Friedmann’s “World City Hypothesis” marks a decisive shift from treating urbanisation as an internally generated social ecology toward analysing cities through their position within the world economy. In the opening argument, Friedmann explicitly situates his intervention after Castells and Harvey, whose work had already displaced ecological explanations by linking city-forming processes to industrial capitalism and class conflict. Friedmann’s next move is scalar: the city must be understood in relation to transnational economic processes whose organisation exceeds the national and municipal frame. The iconic idea is therefore that major cities function as spatial articulations of an increasingly integrated world economy. Its theoretical contribution is to make global economic position constitutive of urban structure rather than an external contextual variable. Methodologically, the hypothesis turns relational position, economic function and interurban hierarchy into comparative objects. It bridges Marxian urban theory, development studies and the later literature on global-city networks.
URBANISM MEETS ART