Globalisation and the Making of the World's Cities

Globalisation is often narrated as an abstract flow of capital and information, but its most visible spatial expression is the transformation of cities. Saskia Sassen's concept of the 'global city' identifies a small set of urban centers — New York, London, Tokyo, and increasingly Shanghai, Mumbai, and São Paulo — that function as command-and-control nodes for the world economy, concentrating financial services, corporate headquarters, and specialized producer services even as manufacturing has dispersed to lower-wage regions. These cities are simultaneously hyper-connected to each other and increasingly disconnected from their own national hinterlands, forming a networked archipelago of globalized urbanism.

This process has been accompanied by an unprecedented pace of world urbanisation: the UN estimates that the global urban population crossed 50 percent around 2007 and continues rising, with nearly all future urban growth concentrated in Asia and Africa. Unlike the industrial urbanisation of nineteenth-century Europe, driven by factory employment, much contemporary urban growth in the Global South is 'urbanisation without industrialisation' — rural-to-urban migration driven by agrarian distress and the pull of informal service and construction economies rather than formal manufacturing jobs, producing what Mike Davis called a 'planet of slums.'

Megacities such as Lagos, Dhaka, Jakarta, and Mumbai illustrate this dynamic starkly: formal planning infrastructure has been unable to keep pace with population growth, producing vast informal settlements that nonetheless function as dense, economically productive, and often remarkably self-organized urban systems, as documented in ethnographic and geographic studies of settlements like Dharavi in Mumbai or Kibera in Nairobi. Urban geographers increasingly resist framing these settlements simply as 'slums' to be cleared, instead analyzing them as sites of informal economy, incremental self-built housing, and contested land tenure that formal city governments must negotiate with rather than erase.

Globalisation also reshapes urban form through special economic zones, export-processing zones, and gated enclaves for transnational elites, producing what geographers term 'splintering urbanism' — the fragmentation of cities into differentially connected zones of premium infrastructure (fiber-optic corridors, private security, gated townships) existing alongside chronically underserved areas lacking reliable water, power, or sanitation, often within a few kilometers of each other.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of remote work have introduced new uncertainties into these urban hierarchies, prompting debate over whether global cities' agglomeration advantages will persist or whether distributed digital economies might disperse some functions to secondary cities — though evidence through the mid-2020s suggests global cities have largely retained their command functions even as some residential and office geography has shifted.