The World City: Singapore, Shanghai, Berlin, Dar es Salaam and Beyond

The World City: Singapore, Shanghai, Berlin, Dar es Salaam and Beyond: "World Cities in the 1980s were identified to include mostly cities in the core of the developed world, i.e. London, Paris, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Tokyo, plus Singapore and Sao Paulo (Friedmann 1995, p319). Today, a number of cities can be added to this list, including Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul, Taipei, and to a lesser extent Jakarta, Bangkok, and Kuala Lumpur (for the story of Asian World Cities, see Lo and Yeung 1996). Likewise, cities such as Zurich, Brussels, Milan, Vienna, Madrid, Toronto, Miami, Houston and Sydney can be added to list of emerging world cities, since they have major economic and political roles (Friedmann 1995, p320). In the periphery, cities such as Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas, Mexico City, and Manila (Friedmann 1995, p319) have major national roles, and perhaps a stronger global role in the future. More recently, a study of matrices of global service firms in 'accountancy, advertising, banking/finance and law' has been mapped against 55 leading cities, generating a slightly different hierarchy, with 10 alpha world cities, 10 beta world cities, and not far behind them 35 gamma world cities clustered mainly in Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific region (Taylor et al. 2001). Prominent World Cities in this sense are Chicago, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Milan, New York, Paris, Singapore, and Tokyo as alpha cities, followed by Brussels, Madrid, Mexico City, Moscow, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Sydney, Toronto, and Zurich, as beta cities (Taylor et al. 2001). "