Global Metropolitan

Globalizing Cities in a Capitalist World

John Rennie-Short

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415305419
• eBook ISBN: 9781134405190
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Exploring the connections between globalization and urbanization, this notable book places particular emphasis on understanding the economic function of global cities, the political process of globalizing cities, and the cultural significance of cosmopolitan cities.

The book explores the meaning of the globalizing project in cities:

• the maintaining, securing and increasing of urban economic competitiveness in a global world
• the reimagining of the city
• the rewriting of the city for both internal and external audiences
• the construction of new spaces and the hosting of new events.

Specific chapters look at the significance of signature architects, the hosting of the Summer Olympics and the role of the super-rich. The main thesis of the book is that this discourse of globalizing is a major force in the restructuring of cities around the world.

1 Introduction

This book will explore the connections between globalization and urbanization. Emphasis will be placed on the economic function of global cities, the political process of globalizing cities and the cultural significance of cosmopolitan cities. Perhaps the easiest way to begin is with three, very brief, urban stories.

First: the changing face of Syracuse, New York. In the 1970s the city of Syracuse in upstate New York changed its logo. The old logo, in operation for almost 100 years, depicted an industrial city where tall factory chimneys proudly broke the skyline. However, the global shift in manufacturing employment eroded much of the city’s traditional economic base. The new logo, in contrast, showed a postindustrial landscape, sleek buildings overlooking a pristine lake. The change in imagery was matched by the change in landscape. In the early 1990s a new postmodern mall, the Carousel Center, was built on the site of an abandoned petrochemical storage site in the middle of a landscape of deindustrialization and decay. A postindustrial iconography replaced industrial imagery as the basis of the city’s new identity. In October 2002 ground was broken, beside the new mall, on a new $160 million hotel that was the opening stage of an eventual mega-mall, DestiNY, that is intended to cover 3.2 million square feet, cost $3.2 billion and consist of 4,000 hotel rooms, 30 restaurants, 65 acres of an indoor park as well as a miniature replica of the Erie Canal.

Second: situated on the other side of the global shift in manufacturing employment is the Chinese city of Shanghai. Since the early 1990s Shanghai has built a downtown of high-rise towers, a new international airport and under construction are a deep-water container terminal and a magnetically levitated train. Plans are on the books to build the world’s tallest building. A new global city was being self-consciously recreated.

Third: in 2002 the tourist board of Rio de Janeiro was seriously considering suing the media conglomerate Fox because, in an episode of The Simpsons the city was described as “a city where all men are bisexual, where fearsome monkeys roamed the street, and tourists are kidnapped by taxi drivers and mugged by children.” A fictional dance, the “penetrada” was also mentioned. All this, felt the city officials, caused damage to Rio’s international image and loss of revenue.

While there is uniqueness in each of these tales, there is something more universal. They are part of a broader story of urban change that is sweeping the world. A global urban restructuring is taking place that, internally, involves a social and spatial restructuring, and, externally, a repositioning and re-presentation in the world of flows, images and symbols. Important socio-spatial transformations and major semiotic changes are reshaping the new global urban order.

There are some definitional issues that we need to consider before proceeding. We need to define a global city and indeed the whole notion of globalization.

