The Nertwork of Global cities: A Space of Power and Empowerment

Since the early 1980s, the power of global economics has opened national territories to foreign finance, products, ideas, and people. Such mechanisms as privatization, deregulation, new information technologies, and foreign capital, backed by various political agencies, have increasingly penetrated the sovereignty of the nation state so that global cities within a state are, by definition, as plugged into internal circuits as into national hiearchies of cities. The centrality of cities has thus changed. And, as cross-border transactions grow as a function of the global economy, so will the networks binding cities into a new kind of imperial order fostered to serve the needs of capital. The world economy has re-scaled global cities, along with implicitly restructuring the social relationships within them. In contrast to other cities within a nation or a region, global cities are increasingly spaces of power with increased ratios of financing, mobility of labor, and concentrations of resources. This study examines the politics of concentration, the potential conflicts between the capital enfranchised and the disadvantaged sectors of society, how the function of comand for worldwide operations is situated within the urban space, and how the global cities articulate into a new imperium of capital.