The term ‘global city’ is now more than three decades old, having first been brought to our attention by Saskia Sassen in The Global City (Sassen 1984: xix). Sassen acknowledges that her use of the term is a development of Goethe's ‘world city’ (Sassen 1984: xix). Goethe is an interesting reference here because it was he who foresaw ‘that along the Pacific Ocean, where nature has already formed the most capacious and secure harbours, important commercial towns will gradually arise, for the furtherance of a great intercourse between China and the East Indies and the United States’ (quoted in Berman 1988: 73). This vision is something that has come to be realized, not just in the Pacific, but all over Asia.

The term ‘global city’ has become, however, something of a commonplace over the decades, its meaning so shopworn that it seems to have been rubbed clean of any useful sense. We can no longer be sure it means anything at all, except perhaps as a catchphrase stuck onto any place with pretentions to commercial or cultural greatness (many of which are, sadly, simply drawing attention to their parochialness). But one thing that is often overlooked when people refer to Sassen's analysis of the global city is the fact that she stresses they cannot stand alone as entities (something that has already been highlighted in the introduction to this book). Any city that operates within a global network must work with the others in the system if they want to thrive; this means that, rather than competing with one another (although there is a certain amount of competition, of course), these cities must work together to fit themselves into a hierarchy. This is a profoundly important point: a city network stands or falls on how well it operates as a network; the strength of each depends on the strength of all; nothing is gained if one or more of them fails, and this is something that is going to be even more important as the twenty-first century unfolds, and the skeins of globalization draw even tighter together.