ABSTRACT
Almost half a century ago, as Peter Taylor has outlined in chapter 17, Peter Hall (1966) published a book called The World Cities. In this book, he analysed ‘great cities’ or, following Patrick Geddes (1915), ‘world cities’. This book precedes much of the ‘global cities’ literature by two decades (cf. Friedmann, 1986; Sassen, 1991) stating that these cities are not just centres of population and wealth, like many other cities, but they are also centres of political power, nodes of trade and finance, and, in addition, sites of cultural industries and high-end consumption. In this book – richly illustrated with coloured maps and quite a few pictures including even one by the famous French photographer Robert Doisneau – Peter proposed that not just London, Paris, New York, Moscow or Tokyo are members of this elite group of world cities, but less obvious candidates such as the Dutch Randstad and the Rhine-Ruhr area as well. Peter, in this seminal study of seven world cities, observed that next to the traditional ‘highly centralized giant city’ there exists another type, namely the ‘polycentric type of metropolis’. In this latter type of world city the metropolitan functions are ‘not concentrated into a single, highly centralized giant city’, but distributed ‘among a number of smaller, specialized closely-related centres’ (Hall, 1966, p. 9). That both the Randstad
and the Rhine-Ruhr area could be seen as polycentric urban configurations was, arguably, not entirely new. However, the view that such urban systems, reaping significant agglomeration economies generated on the level of the region, could be seen as ‘world cities’ and, hence, on a par with New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo was at least a new way of framing.