Defining a Global City

Some definitions are clearly in order, not so much to put up barriers but as creative aids to some systematic theorizing. Global cities are big, but not all big cities are global cities. Tehran, for example, has a population of almost 11 million. It is not a global city. We can distinguish between megacities, those large and increasingly growing cities found throughout the world but especially in the Third World, including such cities as Tehran, and global cities that are also large but have other characteristics. We can also make a distinction between world cities and global cities. World cities are large cities linked, however loosely, to a global urban network of flows of people, goods, ideas, practices and performances. Global cities, in contrast, are the core of this global urban network. If we use the hierarchy metaphor, although later I will undermine it, they would be the apex; if we use the network metaphor they are the main switching points, the really connected world cities. The distinction is loose. When does a world city become a global city? The answer, unsatisfactory to many I am sure, is “It depends.” If we are looking at cinema then Los Angeles clearly becomes a global city, but in terms of other economic transactions, Los Angeles is relatively provincial, despite the academic boosterism of the LA School to the contrary. In terms of strategic surveillance and military action Washington is the center of the global empire that is the United States but the city fails to make global status in terms of economic flows. We can use a soft as opposed to a hard definition of global city. Like being in love, being a global city can be a temporary phenomenon, a soughtafter status, sometimes achieved but always a source of motivation and longing. Thus a megacity may become a world city if there is a significant inflow of foreign tourists. And a world city may become a global city for at least two weeks while it is hosting the Summer Olympic Games. This more plastic use of the terms undermines definitive lists of global cities. I prefer the term global cities to world cities because it is possible to use the term globalizing city to capture that sense of becoming and longing. Globalizing cities are both global cities seeking to maintain their position and non-global cities seeking to become global cities. The terms are not permanent unchanging verities, but relational, spectral, temporal, shifting and unstable.

We can be slightly more precise, or suggest other folds, to use a post-structuralist term, by considering both the minimum attributes of global cities as well as their threshold network function. An important ontological point is their size. A base line population of at least 1 million may be a basic prerequisite for being a global city. The figure is selected for its symbolic rather than any functional functions. Economic attributional characteristics include a concentration of advanced services, creative and cultural industries and command and control functions. Social attributional characteristics include a polyculturalism that encompasses and embraces various ethnicities and cultural diversities. Network characteristics include being an important node in the global flows of people, goods and especially ideas. Global cities are networked into circuits of transnational movements, cultural diffusions and planetary economic transactions. Global cities are the command centers of a global economy, the connecting points of a global society and important sites of social and economic transformation.

Globalization

A lot has been written about globalization. Here I want expose some of the popular representations to closer scrutiny and unpack some of the different meanings of globalization. The three most popular conceptions of globalization are that it is a new thing, it makes everywhere the same and it is bad thing.

Globalization as something new? Although the rate of globalization has certainly increased in recent years, we have been living in a truly global world for over 500 years. When Columbus landed on the Caribbean island a global exchange between the eastern and western hemispheres created a truly global world. People, animals, viruses as well as goods and ideas now moved between formerly separate continents. Spanish was spoken in the New World, potatoes were introduced into the Old World, slaves were shipped from Africa to the Americas while gold was sent from the Americas to Spain. It is more appropriate to think of globalization as a series of pulses over the subsequent five centuries producing new configurations. These reglobalizations connect and disconnect different places in different ways. So rather than positing a sharp dichotomy of global/non-global, most of the world has witnessed various waves of globalization and reglobalization. Between 1880 and 1914, for example, an epoch marked by a significant upswing on globalization trends, a whole set of international standards ands organizations were established including the Olympic Games and various sports federations as well as postal unions and international time zone agreements.

Is globalization making everywhere the same? There are powerful homogenizing tendencies. Since 1989 a capitalist system has dominated the whole world. We are all capitalists now. There is now very little alternative to capitalism. And while there are still a few Marxists in tenured positions at US universities, there are few competing economic ideologies that have captured popular interest. Indeed the hegemony of the neo-liberal agenda is so complete that even resistances and alternatives are situated in response to its doctrines.

The world is becoming smaller. The hero of Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in 80 Days, first published in 1873, reads a report that it is possible to travel around the world in 80 days. While he believes the claim, none of his friends do, and so he makes a wager and thus begins the adventure of the novel. At the time of Verne’s writing 80 days was an optimistic estimate. Today it is more likely to be 80 hours. In 1960 it was Marshall McLuhan who coined the term the global village to refer to a world tied together by images and media. Since McLuhan committed that phrase to print the world has shrunk, with more frequent and cheaper international travel, the Internet and the globalizing of shared images and news reports. The world has become smaller in space-time. Places are closer together. However, small differences become even more important. Small differences in wage rates between different parts of the world take on huge significance and accessibility once measured in days and months is now calibrated with reference to hours, minutes and even seconds. Global cities are places of concentrated global accessibility different from places just a few hours away. The more the world had become a global village, the more differences within the village matter.

