Acknowledgements -- What is a market? -- Markets as metonyms of urban transformation : East London -- Markets and place-image : Rio de Janeiro -- Markets as unremarkable and remarkable places : Paris, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Beijing -- Dis/placing markets through urban renewal : Sydney -- The...

Beginning with the recent history of capitalism and urbanization and moving into a thorough and complex discussion of the modern city, this book outlines the dynamics of what the author calls the third wave of urbanization, characterized by global capitalism's increasing turn to forms of...

Contents: Prologue: The global city: enabling economic intermediation and bearing its costs / Saskia Sassen -- 1. Agency and practice in the making of global cities: towards a renewed research agenda / Michael Hoyler, Christof Parnreiter and Allan Watson -- 2. Producer service firms as global...

Sassen's identification of global cities as “strategic places” is explored through world city network analysis. This involves searching out advanced producer service (APS) firms that constitute “strategic networks,” from whose activities strategic places can be defined. Twenty-five out...