as he called it, examined from a social
activist perspective the increasingly evident effects of globalization on the
conditions of urban life, especially with regard to the growing polarization
between the expansive citadels of financial and political power and the
compacted ghettoes of the poor. He also focused attention on the emerging
global network and hierarchy of cities and metropolitan regions that was
affecting in significant ways the world system of economic and political
power relations, reinforcing but perhaps also blurring somewhat the
international divisions between First and Third Worlds.
The concept of world cities would continue to influence the work of planners
and geographers, but the specific term world city was eclipsed in the academic
and popular literature by the term global city, defined and promulgated most
forcefully in the work of Saskia Sassen. 5 Influenced by Friedmann, by world
systems theory, and by more sociological notions of postindustrialism, Sassen
focused attention on the social polarization and economic expansion associated
with the concentration of financial power in a smaller group of global
command centers, the controlling spatial nodes of the expanding global
economy. This had the effect of narrowing the definition of global cities,
concentrating attention on the three largest capitals of global capital
(London, New York, and Tokyo), and focusing research on the commanding role
of financial capital in shaping both the internal structure and external linkages
of the worlds major metropolitan regions.

The discourse on urban globalization was broadened again, and significantly

refocused around the relations between globalization, urbanization, and
industrialization at an international conference held at the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in October, 1999, and the publication two years
later of Global City-Regions, edited by the main conference organizer and a
leading figure in the UCLA cluster of urban and regional researchers, Allen J.
Scott.6 The agenda-setting first chapter of Global City-Regions was collectively
written by four UCLA geographers and planners, Allen Scott, Edward Soja,
Michael Storper, and John Agnew. Here is an excerpt from this framing chapter.
[C]ity-regions increasingly function as essential spatial nodes of the
global economy and as distinctive political actors on the world stage. In
fact, rather than being dissolved away as social and geographical objects
by processes of globalization, city-regions are becoming increasingly
central to modern life, and all the more so because globalization (in
combination with various technological shifts) has reactivated their
significance as bases for all forms of productive activity, no matter
whether in manufacturing or services, in high-technology or lowtechnology sectors. As these changes have begun to run their course, it
has become increasingly apparent that the city in the narrow sense is
less an appropriate or viable unit of local social organization than cityregions or regional networks of cities. (2001: 11-12)
This approach to global city regions represents much more than a nominal
change in the analysis of urban globalization or the idea of global cities. It
signals a much broader and more ambitious re-conceptualization. Above all, it
reflects and forcefully asserts the resurgence of interest in the importance of
space and spatial perspectives, especially in the study of globalization
processes. Many have written about how globalization and technological
innovations such as the Internet have been reducing the significance of space
and geography as global flows of information, capital, labor, and culture erode
territorial borders and the identities and attachments to particular places,
cities, and regions. Just the opposite is argued here, that globalization and new
technologies may be making space, place, location, networks of urban nodes,
territorial development, cities, regions, and regionalism more important in the
contemporary world.
Through the global city region concept, globalization, urbanization, and
industrialization are analyzed together as fundamentally spatial and regional
processes. Whereas manufacturing industry was assumed to be disappearing in
most earlier analyses of global cities, all forms of productive activity, no
matter whether in manufacturing or services becomes central to an
understanding of global city regions, a clear departure from the notions of a
postindustrial society dominated by the services sector. The global city region
is still emphatically the expression of urban-based industrial capitalism, and the
manufacturing sector remains a primary generative force in urban, regional,
national, and global economies, especially when seen as incorporating the
production of information, industry-linked business services, and the so-called
culture or creative industries.