While there are a range of similar goods and images available around the world, they are used and incorporated in different ways in different parts of the world. Different locales have different ensembles of the same images and goods. While there are shared languages of consumption and exchange, the regional variations are still important. Think of the way that multinational corporations now have strategies of glocalization in which global commodities are branded for different markets. In Ghana, Guinness is marketed as a distinctly African beverage.

Globalization has created complex patterns of hybrids rather than a common standard of homogeneity. Similar goods are consumed differently around the world. The English language has been creolized into different dialects and more people now use a number of different languages and variants of the same language depending on the context of communication. Japanese marriages will often consist of a traditional and a more Western ceremony; people will consider themselves citizens of more than one country. More groups are combining local and national identities with a cosmopolitan identity to produce a rich mosaic of different identities rather than one all-encompassing global identity. Globalization is creating more hybrid identities.

Globalization is a bad thing? The term has taken on a darker hue, often standing in for capitalism, rapid capital mobility, loss of jobs and a whole range of negative trends and processes. Globalization has become the catch-all phrase for the negative things of the contemporary world. Globalization as the root of all modern evil is a tidy if inaccurate reading. Not all forms of globalization, however, are bad; we can identify more benign global discourses of environmentalism, human rights, social justice and economic equity. There are growing senses of a global community and global standards of social justice, environmental quality and political rights. World public opinion created and maintained by global media coverage has often been an important lens in which national dictatorships and local regimes are viewed. Cosmopolitanism is now a more active agent in global politics and domestic power relations. To be sure there are limits. While Saddam Hussein was roundly condemned in the court of world public opinion for the abuses of human rights, his regime was only toppled by the brute force of superior military power. World public opinion is important, but less effective in forcing regime change than is military superiority.

Globalization is a super-condensed word on which a variety of many different meanings and interpretations have liquefied from the hot air of discussion. We can make a rough distinction between economic, political and cultural globalization. The distinction is an analytical conceit since in practice the three forms are more linked than separate.

Economic globalization involves the more rapid flows of capital around the world, the lengthening production chains of goods and services across borders and the increasing interconnectivity between the economies of different countries. During a previous round of profound globalization, Karl Marx wrote of capitalism as an agent of great social change; “everything solid melts into air” he noted in an arresting image. The present day round of global capitalism is also profoundly transforming. There has been a global shift in manufacturing and a consequent decline of the male working class in Europe and North America and the creation of a new female working class in South and East Asia. National territories have lost their spatial homogeneity as islands of global connectivity differ increasingly sharply from the rest of the national space economy. Occupational rewards differ enormously depending on the form of the global connect. Thus in the USA basketball players can earn in a year what a steel worker earns in a lifetime. One is positively connected to the global economy, the other negatively. Economic globalization is creating profound differences sectorally between economic sectors and job categories, and spatially between parts of the country and the city.

Political globalization is evident in such global discourses as trade, aid, security and environmental issues. The world is now organized along more global systems of regulation, monitoring and control. This is not to argue for the death of the nation state. In fact, distinct elements of the nation state are reinforced by globalization as some parts, especially a central banking system and trade departments, play a pivotal role in managing the global national nexus. Since 1989 a bipolar world has been replaced by a world dominated by US military power and a neo-liberal political economy. While there are differences between countries, they can be more easily situated on one global metric (one global dimension of comparison) of open markets, which in effect is the openness to capitalist penetration. There are resistances and reaction. When the present is ever changing and the future is uncertain the past becomes a place of security. The rise of fundamentalism, Islamic, Christian and Jewish, is a promised return to fixed, unchanging categories. Fundamentalism provides a sense of certainty, a soft landing for the troubled and something solid that promises not to melt into air. Fundamentalism and cosmopolitanism are the two interconnected poles of the social reactions to globalization.

