the global city: new york, london, tokyo by saskia sassen

First, “territorial decentralization of economic activity” failed to distribute business and profits more broadly. Global Cities embraces four primary themes. If Fordism, though flawed, maintained a manufacturing sector with a workforce that achieved reasonable levels of compensation, the shift in recent economies skews this arrangement that depends not only on the poorly compensated wage labor upon which it stands but also the exploitation of a class of white collar workers who have given up job security and protection in return for high wages and a certain lifestyle ideology conducive to their interests.

Producer services require the labor of wage work for their various professional and personal lifestyles. However, with this growth came polarization. Producer services came to dominate urban economies while their employees gentrified various communities across each metropolitan area (of note, Sassen compares/contrasts the three cities repeatedly noting that similar processes unfolded simultaneously with remarkably similar though far from identical results – this especially true when Sassen discusses Tokyo whose economy displayed far greater government intervention, a notable lack of immigration replacing it with migration from rural Japanese areas.

The dispersal and decentralization that the telecommunications boom was to usher in actually contributed to a centralization process in several global nodes internationally. Arguing that the forces of technological/telecommunication innovation, globalization, and the decline of Fordism combined to deepen dependences on “global cities” such as New York and Tokyo. Originally published in 1991, Saskia Sassen’s The Global City sparked debates across disciplines and fields.

The global city: new york, london, tokyo by saskia sassen