Behind this emphasis on urban-industrial restructuring is a very distinctive

perspective on the globalization process itself. From this point of view, the most
distinguishing feature of the current phase of globalization is not the spread of
commercial capital through trade or the global reach of financial or investment
capital, but more specifically the selective diffusion of advanced forms of
urban-based industrial production. Globalization in this sense has been
associated with the creation of new industrial spaces at many different
scales, spreading advanced forms of industrialization and the characteristic
conditions of urban industrial societies to areas where little of this existed
before the urban and other crises that marked the 1960s.
The best known examples of these new industrial spaces are the NICs (Newly
Industrialized Countries), including the most recent addition of the Celtic
Tiger of Ireland, now the third richest economy of Europe after Norway and
Luxembourg. But there are also many examples of NIRs, or Newly Industrialized
Regions, including at the sub-national scale the US Sunbelt and the Third Italy
(located between the highly industrialized north and the agricultural south),
and, at the metropolitan regional scale, Silicon Valley and many other hightechnology production and employment complexes that have developed in
formerly suburban or greenfield sites.
Sustained by massive transnational and inter-regional flows of labor, capital,
trade, and information, the growth of global city regions has created distinctive
new relationships between globalization, industrialization, and urbanization
processes. In so doing, the city region has become the primary developmental
fulcrum between the global and the local, concentrating the geographical
effects of globalization and the New Economy of flexible capitalism in 400 or so
regional conurbations. Although the global spread of industrial urbanism is far
from complete, the old divisions of labor at the international, national, and
metropolitan scales have been significantly reconfigured and the once profound
differences between First, Second, and Third World urbanization processes are
no longer as great as they were thirty years ago.

Urban Restructuring and the Postmetropolitan Transition

As with the study of globalization, the analysis of urban restructuring processes
traces a distinctive path to the concept of global city regions. There can be no
doubt that cities and urban life have been changing quite dramatically over the
past forty years, a multi-faceted transformation that I have described in
composite terms as the postmetropolitan transition. The modern metropolis
that existed in the 1960s, for example, is no longer what it used to be. Among
its many changes, the old metropolis has become increasingly unbound in
several senses of this term.
More than ever before, the reach of the city stretches outward to a global scale.
The metropolitan hinterland is no longer defined exclusively by proximate
boundaries of daily commutes or media use or residential identities, for the
city limits have exploded in scale and scope. Every urban activity or event,

whether linked to production, consumption, exchange, or entertainment, is in

some sense not only local but global as well, giving additional meaning to such
hybrid terms as glocalization to describe the increasing interpenetration of
global and local worlds. At the same time as glocalized city regions reach out
to the entire world, all the world is also reaching in, creating extraordinary
degrees of cultural and economic heterogeneity. It is almost as if the modern
metropolis has been turning itself simultaneously inside-out and outside-in,
making what we associate with the city and urbanism as a way of life appear
everywhere while at the same time everywhere increasingly appears in the
city. In this sense, every place on earth, from the Amazon to Antarctica, is
being both globalized and urbanized (glocalized?), although at very different
rates and intensities.
A similar paradoxical spin seems to be happening within many metropolitan
regions as they are affected by the forces of globalization, economic
restructuring, and new information technologies. In its selective deconstruction
and still ongoing reconstitution, the modern metropolis has been
simultaneously deindustrialized and reindustrialized, decentralized and
recentralized, in highly varied mixes and intensities, as the postmetropolitan
transition takes many different forms in different urban spaces. Many dense
urban cores, for example, have become hollowed out, losing population and
jobs, while some have become refilled again with the influx of global migrants
and reinvigorated global investment. While the inner city is being reconfigured,
there has also begun what can be described as the urbanization of suburbia,
another seemingly paradoxical concept, as once homogeneous and sprawling
outer rings of the metropolis become punctuated by densely populated edge
cities, technopoles, and other outer city employment centers.
In the transition between metropolis and postmetropolis, the typically
monocentric focus of the metropolitan region has become increasingly
polycentric or multi-nodal. Once steep density gradients from the center have
begun to level off as peripheral agglomerations multiply and the dominance of
the singular central city weakens. What were formerly relatively clear
boundaries between city and suburb, the urban and the non-urban, urbanism
and suburbanism as ways of life are becoming increasingly blurred as new
networks of interaction emerge and the city and the suburb flow into one
another in what can best be described as a regional urbanization process.
One of the most remarkable examples of regional urbanization can be found in
the city region of Los Angeles. In the 1960s, the urbanized area of Los Angeles
was among the least dense of all major metropolitan areas in the US. By 1990,
however, it had passed the urbanized area of New York City as the densest in
the country. While more than a million white and black residents left the inner
city, as many as five million new migrants poured in, creating Manhattan-like
densities in the old urban core. At the same time, at least three outer cities, the
largest located in Orange County, grew in the suburban periphery, raising
density levels there as well. It is perhaps no surprise then that the concept of
global city region has evolved with strong roots in Los Angeles.

