فهرستی از شهرهای جهان

Although there is a general consensus on which are the leading world cities, there is no agreed-upon roster covering world cities below the highest level. This paper reports the construction of an inventory of world cities based upon their level of advanced producer services. Global service centres are identified and graded for accountancy, advertising, banking/finance and law. Aggregating these results produces a roster of 55 world cities at three levels: 10 Alpha world cities, 10 Beta world cities and 35 Gamma world cities. These are found to be largely geographically concentrated in three “globalization arenas”, northern America, western Europe and Pacific Asia.

Large and significant cities have fascinated social scientists over the last century and this is indicated by the range of terms used to describe them: imperial cities, primate cities, great industrial cities, millionaire cities, world cities, global capitalist cities, international financial centres, mega-cities and global cities are all well-known designations. This variety in terminology reflects both the diversity in the nature of cities and differences of approach to the study of cities. Although often closely entwined, there is a basic division of approaches which can be easily identified. There is a demographic tradition which is largely interested in the sizes of cities and a functional tradition which treats cities as part of a larger system. The former tradition is today represented by the mega-city project, which is exploring the human and ecological implications of contemporary and future huge population concentrations. The functional tradition is to be found in studies of world and global cities which are interpreted as integral to contemporary globalization processes. In this paper we will be concerned solely with the latter cities. It should be noted that this conceptual distinction does not identify discrete classes of cities: New York and Mexico City, for instance, are both mega- and world cities. Despite such overlap – obviously there is a tendency for demographically large cities to be economically significant cities – the differences between the two approaches means that their respective rosters are distinct: Calcutta is a mega-city but not a world city, Zurich is a world city but not a mega-city. However, such discussion of rosters of cities is problematic in the case of world cities. Whereas mega-cities can be easily defined in terms of a given population threshold, which cities qualify for “world” status has never been so clearly specified. Hence, while it is obvious that cities like London and New York are world cities, as we move to less significant cities such as Manchester and Minneapolis for example, there is by no means any consensus as to their status in this context. It is the purpose of this paper to construct a roster of world cities. The usual way of treating these cities below the Londons and New Yorks is to cite them as national, regional or even “sub-global” in their functional reach. This hierarchical approach is itself problematic since it relies on specification by city ranking rather than actual inter-city relations (Taylor, 1997). It is also somewhat doubtful given the pervasive nature of globalization. As a recent special issue of Urban Geography (Knox, 1996) has indicated, “medium cities” have just as much need to respond to globalization trends as their larger neighbours. Hence, in this study we do not approach the definition of a roster in terms of working our way down a possible hierarchy – the latter is considered a separate, albeit closely related, research question. Rather, we consider the global capacity of cities in terms of selected services they provide. Using key advanced producer services, we consider firms which have a global competence and enumerate their presence in cities across the world. Global capacity is then defined empirically in terms of aggregate scores and interpreted theoretically as concentrations of expertise and knowledge. In this exercise, we find 55 world cities and another 68 cities showing evidence of world city formation. The paper is divided into two main sections. In the first we review the work of others in defining world cities. Within this functional tradition of studying major cities we identify four main approaches. However, the problem with this collection of approaches is the variety of criteria used; they range from being very specific to being quite subjective, and sometimes even vague, specifications of world city status. This exercise is useful for presenting the state of play in defining world cities but, most of all, it illustrates clearly the need for a systematic consideration of the question of world city status. This is what we attempt in the second section. Using Saskia Sassen's argument (Sassen, 1991) that it is advanced producer services which are the distinctive feature of contemporary world city formation, we focus on four key services: accounting, advertising, banking and law. Cities are evaluated as global service centres in each of these sectors and aggregation of these results provides a measure of a city's global capacity or world-cityness. From these scores we define 10 “Alpha” world cities, 10 “Beta” world cities and 35 “Gamma” world cities. In the conclusion we briefly evaluate our results comparatively and their utility in future research.

Let us begin these remarks by comparing the GaWC inventory with the previous studies that have identified world cities (Table 1 and Table 2). The first point is that there are no major surprises in our listing. Certainly the cities which appear in Table 1 are found to be Alpha world cities in our analysis with only one or two exceptions. Furthermore, there is an exact coincidence between the four cities identified by all sources in Table 2 and Alpha cities with maximum scores in our inventory (London, New York, Paris, Tokyo). The interest of our inventory lies in the lower levels of world-cityness, which provides us with a world geography of “global” service centres. The regional concentration is quite remarkable: this is a concrete expression of what has been called “uneven globalization”. As we have noted in another paper (Beaverstock et al, 1999), world city formation has largely proceeded in three world regions – northern America, western Europe and Pacific Asia – which we have termed the major “globalization arenas”. Note that the Alpha world cities are relatively evenly distributed to these three regions (three, four and three, respectively) and seven out of 10 Beta cities have a similar distribution (two, three and two, counting Sydney as part of Pacific Asia). The other three Beta world cities represent two minor globalization arenas, two in Latin America and one in eastern Europe (former COMECON). The rise of the latter arena is consequent upon the demise of the Cold War and the subsequent economic liberalization, especially privatization of state assets, which requires new advanced producer servicing. This arena counts for three of the four world cities we have identified that do not occur in the lists of others in Table 2; they are Budapest, Prague and Warsaw, which we designate as Gamma world cities. The overall pattern of the 35 Gamma world cities repeats the geography of the higher levels: the three major globalization arenas account for 27 of these cities (eight, 11 and eight, respectively; counting Istanbul as western Europe and Melbourne as Pacific Asia) and the two minor globalization arenas account for another seven cities (four in Latin America, three in eastern Europe). Geographically, the odd city out is Johannesburg, which might be considered to represent an outlier of European capital. Our inventory most certainly defines a very uneven globalization. Of course, the basic advantage of the GaWC inventory is its grounding in a large quantity of comparative data, thus giving identification of world cities a robust empirical basis. We hope it helps alleviate the confusion illustrated by the many differences among the lists in Table 2. However, while this is the first systematic, multi-sector assessment of cities to produce an inventory of contemporary world cities, we do appreciate that world cities are much more than service centres. Following Sassen, we have focused on the latter because the production of advanced producer services defines a distinguishing feature of cities in contemporary globalization, but there is room for other inventories emphasizing other aspects of world-cityness. And there is one added advantage to creating an explicit inventory: it highlights a relatively large number of cities where world city formation processes are shown to be operating, thus getting away from research concentration on just a few, allegedly paradigmatic, world cities such as London, New York and Tokyo (finance) and Los Angeles (cultural processes). Finally, this inventory has been produced by us as a part of the GaWC programme of research looking at relations between world cities. Obviously, the starting point of wider research exercises is to define the roster of objects which are of concern. The GaWC inventory of world cities as presented here can be a starting point for new researchers interested in the hugely under-researched area of inter-city relations in the world economy. We hope the publication of this roster of world cities stimulates such research.