Works such as Peter Hall’s The World Cities sounded an alarm for a “metropolitan explosion” that would surely accompany the significant influx of rural dwellers into urban areas.
By the mid-twentieth century, scholars began to signal the important role of these cities as nodes of power. These rapidly growing world cities were defined as their nations’ economic, political, and cultural centers. This distinction lies fundamentally in the roles that cities play in the era of globalization, a period that most scholars trace back to the early 1990s and the end of the Cold War.īefore the age of globalization, many in the field of urban studies referred to major urban centers as “world cities,” a term coined by Patrick Geddes in his prescient 1915 book Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study of Civics. It is important to distinguish, however, between traditional examinations of the world’s metropolises and examinations of so-called global cities. In all disciplines-from philosophy to geography and political science-thinkers have explored the complex role of urban centers in human life. Scholars have written about cities since the birth of the city-state.
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