End of a Paradigm: The Current Crisis and the Idea of Stateless Cities

Urban studies in the social sciences have for two decades been driven by a hegemonic conception, under slightly different, competing labels: world city, global city, and world city networks. While making important cognitive contributions, it has, I argue, been fundamentally flawed in assuming nation-states and state-processed national economies to be unimportant to the world economy and to world/global cities. While in several ways enriching urban knowledge, its dominance has also impoverished urban research by reducing cities to zip codes of firms and labour markets, leaving out that cities are also places of meaningful built environments, in which people live and interact. Basic assumptions and arguments of the world/global city idea by the three most distinguished representatives of the approach—John Friedmann, Saskia Sassen, and Peter J Taylor—are critically scrutinized. The current economic crisis has demonstrated these assumptions and arguments about cities in the world economy as untenable. The economic crisis is spawning a paradigmatic crisis, which should be seen as an opportunity for wider views of cities to be opened up.