A global city (also called world city or sometimes alpha city or world center) is a city generally considered to be an important node in the global economic system. The concept comes from geography and urban studies and rests on the idea that globalization can be understood as largely created, facilitated, and enacted in strategic geographic locales according to a hierarchy of importance to the operation of the global system of finance and trade.
The most complex of these entities is the global city, whereby the linkages binding a city have a direct and tangible effect on global affairs through socio-economic means. The use of global city, as opposed to megacity, was popularized by sociologist Saskia Sassen in her 1991 work, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo though the term world city to describe cities that control a disproportionate amount of global business dates to at least the May 1886 description of Liverpool by the Illustrated London News. Patrick Geddes also used the term "world city" later in 1915. Cities can fall from such categorization, as in the case of cities that have become less cosmopolitan and less internationally renowned in the current era, e.g., Alexandria, Egypt; Coimbra, Portugal; and Thessaloniki, Greece.
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Famous quotes containing the words global and/or city:
“Much of what Mr. Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still globaloney. Mr. Wallaces warp of sense and his woof of nonsense is very tricky cloth out of which to cut the pattern of a post-war world.”
—Clare Boothe Luce (19031987)
“The city of Washington is in some respects self-contained, and it is easy there to forget what the rest of the United States is thinking about. I count it a fortunate circumstance that almost all the windows of the White House and its offices open upon unoccupied spaces that stretch to the banks of the Potomac ... and that as I sit there I can constantly forget Washington and remember the United States.”
—Woodrow Wilson (18561924)