Rankings of global cities, city typologies and top lists on world-level, and the scores achieved in them are rather important for cities, they may play a role in improving their ability to attract investment, and may provide transnational companies with viewpoints for establishing their centres and offices. According to her definition, global cities play a key role in organising the governance of world economy, they are the primary focus areas of financial institutions and, among leading economic sectors, the specialized services replacing the traditional manufacturing output, they are the major scenes of manufacturing, especially innovative manufacturing, and finally, they are also the markets of manufacturing and innovation. In her now classic book, Sassen identifies global cities primarily on the basis of economic aspects: they are entities functioning as leading centres of the global economy. In world history, there have been numerous occasions when cities of global significance emerged – such as ancient Athens or Rome – but the notion was introduced widely and in a modern sense by urban sociologist-economist Saskia Sassen for the first time in her work published in 1991, entitled The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (and as its forerunners, Peter Halls’s The World City from 1966 and the article of John Friedmann entitled The World City Hypothesis, published in 1986, must be mentioned). There is no single definition of global cities. During the course of mapping cities, it is revealed that significant differences manifest in different factors even on the level of metropolis regions, proving the presupposition that each city becomes a global city on the basis of its own competitive industries and fields. Although an urbanised world means far more than global cities, the drives of modern economic growth – commerce, innovation, talent and infrastructural relations – are concentrated in a territorially unique way in these metropolises. Thanks to urbanisation, cities mean the core of economic growth. In addition to the innovative approach, the growing prominence of global roles played by Asian cities, which is the result of the urbanisation trends evolved in the last decades, is remarkable.
An analysis published in autumn 2016 differentiates between seven types of global cities.
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