Regional urbanization and the postmetropolitan transition have been strikingly

associated not just with the blurring of social, economic, and cultural
boundaries, but with increasing economic inequalities and social polarization.
Over the past thirty years, the income gap between the rich and the poor in the
US (with it greatest extremes in Los Angeles and New York) has reached
historically unprecedented levels. Associated with this widening gap, there has
also been a significant reduction in the size of the middle class, with the
fortunate few moving up the income ladder while much larger numbers fall
toward the swollen ranks of the urban working poor and welfare-dependent
underclass. Even where strong surviving welfare systems have blunted this
income polarization, as in most of the European Union, cities have become
increasingly divided politically and culturally, especially by conflicts between
domestic and immigrant populations.
With its deepening inequalities and polarizations, growing cultural
heterogeneity, and rapidly changing geography, the still evolving
postmetropolis has become a highly volatile space, seemingly ready to explode
under its new conditions. This has encouraged the spread or globalization of
what Mike Davis once called security-obsessed urbanism and an ecology of
fear as urban life in nearly every part of the world becomes increasingly
fortressed behind elaborate alarm systems, thick defensive walls topped with
razor-wire, gated and armed-guarded housing compounds, and omnipresent
surveillance cameras.7
These urban transformations have had the additional effect of blurring another
boundary, that between what are conventionally known as the urban and the
regional (or metropolitan scales). It once was quite easy to distinguish the
urban from the regional as distinctive levels of analysis. In the postmetropolis,
however, the two seem to be blending together, as the simple structure of the
modern metropolis, with its clear and monocentric division between urban and
suburban, becomes shattered and shifted around in new and still unsettled
forms of polynucleated, complexly networked, multi-cultural, and polyglot
regional urban systems. This urban-regional convergence adds further to the
distinctive meaning of city-region or region-city, with or without the dash in
between.
The New Regionalism
The concept of global city region is more directly rooted in the resurgence of
interest in regions and regionalism than it is in the study of globalization or
urban and metropolitan restructuring. Stated somewhat differently, the
regional dimension of globalization and urbanization processes is what matters
most significantly to the meaning of the term. It is the regional that absorbs
and defines the interplay of globalization, urbanization, industrialization, and
development, and grounds the concept of global city region in a particular form
of analysis and interpretation.
Over the past thirty years, there has not only emerged a pronounced crossdisciplinary turn toward critical spatial thinking and analysis but also a closely
related development of specifically regional perspectives. This New

