Going Glocal? Read this first.
Within the past two decades, an expanding body of work has shown that an emerging global system of production, culture, communication and politics is, through a worldwide network of cities, being articulated spatially. Urban processes and politics are not only expressing, but re-shaping the processes of globalization everywhere. Cities are becoming more receptive to global forces, while national and local actors are taking a more active interest in restructuring their cities as globally competitive locations. This intersection between the global and the local has utterly transformed cities into mediums of globalization where global, national and local processes and forces encounter each other, merge, and create something new under the conditions of neoliberal capitalism.
Until recently, the idea that cities should be viewed as key spaces through which wider systems of production, culture and exchange occur had largely been confined to historical and archaeological studies. While studies on contemporary cities were approached within the confines of a state centric perspective, if not the city itself. An international perspective of urbanization requires comparative studies of cities still considered independent and separate nodes on a map, locked away within their nation’s borders, overlooking cross-border connections between cities.
As Sassen says, essentially with the rise of transnational corporations and a new division of labor since the 1960s, the emergence of transnational economies, institutions and the like made it increasingly difficult to maintain a nation-state centric approach in regards to social processes, cities and urbanization. She provides empirical evidence on how the global capital and the producer services impinge on the demographic, socio-economic and spatial dynamics of three global cities, London, New York, Tokyo. Her central aim is to explain an anomaly, i.e., the continuing significance of cities in the age of accelerated globalization and digitalization of economy, despite the claims made to the contrary. According to her, cities have not lost significance in the face of globalization and digitalization of the economy. Actually, we see a renewed strategic role so to speak, of major cities in the world economy. This is the result of territorial dispersion of economic activity and the restructuring of finance which created a need for expanded central control. It is through particular technologies and services produced in certain cities that the global capital gains the capability to control and coordinate capital, production, trade and marketing at an accelerated rate on a global scale.
Because of the need of infrastructures to create, control and coordinate mobility, instead of becoming obsolete, cities have continued significance in the functioning of the global economy. So while the current round of globalization is marked by an increasing mobility of capital, the expansion of such capacity has been partly premised upon certain major cities where the real work gets done, that is to say where the technological, institutional and social infrastructure of globalization is secured. These cities are what Sassen refers to as global cities, highly concentrated command points, key locations for finance which have replaced manufacturing as the leading economic sectors, they are sites of innovation and operate as markets for such innovation. The difference between world city theory and Sassen’s idea of the global city, is that she attributes the characteristics of global cities to the agglomeration of producer services which are seen as leading sectors in the global economy rather than the localization of TNC’s, as in world city theory. In this light, global cities are command and control centers not necessarily because they host TNC’s but rather because they host strategic sectors, capabilities and a labor force that produce the capacity for a more coordinated control.
The advantages of this perspective, according to Sassen, is that our attention is then directed to production processes and the whole array of practices and people that take part in these processes which are located in the cities. The focus on production and people enable us to capture the “social thickness” of the global within the local that simply focusing on the locational strategies of the TNC’s don’t allow for.
While globalization has mostly been viewed as a social and economic phenomenon, global city theory, breaks this process down to urban-based actors, politics, and struggles. When pointing toward a global city theory, the intention is not do identify a hierarchy or network of particular places that can be traced through indicators and rankings. There is a growing body of often contradictory literature of urban globalization which encompasses all “ordinary” cities and makes all Global Cities into global cities in a manner in which views urban places generally as globalizing cities, instead of focusing on a select group of cities in an elite group of Global Cities. One of the issues and expressed by Brenner and Keil is that global bias in such research seems to move forward without taking into account political and cultural dynamics.
The fact of the matter is that the world has become more complex since the introduction of world city theory through its advent during the Cold War. What was once idealized in an almost cartoonish cycle of the globalization of capital, culture and labor is now viewed often as a more vicious cycle. Moreover, the discourse in recent years has shifted away from looking specific cities as powerful international centers to looking at globalized urbanization more broadly. Global cities are highly polarized places, and while the politics of the city is caught up between the dilemma of mediating between the growing discrepancy between the needs of “economic space” of capital and the demands of transnational elite on one hand, and the living space of residents on the other.
It is true to say that economic and political actors do occupy specific spaces, their headquarters are somewhere. And cities continue to be that somewhere, the anchor of the network of global activity. The idea of the “world city” has evolved and now address the fact that global influences can pressure finance and commerce within urban centers. Global cities attract large numbers of immigrants and migrants, which in turn amplify inequalities between social classes who live in them, and strain the local and national governments who have to deal with the social fallout.
The world city concept seems best understood as the city-hinterland model. Of course, in this day and age, Brenner and Keil would argue that the hinterland of a world city is the world itself. And this is what the globalization of urbanization essentially means. Places like London, New York, and Tokyo extend their influence around the world. However, as a result of neoliberal policies which lead to the rapid development of the BRICS economies, there is now a 2nd tier of economically important world cities in places like Beijing, Shanghai, Mumbai, and so on.
Increasingly, common regional interests overlap international borders like Seattle and Vancouver, where local officials of both municipalities have worked together to promote and preserve the region as one which exerts such global influence. In Europe, one can see such joint ventures even more prominently because of the proximity multiple nations within the EU, there is much more opportunity for cross-border cooperation here.
However, decentralization as a process of the globalization of the city is still in its infancy in a world that continues the historical trend of concentrating in cities and metropolitan regions. The big difference now seems that there are more options, there are just more cities to choose from. We still look to the major metropolitan regions to discover new trends in technology and how this is changing the way we work. We still find manufacturing and industrialization in city centers as well as on the edges. Cities literally remain the laboratories where the experiments of diverse living and working conditions are figured out in the most culturally diverse areas of a population. The excitement, risk and opportunity of urban life still draw the talented, adventurous and ambitious among us.
Wage and salaried employment patterns are changing, local business owners increasingly face competition from international chains, selling mass marketed goods all too often manufactured by people working in sweatshops on the other side of the world. In essence, the global and the local are not opposites, but rather are intricately interwoven. All sorts of companies profit from the global economy, which in turn causes their highly paid employees and the businesses that cater to them, to drive up the cost for space thereby exerting pressure over the local economy affecting the ability of other businesses and residents to afford to pay the rent. This idea may have been perfectly embodied in the campaign slogan of Jimmy McMillan as he ran for governor of New York, “The rent is too damn high!”
It sure is Jimmy, it sure is.
