ABSTRACT
One outcome of the new international division of labour based on the spatial separation of corporate functions has been the emergence of global cities. These are the control and command points in the global economy where corporate headquarters, financial intermediaries and highly specialized services agglomerate to convey decisions or to conduct transactions over large areas of the world (Cohen 1981, Friedmann and Woolf 1982, Friedmann 1986, Frost and Spence 1993, Hamnett 1994a and b, Sassen 1991). When global cities are examined, focus until now has been upon producer services in general and financial services in particular (see, for example, Daniels 1993). The aim of this chapter, however, is to explore the character and nature of consumer services in a global city. Are they simply ‘dependent’ activities or can their role and character be ‘read’ in a different way, as has been shown to be the case in second-tier cities? Indeed, how does their function differ when compared with the case of the second-tier cities discussed in the preceding chapters?
