Locating cities on global circuits

There have long been cross-border economic processes. In the last hundred years, the inter-state system came to provide the dominant organizational form cross-border flows, with national states as its key actors. This condition has changed dramatically over the last decade and more, as a result of privatization, deregulation, the opening up of national economies to foreign firms and the growing participation of national economic actors in global markets. In this context, we see a re-scaling of what are the strategic territories that articulate the new system. The organizational architecture for cross-border flows that results from these re-scaling and articulations increasingly diverges from that of the inter-state system. My central effort here is to contribute to empirical and theoretical specification of this organizational architecture. Among the features examined here are the combination of centralization and dispersal trends, the disproportionate concentration of value and transactions in the North Atlantic, the role of cities in an increasingly digitized global economy, especially as illustrated by the growth of finance and specialized services, and the impact of information technologies on urban economies.