Globalizing Cities

A New Spatial Order?

Peter Marcuse, Ronald Van Kempen, Peter Marcuse, Ronald Van Kempen

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780631212904
• eBook ISBN: 9781444399615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This exciting collection of original essays provides students and professionals with an international and comparative examination of changes in global cities, revealing a growing pattern of social and spatial division or polarization.

1

Introduction

Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen¹

The Question

Is there something new, something different, about the spatial patterns of the cities of today and tomorrow which differentiates them from the cities of yesterday? That is the question to which this book is addressed. It asks it of cities around the world. New types of cities, called global cities by some, world cities or megacities by others, are described both in the scholarly and in the popular press. Indeed, internal spatial patterns seem to play a different role in cities today, and a very variable one: service-adapted patterns are different from manufacturing-based patterns, central cities have different patterns from those on the periphery, “edge cities” are different from traditional cities. Within cities, the ghettos are increasingly separated from the rest of the city, while the same holds true, though in a different way, for the exclusionary enclaves of the rich. Areas that are socially and spatially between these two extremes also separate themselves out from the rest of the city more and more. These are the evolving patterns we wish to examine in this book.

Of course cities are in a constant process of internal change. The center of cities decline or change form and functions, and new business districts spring up; immigrants cluster together and mix with others; ethnic and racial groups are segregated in ghettos and slums, or they escape to more livable neighborhoods; new cultural enclaves are formed, while old ones disappear; new forms of cities are created at the edges of metropolitan areas; suburbanization never seems to end. Spatial divisions of themselves are nothing new, but they are not stable in their causes, in their appearance, in their scale, or in their effects.

There is today a growing consensus in the literature that significant changes in spatial divisions within cities have occurred very visibly since the early 1970s. Descriptive accounts of these changes have multiplied. So have accounts of changes in the national and international context that parallel and perhaps cause them: a process of globalization, changing forms of production, a declining state provision of welfare, differences in power relationships, developing technologies, all have their influence on urban patterns, within cities as well as among them (see, e.g., Fainstein et al., 1992; O’Loughlin and Friedrichs, 1996; Musterd and Ostendorf, 1998; Madanipour et al., 1998). But exactly how do these changes affect the spatial form of individual cities? Are the patterns of all cities convergent? On what do changes depend? Can (should) public policy influence them?

In this book, our focus is thus on one deceptively simple question: what is “new” about these cities of today, and in particular, what is new about the spatial arrangements within them? In brief, we ask the question:

Is there a new spatial order within cities?

We have tried to make this central question more concrete by formulating a set of subsidiary questions:

• Is there a clearly visible direct impact of globalization on the internal spatial pattern of cities? How (if at all) can the impact of globalization be separated from other macro-societal changes that are linked to globalization and/or parallel it?
• Is there indeed any generalizable city form that is characteristic of globalizing cities, be it radial, gentrified, edge city, or other? Or is it precisely that absence of conventional form that characterizes today’s cities, as post-modern discussions of the Los Angeles model suggest?
• Do spatial cleavages that are indeed found in cities today reflect a dual city, a quartered city, a plural city? Are the separate residential parts further apart economically, socially, culturally, than in previous eras? The move of manufacturing to the suburbs and services to the central city goes back many decades: how can the effects of these developments be described?
• Is the old doughnut pattern, with the middle class in the white suburbs surrounding a lower class black inner city, obsolete in countries such as the United States? Is the reverse pattern, with an upper class inner city and working class suburbs, that has characterized many European cities, likewise obsolete? Or are today’s patterns simply a continuation of older and well-known market-driven mechanisms, with variations only in magnitude?
• Is “race” a critical factor in the definition of the spatial pattern of globalizing cities? If so, how and why? In all countries? Are patterns of immigrant location and separation/integration in the United States a forerunner of developments elsewhere?
• To what extent does, or can, public policy, at the local or national level, influence the internal spatial structure of cities?

We have raised these questions² with each of the contributors to this book. They have each provided valuable material towards some general answers; we have summarized our own understanding of what has been learned, and what remains unclear, in our Conclusion.

The volume begins with a general statement of our opening hypothesis in the next section of this Introduction. The following part of the Introduction is devoted to the factors that might be expected to produce a new spatial order within cities. This is followed by a general description of the different spatial forms we expected to find within cities. The core of the book is then devoted to case studies of diverse cities around the world. The cases provide evidence relevant to the validity of the hypothesis with which we began, although there is no pretense that they are representative enough or conclusive enough to validate or disprove it. They do clearly show the need at least for modifications, and we present a revised formulation of our hypothesis in our Conclusion, which presents our own summary and synthesis.

