The Globalizing Cities Reader

Xuefei Ren, Roger Keil, Xuefei Ren, Roger Keil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317410461
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The newly revised Globalizing Cities Reader reflects how the geographies of theory have recently shifted away from the western vantage points from which much of the classic work in this field was developed.

The expanded volume continues to make available many of the original and foundational works that underpin the research field, while expanding coverage to familiarize students with new theoretical and epistemological positions as well as emerging research foci and horizons. It contains 38 new chapters, including key writings on globalizing cities from leading thinkers such as John Friedmann, Michael Peter Smith, Saskia Sassen, Peter Taylor, Manuel Castells, Anthony King, Jennifer Robinson, Ananya Roy, and Fulong Wu. The new Reader reflects the fact that world and global city studies have evolved in exciting and wide-ranging ways, and the very notion of a distinct "global" class of cities has recently been called into question. The sections examine the foundations of the field and processes of urban restructuring and global city formation. A large number of new entries focus on the emerging urban worlds of Asia, Latin America and Africa, including Beijing, Bogota, Cairo, Cape Town, Delhi, Istanbul, Medellin, Mumbai, Phnom Penh, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Shanghai. The book also presents cases off the conventional map of global cities research, such as smaller cities and less known urban regions that are undergoing processes of globalization.

The book is a key resource for students and scholars alike who seek an accessible compendium of the intellectual foundations of global urban studies as well as an overview of the emergent patterns of early 21 st century urbanization and associated sociopolitical contestation around the world.

Part One
Foundations

Introduction to Part One

Plate 1 Times Square, New York City

Source: Roger Keil

While the notion of global or world cities in its contemporary usage may be new, the idea that cities are of world-historical importance—economically, militarily, politically, and culturally—has been around for some time. Cities played fundamental geostrategic roles and had long-distance, networked relationships prior to the consolidation of the modern interstate system. Whether in Mesopotamia or Egypt, the Indus Valley or in the Far East, wherever the first urban cultures appeared, their settlements were the core of territorial or maritime empires (Soja 2000). Athens and Rome are perhaps the most pervasively cited urban cores of two major world empires.

In the Middle Ages, through trade networks such as the German Hansa, cities once again came to serve as the spatial infrastructure of emerging continental and, eventually, during the early modern period, global economies (see Ch. 2 by Braudel). Byzantium, which took the mantle from Rome and remained the important buckle in a belt that tied together Occident and Orient in the Middle Ages, was certainly a type of global city, even by today’s standards. But there are also many examples of smaller, less well-known cities, which fulfilled global city functions, in particular financial control, and which are now little more than regional centers and tourist destinations. One such place is Augsburg, in southern Germany, a city of impressive wealth in the late Middle Ages, when the Fugger family financed the global enterprises of the Hansa and other commercial, mining, and manufacturing projects. Located at the northern foothills of the Alps, it was the ideal connector of the Mediterranean, eastern European, North Sea, and western European economies. Another such place was the legendary Cahors in the French southwest, which is cited, alongside Sodom and Gomorrah, as a model for Hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy (1321). At the time of Cahors’ greatest power during its Golden Age in the 13th century, local and Lombard bankers transformed the city into the chief banking center of Europe and earned a reputation as usurers—a characteristic of the town that was subsequently noted by the great Italian poet.

The developmental trajectories of major cities and inter-city networks have been linked to the emergence and decline of precapitalist imperial systems and, subsequently, to the expansion of capitalism on a world scale (Abu-Lughod 1989; Chase-Dunn, Manning, and Hall 2000). In each period, the identity and character of a global city is tied into the dominant mode of production: globality is defined by the scale of the world system—the large-scale framework of material, political, and cultural life—in which that city is embedded. Cities are in turn connected in diverse, long-distance relationships that are designed to maintain the world system as a whole. However, since the mid-1970s we have witnessed the consolidation of a truly worldwide urban hierarchy that has significantly expanded the scale of major cities’ command and control functions within the capitalist world system as a whole.

Peter Hall (1966: 7) attributed the term “world city” to a book by Scottish urbanist Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution (1915), which emphasized world cities’ centralized economic functions. In Hall’s view, world cities were sites of intensive population growth, centralized political power, and major commercial, financial, and transportation functions. These critical functions were treated not only as attributes but also as capabilities that connected world cities to one another. In Hall’s view, relational properties were defining features of world cities. Crucially, however, Hall conceived world cities primarily as national centers that channeled international forces and influences towards national interests. Hall’s conception of a world city is thus arguably a product of a period in which cities operated primarily as nodes within national urban systems. By contrast, contemporary notions of the world city emphasize the embeddedness of urban centers within an emergent system of global capitalism; this may entail their partial delinking from the territorialized economic spaces regulated by national state institutions (Ross and Trachte 1990; Sassen 1991).

