Drawing Ambience | Robin Evans

Image Caption: Some of Hong Kong's best-known buildings. From right to left is the Head Office of the Hongkong Bank, the Citibank building, the former Hong Kong branch of Bank of China, and the new 74-story Bank of China designed by I. M. PEI.

7. Architectural History and Globalization | Saskia Sassen | The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo | 1991

The article mainly talks about the changes in economic activities under the background of globalization, the emergence of global cities, and the formation of a new worldwide network of transactions.1 Sassen believes that the subject of the "spatial dispersal and global integration"1 refers to the economic activity that occurs in the global cities. According to Sassen’s observations, the current economic activity like manufacturing has presented a trend of spatial decentralization and internationalization.2 However, at the same time, the top-level control and management have become more centralized. And then, the decentralization of manufacturing has led to an increase in global demand for specialized services and central management. Sassen has taken New York, London, and Tokyo as examples: the producer services and finance have increasingly concentrated in these major cities, while traditional manufacturing centers like Detroit have gradually declined. However, the city like Chicago has completed the transition from the industrial center into the financial center.1

The article was written in 1991. With the development of recent years, the status of global cities has also undergone subtle changes.3 The Globalization and World Research Network, abbreviated to GaWC, has begun to define and classify world cities in the context of globalization since 1999. The evaluation of standards includes the terms of economic, political, cultural, and infrastructure aspects.3 They mainly focus on judging the contribution of cities to globalization. Also, the ranking of the GaWC city is sorted into categories of Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and additional cities. In the latest data released in 2020, only London and New York maintain the highest ranking, which is named Alpha++. Tokyo and six other cities are ranked as Alpha+.4 We can observe that more Asian cities are more open to the world. They have created drastic changes in the Asian economy. Globalization is a powerful force that reshapes the network of global cities.1 In the 30 years after Sassen's research, the world structure has never stopped changing.

How the dispersion of manufacturing and the concentration of management have changed the spatial structure of cities? The most direct manifestation is the reorganization of the urban spatial pattern caused by the transformation of the industrial structure.2 A large number of high-rise office buildings and large-scale public projects have emerged. Take the architect Robert Moses as an example: he designed the expressways to connect the five scattered districts of New York City.5 His programming finally contributed to form New York City as a global city. The reorganization of the urban spatial pattern has been criticized in recent years. To some extent, it has promoted the emergence of a postmodern city.

1.Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991). 2.Melpomene, “Review of The Global City”, Douban Reading, accessed December 2, 2014, https://book.douban.com/subject/26201198/. 3.Peter Taylor, World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis (United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, 2003). 4.“The World According to GaWC 2020”, GaWC, accessed August 21, 2020, https://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/world2020t.html. 5.Paul Goldberger, “Robert Moses, Master Builder, is Dead at 92,” The New York Times, November 11, 2009. 19