Regionalism, as it has come to be called, has been playing a particularly

important role in making theoretical and practical sense of globalization,
economic restructuring, technological change, and other processes shaping
contemporary life. Underpinning the New Regionalism is a significant retheorization of the key concepts of region and regionalism.
Regionalism in the broadest sense of the term is a form of advocacy, an
actively practiced belief that regions are useful tools for achieving a wide
variety of objectives. These objectives may involve achieving greater
theoretical insight and understanding, inducing more rapid and equitable
economic development, improving administrative efficiency, fostering and
defending cultural identity, enhancing political democracy and representation,
preserving the natural environment, and stimulating innovation and creativity.
As a form of advocacy and collective action, regionalism is intrinsically political
and contentious, in that is promotes regional ideas, organizations, and
identities in ways that often do not fit easily within existing political structures.
This connects regionalism to questions of governance, and especially to the
territorial or spatial dimensions of government, administration, social control,
and the shaping of the built and natural environments. 8
Most often, the term region has been used to refer to sub-national and supraurban scales, that is, to regions and regional states such as Quebec and
Catalonia, as well as to metropolitan regions, such as Greater Montreal or
Barcelona. The global city region can be seen as straddling these two forms,
between the state and the city. The term region can also be expanded
conceptually and analytically to describe all distinctive and organized spatial
domains, from the personal spaces that surround the human body, defining the
most intimate and mobile nodal region, through many intermediate
geographical scales, to the planet earth, the largest occupied region of
relevance.
Regional thinking, advocacy, and identity are thus closely associated with
concepts and theories of geographical scale(s). This conjunction of regions and
scales can be expressed in an axiomatic or ontological statement that
describes the fundamental spatiality of human life: all human beings exist in
a nesting of nodal regions, starting with the mobile region of the body and
moving upward through the built environment of rooms, households,
neighborhoods, and so on to larger and larger regional scales. While the
specific meaning and number of these scales and their influence on our lives
varies from place to place, culture to culture, and changes over historical time,
there is always a nesting of nodal regions shaping human behavior and
existence.
It is crucially important to recognize that the nesting of nodal regions is socially
constructed and not naively or naturally given. This means that regionality and
regionalism at every scale can be socially changed or reconstructed. Indeed,
over the past decade, there has developed a growing literature on the notion of
regional or territorial re-scaling, especially in connection with increasing
globalization and the effects of the New Economy. 9 One example of this was
discussed earlier, with the blurring and possible convergence of the urban and

regional scales. Another has to do with the restructuring of the nation-state and
national sovereignty in conjunction with subnational and supranational
regionalisms, exemplified by debates over the distribution of powers in the
European Union.
The term nodal emphasizes another fundamental aspect of regionality, the
tendency for regions to be organized around centers or nodes. Proximity to a
nodal center usually brings with it some advantages. In this sense, centrality
also defines peripherality as potentially generating relative disadvantage,
giving to all regions at least a superficial core-periphery structure. Regional
scales and core-periphery structures are in turn often associated with different
levels of power or influence over our individual and collective lives. For the past
two hundred years at least, the scale of the territorial region we call the nationstate has been especially influential. More recently, the global scale has
significantly increased in its influence both absolutely and relatively. This has
generated an interesting literature on the impact of globalization on the power
and sovereignty of the nation state and on the development of new concepts of
citizenship from the local to the global (or cosmopolitan), as the exclusive
nature of national citizenship is questioned. 10
Regions and regionalism in this general sense can thus be seen as mesoanalytical concepts and emphases, located in between and serving as a
mediating link between the macro- and the micro- or, more pertinently for
present purposes, the global and the local. The hybrid field of regional political
economy has itself developed from a meso-analytical blending of insights from
pre-existing urban and international political economy perspectives, tying
together the exogenous or top-down (macro) forces of globalization and the
endogenous, bottom-up (micro) processes of urban-industrial restructuring. In
short, the New Regionalism draws insight from the interplay of the global and
the local, seen not simply as a dualism but as the ends of a concatenation of
mediating regional scales. The term glocalization can also be positioned here,
as a related meso-analytical concept.
One of the most vigorous expositions on the New Regionalism is Michael
Storpers The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global
Economy.11 As Storper notes, nearly all earlier approaches to regionalism and
regional development treated the region almost entirely as an outcome of
underlying social, economic, and political forces, conceptualizing it as an
external domain or container in which things happen but rarely as a influential
or causal factor in and of itself. Today, the region is being conceptualized quite
differently, and it is this difference that most emphatically distinguishes the
global city region from related concepts.
Storper defines regions as fundamental units of social life, comparable in
importance to the family, the state, and the market as ways of organizing
societies and social relations. Moreover, he argues that regions and regionalism
are equally fundamental as driving forces for societal development, similar in
impact and influence to such social forces as technological innovation, the
division of labor, interest-seeking behavior, and competition for markets. In
other words, regions and, in particular, cohesive regional economies, are active

