ABSTRACT

Along with Christopher Chase-Dunn, Michael Timberlake, Fernand Braudel and Janet Abu-Lughod, sociologists Joe Feagin and Nestor Rodriguez's classic study of urban specialization in world cities was published during the mid-1980s, just as a large number of North American and western European urbanists were beginning to grapple more explicitly with the problematic of globalization. This chapter explores the key role of “urban specialization”—the spatial concentration of particular types of economic activities within cities—in the dynamics of world city formation. Their major insight is that urban specialization assumes different forms within globally hegemonic national economies and during successive phases of capitalist development. Taking a world-system perspective of urban growth, the concept of specialization is developed and advanced from the standpoint of the development of specific cities in the world-economy. The chapter describes the historical cases of urban specialization in the capitalist world-system.