Global cities research and urban theory making

摘要

Global cities research has long been an integral and often a dominant aspect of urban theory making. Nowhere is this history more visible than in the recent anniversaries marking pioneering publications in this research tradition, including the centenary of Patrick Geddes' (1915) Cities in Evolution, golden anniversary of Peter Hall's (1966) The World Cities and silver anniversary of Saskia Sassen's (1991) The Global City. Each book became the antecedent to successive generations of world/global cities research and urban theory making, centred on examining cities as nodes in regional (Geddes), national (Hall) and global (Sassen) urban systems. Yet as we have passed these landmark anniversaries, world/global cities research is facing powerful challenges - conceptually, empirically, ideologically and methodologically - in ways arguably not seen before.