The Hypothesis

The hypothesis with which we begin can be formulated as follows.

There is a new spatial order of cities, commencing somewhere in the 1970s, in a period often described as one of a globalizing economy. While cities have always been divided along lines of culture, function, and status, the pattern today is a new, and in many ways deeper-going, combination of these divisions. Although it varies substantially from city to city by historical development of the built form, by national political and economic structures, by the relative weight of the contending forces involved in development, by the role of “race” and ethnicity, and by the place in the international economy, nevertheless there are basic features in common. They include a spatial concentration within cities of a new urban poverty on the one hand, and of specialized “high-level” internationally connected business activities on the other, with increasing spatial divisions not only between each of them but also among segments of the “middle class” in between.

Boundaries between divisions, reflected in social or physical walls among them, are increasing. The result is a pattern of separate clusters of residential space, creating protective citadels and enclaves on the one side and constraining ghettos on the other, in a hierarchical relationship to each other. The market produces and reproduces these divisions, but the state is deeply involved in their creation and perpetuation. The state can also ameliorate them, and will tend to do so under specific conditions. Present trends do not suggest it will do so in most places. The result is a converging pattern within cities radically different enough from earlier patterns to justify being called “a new spatial order.”

Within this general hypothesis, there are the contours of specific, arguably new, socio-spatial formations (see also Marcuse, 1989; Van Kempen and Marcuse, 1997). They are mentioned briefly below and will be further elaborated later in this Introduction. Those formations include the following:

• Areas that can be considered as protected enclaves of the rich, the representatives of an extremely mobile top, operating at a more global level than ever before. These areas can be labeled as “citadels” or as “exclusionary enclaves” and generally consist of expensive apartments in favorable locations.
• Gentrified areas occupied by the yuppies, the professionals, the managers. They are surrounded by the older, often poorer, population. These areas are located in the inner parts of the older cities.
• Suburbs generally inhabited by the middle class, by households with children and substantial incomes.
• Tenement areas – with less expensive, often (but not always) rented dwellings – inhabited by the working class, the employed, unemployed and temporarily employed. The tenement city is not a homogeneous whole but is increasingly divided in itself. Neighborhoods are differentiated among each other by income, occupation, and ethnicity. In some cases the divisions are represented spatially by the hardening of the boundaries between them.
• Ethnic enclaves, often seen as a specific form of the tenement city. Here, ethnic minorities congregate for various reasons.
• A new type of ghetto, the so-called excluded ghetto, inhabited by the new urban poor, a fully and long-term excluded group at the bottom (Marcuse, 1998).

These ideas were formulated before we knew what the contributions to this volume would be. Since we know now, as this is going into print, what our conclusions are, a very brief summary here is appropriate:

The hypothesis accurately states certain common tendencies, but their manifestation in cities is the result of changes that are of longer historical origin, and dependent on multiple contingencies. In any given case, the variations may overwhelm the general, and the results are much subject to political control. While the general tendencies produce predictable sociospatial patterns, very visibly affect some locations, and are increasing in importance, they are not so consistent or so different from prior patterns as to deserve being called “a new spatial order.”

Each of these points is developed in our Conclusion.

Influences on the Spatial Order of Cities

It is not a very new idea that cities are part of a larger society, that their spatial form is inter-related with the economic, social, cultural, and political structures of the society within which they exist. Areas within the city are further influenced by developments and decisions on higher spatial levels. Sociologists and geographers now agree that patterns of segregation and concentration change as a consequence of the interaction of individual household decisions with a variety of structures and developments on different spatial levels. Societal processes – like economic restructuring on a global level – have their impact on local situations and developments (Sassen, 1990; Burgers and Engbersen, 1996, Van Kempen and Marcuse, 1997, Van Kempen and Özüekren, 1998) and on choice patterns of households (Clark and Dieleman, 1996).

We begin with a consideration of macro-social forces (see also Van Kempen and Marcuse, 1997).