Cultural globalization is the degree to which similar cultural forms are found around the world. This has led some to argue that the process of cultural homogenization, often portrayed as a form of Americanization, is occurring. While US popular cultural forms are disseminating much more wildly and deeply around the world, more people speak a form of English, eat at McDonald’s and watch Hollywood movies, this has not led to an upsurge in pro American sentiment. If anything, quite the reverse. There is a subtle difference between the production of cultural forms and their consumption across the world. The consumption of culture is not a passive process of indoctrination, but a more active process of incorporation and creative readings. While there are similar cultural forms, their consumption varies across the world. If anything there is increased difference as new and old, indigenous and exotic cultural forms are tied together in new and creative ways. The process of cultural globalization is creating as much difference as similarity. New cultural identities are being created around hybrid forms as well as around invented traditions that are resistances to perceived cultural imperialism.

The current round of globalization is creating difference and divergence around the world. Minor differences in wage rates are exacerbated in a truly global economy, new hybrid identities are created as culture is prized loose from its traditional locational constraints. When Detroit is becoming an important “Arab” city then the traditional definitions of both Arab and Detroit are undermined and reshaped. Difference and divergence, change and hybridism are the new order of the day. Globalization is restructuring the traditional forms of economic, political and cultural difference and similarity.

Dominant narratives have a way of crowding out alternatives. The emphases of the dominant globalization narrative are of an integrating world economy, a homogenizing global culture and a coherent global polity. It may be instructive to end this section by noting the possibility of an alternative discourses that focus on globalization as a process that generates fractured economies, splintering cultures and resurgent nation-states.

The Basic Argument

While there has been great deal of research on what have been called world cities, much of this research fails to capture the processes of this global urban change. I want to consider a change of name that signifies a change of approach. Rather than using the term world city I want to use the term global city. As I stated on p. 21, I prefer the term “global” because it is possible to use it in a verbal and an adverbal as well as an adjectival form. It is indicative of cities being active agents and forces us to consider the notion that globalization is enacted and performed. This formulation begs a number of questions. First, are not cities places rather active agents? True, but we can think of both urban regimes and urban alliances as different political groupings that create compacts to make a global connection. The city is an arena for a constellation of distinct social interests that are negotiating the global–local connection. Second, what exactly is this globalizing project? Fundamentally, it is the maintaining, securing and increasing of urban economic competitiveness in a global world. This involves many things (as well as counterpoints) including, but not restricted to global connections (new nationalisms), global identities (new populisms), a self-conscious global look and feel (the invention of the local and the rise of fundamentalisms). We can identify the modalities of globalizing cities that encapsulate a neoliberal agenda and urban spatial change signposted by cultural ensembles, designed by signature architects and enacted in global spectaculars. The globalizing project varies in detail by individual city but overall there are recurring features across the world including the reimagining of the city, the rewriting of the city for both internal and external audiences, the construction of new spaces and the hosting of new events. A major goal is the attraction of jobs and especially favored are the high tech and producer service sectors. Global city status is defined by having a range and density of symbolic analysts. A cosmopolitan lifestyle is also promoted as part of the project complete with settings and performance that synergize the four c’s of culture, consumption, cool and cosmopolitan. The globalizing project also involves a spatial reorientation of the city, the spectacularization of settings, the creation of specifically global (in economic, cultural and political terms) sites and the encouragement of transnational locations.

The main thesis of the book is that this discourse of globalizing is a major force in the restructuring of cities around the world. The book will show how a similar range ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Globalization and the city
• 3. From world cities to globalizing cities
• 4. Globalizing cities
• 5. Black holes and loose connections
• 6. Tensions in the global city
• 7. The modalities of the global city
• 8. Going for gold: Globalizing the Olympics, localizing the Games
• 9. The super-rich and the global city
• 10. The global, the city and the body
• References
• Index