2.3. Global city and Swallowtail Butterfly

"The globalization of economic activity entails a new type of organizational structure.
To capture this theoretically and empirically requires, correspondingly, a new type of
conceptual architecture. Constructs such as the global city and the global-city region
are, in my reading, important elements in this new conceptual architecture. The activ-
ity of naming these elements is part of the conceptual work. There are other closely
linked terms which could conceivably have been used: worldcities," "supervilles," informational city. Thus, choosing how to name a configuration has its own substantive
rationality.

When I first chose to use global city/T did so knowingly—it was an attempt to
name a difference: the specificity oFthe global as it gets structured in the contemporary
period. I did not chose the obvious alternative, world city, because it had precisely the
opposite attribute: it referred to a type of city which we have seen over the centuries/ in
earlier periods in Asia^ and in European colonial centers.^ In this regard, it can be said
that most of today's major global cities are also world cities, but that there may well be
some global cities today that are not world cities in the full, rich sense of that term. This
is partly an empirical question; further, as the global economy expands and incorpo-
rates additional cities into the various networks, it is quite possible that the answer to
that particular question will vary. Thus, the fact that Miami has developed global city
functions beginning in the late 1980s does not make it a world city in that older sense
ofthe term."

Saskia Sassen: The Global City: Introducing a Concept

Cities are very complex and multifaceted. They are sites for extreme exploitation of masses of people; but they are also sites for new types of politics, new ways in which the powerless can engage power in a way they cannot in rural areas, for instance or in small towns. And they are also sites where the many different cultures of resistance, subversion, contestation of power can become present to each other, aware of each other, in a way they cannot on a plantation or in a small town where the diversity is lacking. Cities have become international spaces for a diversity of actors and subjects. They have of course always been so, though perhaps a bit less than today and in a different way from today. Cities are new frontier zones where actors from many many different types of struggles and national origins can come together.
...

Cities are strategic sites for global capital, sites for exploitation, and sites for developing new forms of resistance. They will remain and become so even more. That is my notion of the global city: it is not just about global capital, as some say, it is also about a new type of politics that has to do with engaging the global in the localized site that is the city, and a coming together of the most diverse types of efforts and people from around the world. Nowehere is all of this as concrete as in major cities.

And nowhere are there such vast concentrations of women in the strategic economic sectors at the top of the system and in the infrastructure of low wage jobs that is strategic for the servicing of the top sectors and households. And nowhere do the conditions of illegal trafficking in women materialize so clearly as a mechanism for illegal profit as in these cities. The strategic nature of all these dynamics and the vast concentrations of women from different countries and socio-economic backgrounds it entails, signals the possibility of a variety of concrete politics of resistance, contestation and implementation by women. Because these cities have women from so many different countries one effect could be to strengthen the formation of existing, and also lead to new cross-border networks. The cross-border network of global cities is a space where we are seeing the formation of countergeographies of globalization which contest the dominant economic forms the global economy has assumed.

Saskia Sassen: Women in the Global City. Exploitation and Empowerment

And the film, 2,5 hours of Shunji Iwai: Swallowtail Butterfly