What Happens When the Richest U.S. Cities Turn to the World?<br />“Not only are they losing their power,” he said of the places left out, “but they’re losing their connection to the power centers as well.”<br />That dynamic also leaves smaller places at the mercy of global cities, where<br />decisions are made about which plants to close or where to create new jobs.<br />“These types of urban economies need other major urban economies more than they need the standardized production economies of other cities in their country,” said Saskia Sassen, a sociologist at Columbia who has long studied the global cities<br />that occupy interdependent nodes in the world economy.<br />“It is also, as far as we can see, permanent, simply because the economy<br />that supported the earlier relationships has gone away and shows no sign of coming back.”<br />The Rise of Global Cities<br />For much of the 20th century, wages in poorer parts of the country were rising faster than wages in richer places.<br />“And other places will be kind of left out.”<br />Greg Spencer, another researcher at the University of Toronto, has analyzed the global footprints of the world’s 500 largest firms in advanced industries like machinery, digital services<br />and life sciences — mapping their headquarters, regional offices, manufacturing plants, warehouses, retail stores.<br />The companies that now drive the Bay Area’s soaring wealth — and<br />that represent part of the American economy that’s booming — don’t need these communities in the same way.