The world city literature can be viewed as an implicit critique of what Ben Derudder has called “the zonal implementation of core-periphery models” (2003: 100), which were developed by world system theorists such as Wallerstein (1974) to characterize the polarization of global capitalism among core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral zones. These models are generally grounded upon territorialist assumptions in which economic space is conceived as being composed of clearly delineated, bounded geographical containers. However, by directing attention to inter-urban connections and interdependencies, which generally crosscut territorial borders in complex networked relationships, world city theorists have suggested an alternative conceptualization of capitalism’s underlying economic geographies, in which economic territoriality represents only one among various possible forms of sociospatial organization (for a related perspective, see Arrighi 1995). How best to map the emergent global urban system in relation to the landscape of global capitalism remains one of the most controversial and fascinating questions within the entire field of global cities research, and it is likely to continue to stimulate energetic theoretical debate and empirical analysis in the years to come.

In terms of periodizing the emergence and development of global cities, there are basically two approaches—one which emphasizes the long-term role of cities as basing points for global economic flows; and one which emphasizes the historical specificity of contemporary patterns of global city formation. While we believe these approaches can be compatible, they have, in fact, led to quite divergent research agendas.

On the one hand, some urbanists have insisted that global cities are an age-old phenomenon. This position is strongly articulated by world city researchers such as Janet Abu-Lughod (Ch. 8), John Walton (Ch. 6), Michael Timberlake (Ch. 7), and Christopher Chase-Dunn (1985). These researchers have systematically examined the long-term structural and historical background for world city formation and have argued that cities have long served as nodal points within large-scale economic systems both prior to and throughout the history of capitalist industrialization. An important aspect of this historically based work has been an emphasis on “urban specialization,” a notion that was reformulated in the 1980s to describe the development of urban centers in global systems of cities. The contribution by Rodriguez and Feagin (Ch. 5) illustrates the powerful explanatory capacity of such an approach when it is applied to the dynamics of global city formation in successive stages of capitalist development.

The second, alternative approach to the periodization of global city formation emphasizes the uniqueness of contemporary global cities due to their role as basing points for a qualitatively new formation of globalizing capitalism. Scholars who have worked in this research tradition have linked the emergence of a globalized city system to the specific forms of worldwide capitalist restructuring that began to unfold as of the 1970s. This strand of research emerged in response to two intertwined transformations—first, the end of American-Fordist-Keynesian hegemony, which entailed the crisis of the postwar framework of accumulation and state regulation across the North Atlantic zone; and second, the development of a new international division of labor in the 1970s, which entailed the increasing industrialization of formerly peripheralized states and, concomitantly, intensive processes of industrial restructuring in the former heartlands of global capitalism (Fröbel et al. 1980).

Accordingly, this second approach interprets world city formation as a key spatial expression of the new forms of capital accumulation that have been consolidated since the 1970s (Keil 1993). This means that, while specific global cities emerge as the command and control centers of the new world economy (Sassen 1991), other cities are likewise subject to closely analogous, globally induced forms of political-economic and spatial restructuring. Thus, cities that are not global command and control centers may nonetheless be transformed through, for example, globalized patterns of consumption, cultural politics, and economic restructuring. Such spaces may be most appropriately characterized, according to Marcuse and van Kempen (2000), as “globalizing cities.”

This section provides a broad survey of key contributions to both of the aforementioned strands of global cities research. The section begins with a selection from Peter Hall’s classic work on world cities, and then presents two seminal works by Friedmann and Wolff (Ch. 3) and Sassen (Ch. 4), who laid the foundation of the global city research. It also includes contributions that examine the role of global cities in various historical phases of capitalist development (Ch. 5 by Rodriguez and Feagin; Ch. 8 by Abu-Lughod), and chapters that situate the emergent global city research in the 1980s within the world-system perspective (Ch. 6 by Walton; Ch. 7 by Timberlake). Each of these chapters emphasizes the continuities between contemporary global cities and various types of global urban centers during the history of capitalism. We then turn to two contributions that problematize studies focusing on global city formation in developed countries. Robinson (Ch. 9) urges us to study cities in the global South by examining how global economic restructuring has shaped these cities that are “off the map”. Since the early 2000s, cities in the global South have attracted much research attention, and the large scholarly output on these globalizing cities has significantly enriched our understanding of global urban transformations outside North America and west Europe. Marcuse (Ch. 10) questions the assumption of a single model of urban sociospatial organization resulting from global economic restructuring, and on this basis presents differential patterns of sociospatial fragmentation in globalizing cities as a promising avenue of research. Together, these two contributions complement earlier works on global city formation by identifying new avenues of investigation for studies of the interplay between globalization and urban restructuring.

References and Suggestions for Further Reading

Abu-Lughod, J. (1989) Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250–1350, New York: Oxford University Press.

Arrighi, G. (1995) The Long Twentieth Century, London: Verso.

Benevolo, L. (1984) Die Geschichte der Stadt, Frankfurt and New York: Campus.

Chase-Dunn, C. (1985) The system of cities, AD 800–1975. In M. Timberlake (ed) Urbanization in the World-Economy, New York: Academic Press, 269–292.

Chase-Dunn, C., Manning, S., and Hall, T. D. (2000) Rise and fall: East-West synchronicity and indic exceptionalism reexamined, Social Science History, 24, 4: 727–754.