forces and distinctive social formations that can significantly affect our lives,
positively as well as negatively, in ways that go well beyond physicalenvironmental influences, access to resources, or simple locational advantage.
Under certain conditions, regions or, in Storpers words, regional worlds of
production, can be seen as generating development and change, and
stimulating innovation and creativity. This reformulated view of regions has had
major repercussions. It provides a compelling foundation and explanation for
the resurgence of interest in regions and the New Regionalism and, in a related
way, demonstrates why regionality is so central to the concept of global city
region. The global city region is not just a new twist on the concept of global
city, it is an assertive argument for putting regions first in the analysis and
interpretation of globalization, the formation of a New Economy, the impact of
new technologies, and the patterns of urban and metropolitan development.
Bolstering the New Regionalism has been a closely related revival of interest in
nodality and the role of urban agglomeration and clustering in generating
forces of creativity and innovation in regional economies. Regions or, more
specifically, global city regions are internally comprised of networks of urban
nodes of different sizes connected together by flows of people, goods,
information, capital investment, ideas, etc.. At the global scale, they form a
mosaic or archipelago of city-regions covering nearly all the earths surface and
organized in a fluid hierarchical structure of inter-regional linkages.
Increasingly, these networks of city-regions compete with national economies
and markets as the driving developmental forces of the global economy.
Nodality in the form of urban agglomeration generates economic advantage
and developmental force in at least two different ways. The first is fairly
straightforward, arising from the time and energy savings associated with the
clustering of activities in space, thus reducing the frictional costs of distance.
This has been the basis for what has long been recognized as agglomeration
economies or, more specifically, localization economies. These savings and
other advantages due to proximity can take many forms: in the gathering of
material inputs to production processes (backward linkages), in access to
consumption markets and other producers (forward linkages), in the search for
specialized labor and technical skills (labor pooling). Simply put, having needed
resources, including human capital, close at hand can reduce the costs of
production and lead to increased efficiency and productivity.
In addition to these fairly direct cost-reduction effects of nodal agglomeration,
there are other less tangible advantages that can be described broadly as
innovation and learning effects. These not only help to reduce the costs of
production, they contribute to sustaining continued economic growth and
development. More difficult to measure and more complex in their workings,
these generative effects of agglomeration or urbanization economies, have
become a major focus of contemporary research in the borderlands between
geography and economics. Analysis here extends well beyond the hard
statistics of input-output relations for the individual firm or cluster of firms to
the softer side of regional worlds of production and the study of such

