Global Networks, Linked Cities

Book Overview

In her pioneering book The Global City, Saskia Sassen argued that certain cities in the postindustrial world have become central nodes in the new service economy, strategic sites for the acceleration of capital and information flows as well as spaces of increasing socio-economic polarization. One effect has been that such cities have gained in importance and power relative to nation-states. In this new collection of essays, Sassen and a distinguished...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415931630
• ISBN13: 9780415931632
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 378 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Outsourcing, in a broader context

With the ever decreasing fall in the cost of communication, both digital and analog, this book speculates that a new global phenomenon may be emerging. A few years ago, during the height of the dot com boom, others suggested that the Web might give rise to the disaggregation of cities or cultural hubs, because cheap communications might let creative individuals work from virtually anywhere with a fast bandwidth connection to the Internet.But as many major cities in developing countries achieve this thick connection, another possibility emerges, as suggested by this book. It is now possible for some of these cities to parlay this connection and a well educated workforce into a globally prominent role. In part by assuming some of the functionality hitherto almost exclusively taken by first world cities. Think for example on how Silicon Valley is outsourcing some of its work to Mumbai or Bangalore.The book's suggestions of future global cities is intriguing. Though when they suggest this of Hong Kong, one might argue that it is already a global city by any reasonable measure of how plugged in it is into the global economy.