World Cities, Mega-Cities and Global Mega-City-Regions

Abstract

One useful question to ask in academic life, I've always found, is: what's new and different? We have the mega-city, which we owe particularly to Janice Perlman, but goes back quite a long way – about 2400 years in fact. Thanks to the GaWC group, we have a welcome revival of the term world city –which we can date back to 1910, if not before. The term global city seems to go back to Saskia Sassen, in 1991 – but we can argue, and I’ll argue, that it’s essentially a derivation from John Friedmann, who put a particular spin on the older world city concept. GaWC really put these two together, as the Globalized World City. And then there’s its derivation the Global City Region, which we owe to Allan Scott - and in turn its derivation, the Global Mega-City Region, of which more later on.