Taipei, Aug. 25 (CNA) Taipei should look at itself and contemplate how it fits into the global cities network in order to be a better city, University of Chicago Professor Saskia Sassen said in an interview with CNA Friday.
As a "super platform" of global cities has surfaced after the "merging of major East Asian cities" and the competition between cities has become history, Taipei should think about it fits in the network, according to Sassen, a prominent sociologist and economist.
"The Global City" is a term coined by Sassen in the 1980s to describe how cities became strategic "transnational spaces in the global economy" and later "joined forces as a denationalized network."
"A global city is a platform for international investors and foreign professionals, and a partly denationalized space as well. It is far more oriented to other financial centers of the world rather than its neighborhood, " she explained.
Global cities like London, Tokyo and New York are subnational units that are key structures for a new form of power that globalization has brought with it, said Sassen, who is considered by her peers as a "leading scholar of globalization."
More and more global cities are working together, Sassen said. Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels and Madrid -- four of Europe's largest global cities -- have formed an alliance to "compete" with London, she added.
As an East Asian city, Taipei probably should look at the fact that there are more than 400,000 Taiwanese professionals in China and that its busiest transnational professional circuits are the Taipei-Shanghai and Taipei-Guangdong/Hong Kong flights, and think about its position in the network, Sassen said.