Derudder, B. (2003) Beyond the state: Mapping the semi-periphery through urban networks, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 14, 4: 91–120.

Fröbel, F., Heinrichs, J., and Kreye, O. (1980) The New International Division of Labor, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Geddes, P. (1915) Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and the Study of Civics, London: Ernest Benn Limited.

Geddes, P. (1924) A world league of cities, Sociological Review, 26: 166–167.

Hall, P. G. (1966) The World Cities, New York: McGraw-Hill.

Hymer, S. (1979) The multinational corporation and the international division of labor. In R. B. Cohen et al. (ed), The Multinational Corporations: A Radical Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 140–164.

Keil, R. (1993) Weltstadt – Stadt der Welt, Münster: Westfalisches Dampfboot.

Keil, R. (1998) Los Angeles: Globalization, Urbanization and Social Struggles, Chichester: John Wiley and Sons.

Marcuse, P. and van Kempen, R. (eds) (2000) Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? Oxford: Blackwell.

Ross, R. and Trachte, K. (1990) Global Capitalism: The New Leviathan, Albany: State University of New York Press.

Sassen, S. (1991) The Global City, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Soja, E. W. (1989) Postmodern Geographies, London: Verso.

Soja, E. W. (2000) Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Taylor, P. J. (2004) World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis, London and New York: Routledge.

Wallerstein, I. (1974) The Modern World-System I, New York: Academic Publishers.

1
Prologue “The metropolitan explosion”

from The World Cities (1966)

Peter Hall

There are certain great cities in which a quite disproportionate part of the world’s most important business is conducted. In 1915 the pioneer thinker and writer on city and regional planning, Patrick Geddes, christened them “the world cities.” This book is about their growth and problems. By what characteristics do we distinguish the world cities from other great centers of population and wealth? In the first place, they are usually major centers of political power. They are the seats of the most powerful national governments and sometimes of international authorities too, of government agencies of all kinds. Round these gather a host of institutions, whose main business is with government; the big professional organizations, the trade unions, the employers’ federations, the headquarters of major industrial concerns.

These cities are the national centers not merely of government but also of trade. Characteristically they are the great ports, which distribute imported goods to all parts of their countries, and in return receive goods for export to the other nations of the world. Within each country, roads and railways focus on the metropolitan city. The world cities are the sites of the great international airports: Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle, Schiphol, Sheremetyevo, Kennedy, Benito Juarez, Kai Tak. Traditionally, the world cities are the leading banking and finance centers of the countries in which they stand. Here are housed the central banks, the headquarters of the trading banks, the offices of the big insurance organizations and a whole series of specialized financial and insurance agencies.

Government and trade were invariably the original raisons d’être of the world cities. But these places early became the centers where professional talents of all kinds congregated. Each of the world cities has its great hospitals, its distinct medical quarter, its legal profession gathered around the national courts of justice. Students and teachers are drawn to the world cities: they commonly contain great universities, as well as a host of specialized institutions for teaching and research in the sciences, the technologies and the arts. The great national libraries and museums are here. Inevitably, the world cities have become the places where information is gathered and disseminated: the book publishers are found here; so are the publishers of newspapers and periodicals, and with them their journalists and regular contributors. In this century also the world cities have naturally become headquarters of the great national radio and television networks.

But not only are the world cities great centers of population: their populations, as a rule, contain a significant proportion of the richest members of the community. That early led to the development of luxury industries and shops; and in a more affluent age these have been joined by new types of more democratic trading: by the great department stores and the host of specialized shops which cater for every demand. Around them, too, the range of industry has widened: for the products of the traditional luxury trades, forged by craftsmen in the world cities, have become articles of popular consumption, and their manufacture now takes place on the assembly lines of vast factories in the suburbs of the world cities.

As manufacture and trade have come to cater for a wider market so has another of the staple businesses of the world cities – the provision of entertainment. The traditional opera houses and theatres and concert halls and luxurious restaurants, once the preserve of the aristocracy and the great merchant, are now open to a wider audience, who can increasingly pay their price. They have been joined by new and more popular forms of entertainment – the variety theatre and revue, the cinema, the nightclub and a whole gamut of eating and drinking places.

The staple trades of the world cities go, with few exceptions, from strength to strength. Here and there, a trade may wither and decay: thus shoemaking in nineteenth-century London, diamond-cutting in twentieth-century Amsterdam, shirt-making in twentieth-century New York. In the long view, even the world cities may themselves decline. Where now is Bruges – a world city of late medieval Europe? But so far in history, such cases are conspicuous by their rarity. Nothing is more notable about the world cities, taking the long historic view, than their continued economic strength. Not for them the fate of depressed regions which see their staple products decline: regions like the coalfields of Northumberland–Durham in Great Britain or Pennsylvania–West Virginia in the United States, or remote rural regions like the Massif Central of France or the south-east uplands of the Federal Republic of Germany. True, one disquieting note is that, during the 1970s, some great world city regions – London, New York – for the first time recorded declines in population, while in others – Paris, Tokyo – the rate of growth notably slowed. But this should be seen, in large measure, as the co...