The effects of globalisation

What is globalization? Usually it suggests transnational movement of cultural influences and economical actions and transnational relevance of these actions. While some claim that place loses its very meaning, others suggest that there are losers and winners in this game, amongst those winners being cities called as global cities.

In the influential book published in 1991 called “The Global City. New York, London and Tokyo”, Saskia Sassen claimed that these cities are something new when compared with earlier city types, such as the medieval or industrial city. In the book a non Western city was introduced for the first time to the same “rank” as the most important metropoles known so far.

According to Sassen, these cities are strategic places, articulating the global system of trade and production. They do not only host trans-national companies but especially so called producer services, being outsourced from these TNCs. In cities like New York, London and Tokyo there is a wealthy account of banks, insurance and advertising companies, benefiting from proximity with TNCs.

Nevertheless, Sassen was not the first one to introduce the concept of cities as global actors. Her teacher Anthony King wrote in 1990 in his Global Cities: Post-Imperialism and the Internationalization of London that London can’t be fully understood without taking into account the British empire. The leading cities of the world are not just generators but they also diffuse cultural influences all over the world, causing also brain drain from the Third World as centers of opportunities. As he was mainly interested in architecture, he claimed that the colonialist Indian villa had influenced the English building of villas. Western driven McDonaldization is certainly an inadequate measure to describe all the cultural exchange going on.

Globalization is nevertheless not a recent phenomenon. The logistics to transfer goods, personnel and information had increased international connectivity and disembedded the time-space-place-specificness, but places do still exist. As Sassen was interested in unique places, Michael Peter Smith claims the importance of networks. If natural resources, labor force, knowledge and land can be acquired where they are available the cheapest, places have to distinguish themselves in order to be competitive. One means to do this is to emphasize local culture.
Globalization can result from deliberate strategies. If London has been a global leader for a long time, Tokyo had just become such as a result of political will. Yet Tokyo had maintained its cultural distinctive Japaneseness despite her being a major, international financial centre.

Some places have fared better in the international competition, enabling merchantilism of new kind. As some regions and cities are the strategic hubs of headquarters, others provide the resources and produce. Not only the Wall Street is a global subject, but also the special economic zones in Hong Kong and Singapore, call centers in Bangalore and sweatshops in Indonesia result from economic globalization, each one enabling it by having a role to play in it.