developmental and relational factors as social conventions, untraded

interdependencies, reflexive thinking, and other regionally specific assets.
Among the earliest to recognize these less calculable advantages arising from
urban agglomeration was Alfred Marshall, a key figure in the study of external
or agglomeration economies and the formation of industrial districts. Marshall
saw these advantages in the air or atmosphere of the city and the industrial
cluster. Just how this atmosphere works to stimulate productivity and growth
was unclear but that there was something special emanating from
agglomerations and linked to creativity and learning was undeniable. In the
1960s, Jane Jacobs picked up on these generative and creative effects of urban
agglomeration and spoke of the spark of urban economic life. She went even
further to say that all societal development, going back for 12,000 years to the
origins of cities and agrarian society, was internally generated from the effects
of urban agglomeration.12 Today, some geographical economists refer to these
human capital-augmenting effects of cities as Jacobsian economies or
externalities.
The New Regionalism has recaptured the ideas of Marshall and Jacobs and
taken them several steps further, moving toward such still unformulated but
potentially rich concepts as spatial capital and regionalization economies to
signify the generative effects of urban-regional agglomeration. The industrial or
Marshallian district concept has influenced our understanding of regional
industrialization in many parts of the world, from the Third Italy to Singapore,
Bangalore, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. In his recent work, Michael Storper
(with the British economist Anthony Venables) advances these ideas by
focusing on the importance of face-to-face contact in the promotion of
innovation, creativity, and learning, at least for certain economic activities and
sectors. They call this particular stimulating effect buzz and, in the original
subtitle of the published article, described it as a vital part of the economic
force of cities.13 In Postmetropolis, I follow Jane Jacobs back 12,000 years to
origins of this economic force of cities, using the ancient Greek
term synoikismos, translated as synekism, to define the stimulus of urban
agglomeration and to argue with her that without cities we would all be poor,
meaning that urbanization has been fundamental to all societal development
from the very beginnings of sedentary life.
The dynamic inter-relationship between regionality and nodality, most
effectively captured in recent research on the regional effects of
agglomeration, gives new meaning to what may look to many as just a simple
addition of city + region. Just as the city and the state became one composite
term in the formation of the polis or city-state several thousand years ago, the
city and the region have been blending together over the past thirty years to
create a distinctive new socio-spatial formation, the global city region. The
concept is likely to expand significantly in its use and influence as we make
increasing practical and theoretical sense of what is happening at every
geographical scale, from the global to the local, in the 21 st century.
NOTE: A longer version of this article is published in Spanish in the Basque
Journal of Economics (EKONOMIAZ)

Edward
W.
Professor at the Department of Urban Planning, UCLA, USA.

Soja (USA)

References
1. The term city region (without a dash in between) will be used throughout this
text, except when referring to writings specifically using the term city-region.
The absence of the dash between city and region, however, is not meant to
dismiss the connotations of the dashed term, such as the growing convergence
between city and regional scales and the hint of connections to the much older
notion of city-state.
2. Edward W. Soja (2000), Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and
Regions. Malden US and Oxford UK: Blackwell Publishers.
3.The first major publication to use the term world cities was (now Sir) Peter
Halls The World Cities, published in London by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in
1966. This reference, however, was not directly related to the effects of
globalization.
4. John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff (1982), World City Formation: An Agenda
for Research and Action, International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research 6: 309-44. See also Friedmann (1986), The World City
Hypothesis, Development and Change 17: 69-83 and (1995), Where We
Stand: A Decade of World City Research, in Paul Knox and Peter Taylor
eds., World Cities in a World System. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2147. For a continuation of this tradition of world city research, see the rich and
extensive web-pages of the Globalization and World Cities Group and Network
(GaWC) at http//www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc.
5. Saskia Sassen (1991), The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton
NJ: Princeton University Press; and (1993), Cities in the World
Economy. London: Sage.
6. Allen J. Scott ed. (2001), Global City-Regions: Trends, Theory, Policy. New
York: Oxford University Press.
7. Mike Davis (1990), City of Quartz. London: Verso. The growing attention to
homeland security and the resurgence of radical nationalisms are indicative
of the diffusion of these obsessions and fears from the urban to the global
scales.
8. Emphasizing this link between regionalism and territorial governance is the
Latin root regere, meaning to rule or govern over some defined domain. From
this is derived such terms as regime, regal, regent, regulate, and region itself.

9. For an excellent recent study on this topic, see Neil Brenner (2004), New
State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. New York:
Oxford University Press. Brenners work is directly tied to the regional political
economy and industrial restructuring literature.
10. See Engin Isin ed. (2000), Democracy, Citizenship, and the Global
City. London: Routledge; and (2001), Being Political: Citizenship as Alterity from
Polis to Cosmopolis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
11. Michael Storper (1996), The Regional World: Territorial Development in a
Global Economy. New York: Guilford. It is no mere coincidence that Storper has
also contributed significantly to the development of the concept of global city
regions.
12. Jane Jacobs (1969), The Economy of Cities. New York: Random House.
13. Michael Storper and Anthony Venables (2004), Buzz: Face-to-face Contact
and the Urban Economy, Journal of Economic Geography 4(4).