podvlačena The World Cities was first published in 1966 with a second edition in 1977 and a third in 1984. A simple basic structure was maintained across editions consisting of a first chapter defining and contextualizing world cities, followed by a series of chapters on selected world cities describing their economic and spatial structures and the planning policies devised to meet their special metropolitan problems, and concluding with a glimpse into metropolitan futures and possible planning responses. In the first two editions there are seven world city case studies: London, Paris, Randstad Holland, Rhine-Ruhr, Moscow, New York, and Tokyo; in the third edition the list is increased to eight by adding Hong Kong and Mexico City and omitting Rhine-Ruhr. The latter decision is not due to substantive concerns but is simply pragmatic ‘for reasons of space’ (Hall 1984, 3). Revisions across editions of the two general chapters differ in degree. Changes to the first chapter are largely updating information and context with, importantly, the definition of world cities remaining constant. In the final chapter, the changing context identified earlier is deemed to require rather more substantial changes to discussion of metropolitan futures. Although the case studies are fascinating in their own right as succinct statements of city successes generating problems and stimulating planning coping policies, in this short essay I focus on the two general chapters largely from the first edition but with reference to changes in the third edition as and when necessary. My main concern is to understand why a book of the 1960s remains an important marker on the route towards contemporary research on cities in globalization. All research and writing has to be of its time; you can only know previous and existing subjects and contexts, and the literatures that describe and attempt to explain those subjects and contexts. In this case Hall (1966) draws on information and ideas about large cities and changing employment structures (white collar jobs replacing blue collar, office replacing factory) that appear to favour the growth of those cities – chapter 1 is entitled ‘The metropolitan explosion’. At the heart of this work there is an interplay between the empirical and the normative: how to accommodate the additional population resulting from the demographic growth of cities, which affects their spatial structures resulting in a need for city and regional planning to create satisfactory outcomes. But the key point is that he is sensitive to temporal dynamics in his evaluations and interpretations. Thus London’s green belt, perhaps the city’s most influential contribution to postwar metropolitan planning, is understood as a prewar conception of a city not expected to grow and therefore limiting London arbitrarily to its late 1930s extent. Hence Hall favours green wedges (Randstad, Paris) to green belts (London, Moscow) as the more suitable planning response in a time of growth. The first edition of the book appears towards the end of the postwar boom and by the third edition the world economy is in the midst of a new downturn. The new context is one of demographically declining world cities with growth now represented by his new selections Hong Kong and Mexico City. Although Hall’s work embodies big picture dynamics this leads him to become curiously out of sync with the narrowing dynamics of his academic discipline geography. In his description of what defines a world city he provides a place-based synthesis of attributes and functions that is a tribute to geography’s tradition of regional synthesis. This is his amalgam of characteristics that blend together to constitute a world city (Hall 1966, pp. 7-8): Major political centres encompassing governments, international authorities, important professional organizations, trade unions, employers federations, and headquarters of major companies Trade centres encompassing imports and exports through great ports, the focus of road and rail routes, and sites of important international airports Leading banking and financial centres encompassing central banks, trading banks headquarters, big insurance offices and specialist financial services Professional service centres encompassing major hospitals, the law profession next to national courts, leading universities, specialist research centres for sciences and the arts, national libraries and museums, publishers of books, newspapers and journals, and centres of radio and TV networks Luxury consumption centres encompassing expensive goods and services, great departmental stores and specialist shops Entertainment centres encompassing opera houses, theatres, concert halls, restaurants, cinemas, and night clubs World cities are clearly very special places fusing the highest levels of urban work and living. But Hall’s synthetic thinking was a far cry from the traditional regional geography school that sought out the bounding of national rural landscapes to extol ‘man-land’ relations and thereby write the work of cities out of the script (Wrigley 1965, Taylor 2003). For traditional geographical synthesizers, Hall was focusing on the wrong type of region: metropolitan, inherently uninteresting, and best ignored. In any case by the time Hall was writing of world cities, regional geography was on the wane with ‘systematic’ geography coming to the fore to promote specialization in human geography. In the newly emerging urban geography, a theory of rural marketing called central place theory was converted into description of ‘national urban systems’ to accommodate large cities (Berry 1964, Berry and Horton 1970, Bourne 1975, Bourne and Simmons 1978). This work neatly arrayed cities into national urban hierarchies thus writing non-local trade (‘horizontal’ movements of commodities and services in their various forms) largely out of urban geography (Taylor et al 2010). Hence Hall was out of sync in urban geography not just through his synthetic view of cities, but also through his comparative approach treating major cities outside restrictive central place vertical spatial relations.