The unclear impact of globalization

The causes of changes within cities can to a large extent be traced back to developments that take place on higher spatial levels, regionally and even more critically nationally and globally. The latter, with its concomitant national and regional implications, is today generally subsumed under the concept of globalization, a term that is often used, but not always well defined. Globalization can comprise many processes, such as the spatial integration of economic activities, movement of capital, migration of people, development of advanced technologies, and changing values and norms that spread among various parts of the world. We take it here to mean globalization in its present configuration, that is, a combination of new technology, increased trade and mobility, increased concentration of economic control, and reduced welfare-oriented regulatory action of nation states. Other forms of globalization have existed in the past, and today alternative forms of globalization could easily be envisaged, but we focus here on really existing globalization, globalization as it exists today (see also Marcuse, 1997a).³

Globalization clearly has much to do with mobility of goods, of capital, of persons. An important reason to expect spatial changes within cities is the changing nature of economic activities and the concomitant shift in location of components of the production process. One of the main changes in Western societies – but also in many Asian countries – has been, and still is, the declining importance of manufacturing, and the increasing significance of services. Many traditional production tasks in manufacturing have been mechanized, automated and computerized, making production more capital-intensive and less dependent on manual labor. Other tasks have been shifted to other parts of the world, where labor is less expensive. The increasing ability to separate manual and non-manual components of the labor process has increased the division of labor in the production process, making on the one hand many lower – or unskilled people redundant, and on the other hand demanding more skills from others. The increase in the numbers of so-called flexible jobs gives an increasing number of people the opportunity to find work, but these people are not necessarily the same as those who were made redundant (see also Harvey, 1989; Badcock, this volume).

The power of capital is clear here. Capital’s ability to bargain with labor is tremendously enhanced by its ability to seek out lower wage labor at all kinds of locations, sometimes very remote. Foreign capital may increasingly influence the spatial layout and physical appearance of areas within cities (Beauregard and Haila, this volume). Investors might seek to invest their capital not at home, but at places all over the world where profit is expected to be highest. Some areas profit, some others don’t: uneven development is characteristic of capitalism.

The possible spatial implications of these changes are manifold. We can distinguish between spatial shifts in the production process itself and other spatial changes, e.g. in residential patterns that result from these shifts. For the shift in the production process itself, it is clear that some regions just lose employment, especially manufacturing jobs. At the same time, employment in the service sector increases in some, but not all, cities. It is important here to distinguish between higher-order and lower-order services. At the top of the service sector we find functions of control, in the field of management, finance, law, and politics. Spatial centralization of these kinds of job is increasingly important, despite new communication techniques and fast modes of transport. Centers of some cities keep, or even increase, their importance for these purposes. At the lower end we find unskilled and semi-skilled jobs in sectors like catering (salad bars and snack bars), surveillance, and cleaning. Although unskilled jobs are partly dependent on the existence of jobs in the higher echelons, they can also be found in many places, not only in central cities, but in every place where people concentrate (Sassen, 1988; 1991).

With respect to the effects of these shifts, two lines of reasoning can be discerned (see Bolt et al., 1998). The first follows Robert Reich’s The Work of Nations (1991). He argues that local forms of social solidarity become less important because elites show an increasing international orientation and become less dependent on the services of lower status groups in neighborhoods. There is no need for the rich to live in close proximity to those of lesser wealth. If they even live in the same neighborhoods, the life world of the wealthy is clearly larger than their living neighborhood. Melvin Webber’s (1964) old idea of “communities without propinquity” is important for those at the upper end of the economic spectrum today; the “urban realm” becomes “non-spatial.” For the very poor, by the same token, their spatially defined neighborhoods, while in ways growing even more important for their residents, become more and more irrelevant to the functioning of the mainstream economy. The location of either with relation to the other recedes dramatically in importance. A logical result is an urban society that is increasingly socially and spatially disconnected, fragmented and polarized.⁴

The second line of reasoning focuses on globalization as leading to a kind of socio-economic symbiosis within an increasingly polarized society, which can be seen in a growing number of highly-educated, wealthy persons and households, but also in an increasing number of people in the lower segments of the economy (in dead-end jobs and chronically unemployed). Saskia Sassen (1984, 1986, 1988, 1991) can be seen as the main proponent of this argument. The crux in this line of reasoning is that rich and poor, those included in and those excluded from the (formal) economy are dependent on each other. One group has the money for products and services that the other group can provide. The emphasis on symbiotic relationships might end up with a society that is both more polarized and more interdependent and with spatial patterns characterized by a spatial mix of different groups.

Although globalization is a process that obviously has broad impact, there are important questions concerning the specifically intra-city spatial effects of this process. Globalization is not automatically translated into spatial patterns, even in the case of a growing social polarization. Symbiosis between groups might or might not lead to urban areas that include neighborhoods where people with different incomes, ethnicities, skills and education live together. It might also very well lead to different consequences for different groups, leading some to form enclaves, others to be confined to ghettos. Reasoning from megatrends through social interdependence to spatial patterns should be done with great care.

