The Geography of World Cities

Summary

World cities are a product of the globalization of economic activity that has characterized post-World War II capitalism, and exhibit characteristics previously found in primate cities but with influence extending far beyond the range of the metropolitan state. They are the culmination of postwar urbanization mechanisms coupled with the rise of transnational corporations that have served to concentrate unprecedented population and economic power/potential. The potential for both human development advantage and disadvantage is historically unprecedented in these new and highly interconnected urban amalgams. In general, human settlement systems are usually understood to include the systemic (regularized) ways in which settlements (hamlets, villages, towns, cities) are linked with one another by trade and other kinds of human interaction. Geographers, historians, and economists have developed models of urban structure and patterning incorporating population location/movement and the location of economic activity to be able to rationally explain and predict urban growth and allocate resources so as to implement equitable distributions. The resulting models served to illustrate the importance of the interactions between specific geographic location, population concentrations, and economic activity. But given the development of world cities, there is the relationship between the size of settlements and political power in intergroup relations to consider. The spatial aspect of population density is, after all, one of the most fundamental variables for understanding the constraints and possibilities of human social organization.