World Cities

Large and significant cities have fascinated researchers since the early twentieth century. This is indicated by the wide range of terms used to describe cities, whereby since the 2000s “global cities” and “world cities” have gradually become key—yet at times also contested—concepts. This article provides a bibliographic introduction to this wide-ranging and sometimes seemingly incoherent literature. A first major reason for the sometimes-fuzzy character of “the global/world city literature” is that there have been earlier, related uses of these terms. Although it is difficult to identify a straightforward disjuncture between these earlier uses of the terms and what are commonly seen as key foundational texts in the present-day literature, we can observe a gradual trend toward conceptualizing urbanization processes at transnational rather than national scales. In earlier writings using the global/world cities terminology, the cosmopolitan character of cities was above all interpreted as an expression of their host states’ geopolitical and geo-economic power. Contemporary literature, however, considers city/state relations to be either fundamentally reworked or less consequential for understanding major cities. A second reason for the wide-ranging meaning of the “global city” and “world city” concepts is that, in addition to both terms sometimes having different meanings and connotations in their own right, they are also part of an increasingly diverse literature exploring transnationalization processes and/in contemporary cities, including research on “global city-regions” and more recently also “globalizing cities” and “cities in globalization.” Although the terminology and what it seeks to capture is therefore inevitably to some degree confounded, in the remainder of this article, a straightforward distinction will be made between “world cities” (the more specific literature detailed in this article) and “cities in globalization” (the increasingly broad and diversified literature in which the world city literature itself is embedded).