Patterns of migration and other demographic developments

Working people often seek to improve their position by moving. Emigration to areas where a better life can be expected is a process as old as the world. In more recent times, the migration to Western Europe from Southern Europe and other countries around the Mediterranean and the migration within the United States from South to North are examples of large migration flows that are principally motivated by perceptions of work opportunity (see, e.g., Özüekren and Van Kempen, 1997). Also, on a smaller spatial scale, migration for reasons of job-seeking are frequent. Processes of urbanization, suburbanization, desuburbanization and re-urbanization are sometimes motivated by the creation of attractive residential areas, but often have to do with economic opportunities, including the relocation of work.

Not all migration flows are labor motivated. Internationally, political oppression and wars in many countries have pressed people to emigrate, often, where colonies have become independent, to the land of the colonizer, both before and after independence. Illegal migration flows add to the number of “official” immigrants in many countries, often having a disproportionate effect in specific cities and neighborhoods because of chain migration (Burgers, 1998). Not all these migration flows are urban oriented, but many of them were and still are. Migrants increased the demand for housing, often resulting in fiercer competition between households, especially lower-income households, leading not only to overcrowding in receiving neighborhoods but also to price changes and inflationary pressures throughout the housing market. Consequently, conflicts among groups, between those who had already lived in the neighborhood for decades or even generations and newcomers from other countries, are still manifold in all kinds of urban areas.

Population movement from central cities to suburbs is a common phenomenon in most developed countries. The movement is not class-neutral: it is higher income households that move out, largely in search for better or more cost-efficient housing opportunities and for jobs likewise moving out of central cities. In developing countries the same pattern may be observed; the continuing growth of cities in developing countries, which seems to contrast to the pattern in the more developed world, in fact reveals the same classspecific mobility patterns, but coupled with a rural-to-urban movement that swells the concentration of poorer people in the central cities in quantitatively much greater proportions than in more developed countries. Differences between cities do however exist: not all cities can be characterized by a growing number of poor and a declining number of higher-income households, and both rural-to-urban migration and displacement can lead to residential locations for poor people far from the center of cities.

Demographic developments within cities can have enormous influences on local housing demand and therefore on the spatial patterns of households. A sharp rise, for example, in the number of large families may boost the demand for large dwellings. If they are only available in some parts of the city, a concentration of large families may result there. If these large families are mainly immigrant families, we may end up with a spatial concentration of ethnic families. Rates of divorce, increasing numbers of single parent households, the tendency for young people to stay at home longer, the process of people living longer, are other demographic and socio-cultural processes that affect the housing market opportunities of households.

“Race” and racism

The importance of “race” and racism for the development of the spatial structure of cities is not always clear. Their importance in the US experience, however, cannot be exaggerated. A number of recent works make this point eloquently (see Massey and Denton, 1993; Goldsmith and Blakely, 1992). Central city “decline”, suburban and edge city growth, the changing nature of the ghetto, and the increase in fortified enclaves in US cities are inextricably linked to patterns of racial relations (Marcuse, 1997a). The fact that most African Americans in the United States live in neighborhoods that are racially stamped illustrates this point, especially when we realize that many of them do not live there as a matter of choice. Where the black ghetto was still seen before World War II as analogous to an ethnic enclave, as a place of cultural and economic and social solidarity, today it is more often seen as a place of social disorganization, restricting opportunity by its very spatial limitations (Wilson, 1987; Marcuse, 1998).

Indications of similar racist tendencies exist in many other countries, where opposition to immigration and immigrants has led to xenophobic political policies and even more visible di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Preface
• 1: Introduction
• 2: The Unavoidable Continuities of the City
• 3: From the Metropolis to Globalization: The Dialectics of Race and Urban Form
• 4: From Colonial City to Globalizing City? The Far-from-complete Spatial Transformation of Calcutta
• 5: Rio de Janeiro: Emerging Dualization in a Historically Unequal City
• 6: Singapore: the Changing Residential Landscape in a Winner City
• 7: Tokyo: Patterns of Familiarity and Partitions of Difference1
• 8: Still a Global City: The Racial and Ethnic Segmentation of New York1
• 9: Brussels: Post-Fordist Polarization in a Fordist Spatial Canvas
• 10: The Imprint of the Post-Fordist Transition on Australian Cities
• 11: The Globalization of Frankfurt am Main: Core, Periphery and Social Conflict
• 12: Conclusion: A Changed Spatial Order
• List of References
• Index