Cities in Globalization

Practices, Policies and Theories

Peter Taylor, Ben Derudder, Pieter Saey, Frank Witlox, Peter Taylor, Ben Derudder, Pieter Saey, Frank Witlox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134129812
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Despite traditionally being a strong research topic in urban studies, inter-city relations had become grossly neglected until recently, when it was placed back on the research agenda with the advent of studies of world/global cities. More recently the 'external relations' of cities have taken their place alongside 'internal relations' within cities to constitute the full nature of cities.

This collection of essays on how and why cities are connecting to each other in a globalizing world provides evidence for a new city-centered geography that is emerging in the twenty-first century. Cities in Globalization covers four key themes beginning with the different ways of measuring a 'world city network', ranging from analyses of corporate structures to airline passenger flows. Second is the recent European advances in studying 'urban systems' which are compared to the Anglo-American city networks approach. These chapters add conceptual vigour to traditional themes and provide findings on European cities in globalization. Thirdly the political implications of these new geographies of flows are considered in a variety of contexts: the localism of city planning, specialist 'political world cities', and the 'war on terror'. Finally, there are a series of chapters that critically review the state of our knowledge on contemporary relations between cities in globalization.

Cities in Globalization provides an up-to-date assembly of leading American and European researchers reporting their ideas on the critical issue of how cities are faring in contemporary globalization and is highly illustrated throughout with over fortyfigures and tables.

1
Introduction
Cities in globalization

Peter J.Taylor, Ben Derudder, Pieter Saey and Frank Witlox

 

Cities are inherently complex and diverse. Their multifaceted nature means that there are very many routes to investigating their importance for understanding social change. All this is as true for their contemporary manifestation as ‘world’ or ‘global’ cities as at any time in the past. In fact, it can be argued that, given the growth in the scale of ‘city operations’, cities today are moving towards an apogee of complexity and diversity. Be that as it may, contemporary cities have certainly thrown up many challenges to urban studies, both old (e.g. gross material inequalities) and new (e.g. sustainability of ‘third world mega-cities’). The facet of cities that we focus upon here is a mixture of old and new: inter-city relations. Cities have always existed in relation to one another and contemporary cities are by no means an exception. Quite the opposite: since the 1970s, transport and communication/computing technologies have been fostering an intensification, expansion and extension of inter-city relations. In this way cities have become central to how many people understand contemporary globalization. This is our subject matter here.

Our use of the term ‘cities in globalization’ to portray this tendency is not conceptually neutral. The most common terms used to describe current cities with worldwide relations have been ‘world cities’ and ‘global cities’. These terms are commonly used in the chapters below but we do need to make it clear that we do not necessarily wish to carry on board the baggage that comes with both terms. ‘World city’ is associated with John Friedmann (1986) and his ‘world city hierarchy’; this particular arrangement of cities we leave for empirical investigation, not presumption. ‘Global city’ is associated with Saskia Sassen (1991) and her contention that there are a limited number of major cities that are strategically global in their functions; this particular arrangement of cities presumes a division of cities rather than a continuity of cities in terms of global functions, which, again, is a question we prefer to leave to empirical investigation. The key point with both concepts is that they may be used to suggest ‘lesser opposites’ such as ‘sub-global’ and ‘non-world cities’. Since we understand globalization processes to be pervasive in the contemporary world, we consider this train of thought to be potentially misleading. We challenge anybody to find a contemporary city or town that shows no evidence of globalization processes in the activities that oc-cur within it. Given that we expect nobody to be able to meet this challenge, we conclude that all cities today can be characterized to some degree as both ‘world’ and ‘global’ in nature. Hence, they are all ‘cities in globalization’.

The crux of this argument focuses on the ‘degree’ of globalization experienced in cities. Following Castells (1996), we treat cities as processes, locales through which the social (social space) is constituted as spaces of flows. Globalization is a bundle of processes that constitute a global social space through cities. But there are other bundles of processes constituting spaces of flows at other geographical scales. World-regional scale outcomes are a ubiquitous finding in world city network studies using a variety of techniques and measures of flows (Shin & Timberlake 2000; Smith and Timberlake 2002; Derudder et al. 2003; Taylor 2004a,b; Derudder and Witlox 2005). And, of course, national-scale processes remain important to varying degrees, most clearly seen in the case of the USA (Taylor and Lang 2005). Finally, any trip to a shopping centre or mall illustrates the continuing importance of local spaces of flows to the vitality of cities and city-regions. In other words, focusing on the ‘global’ or worldwide functions can only be a partial view of cities, one of varying importance among cities. Further, these ‘global processes’ can never be separate from the processes concentrated at other scales (‘cities in world-regions’, ‘cities in states’ and ‘cities in hinterlands’). Research focus on one scale should be seen, therefore, always as a pedagogic decision, a way of circumscribing reality to create a manageable, and still coherent, study agenda. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and the world cities literature has remained vibrant over two decades; proof enough. The ‘cities in globalization’ argument is a simple caution not to overinterpret world and/or global cities.

Previously we have referred to inter-city relations on several occasions; but, specifically, what are these relations between cities in globalization? Here again we follow Castells’s (1996) concept of space of flows that he describes as occurring at three levels: infrastructure, social relations and elite relations. Like most social science, our studies are mainly about social relations, but we consider also infrastructural relations and elite relations, both economic and political. One key effect of using this process approach is that we understand inter-city relations not to be primarily the product of the cities themselves. There are ‘official’ inter-city links created by city administrations (from city twinning to city collectives like Eurocities) but these pale into insignificance when compared with the plethora of ‘non-official’ inter-city links: it is private agents that constitute, by and large, the spaces of flows that are our subject matter. Not wholly economic in nature; nev ertheless, it is economic agents (firms) who shape most of the inter-city relations in reality, and this is mirrored in this volume. A key consensus amongst all our authors is that they identify agents within cities and not simply cities as agents.

We have divided the chapters into four sections: World City Networks, InterCity Relations as Networks and Systems, Politics in Inter-City Relations, and Rethinking Cities in Globalization. Like all such divisions, the allocations are to some extent arbitrary: our authors tackle complex subjects that cannot easily be pigeon-holed into simple categories. For instance, as we would expect from leading thinkers in the field, all authors do some rethinking in developing their arguments. Our approach has been to group together chapters on the basis of what we think to be the main thrust of the contribution to the literature. One of the long-term criticisms of the world cities literature is that we actually know less about relations between cities in globalization than has often been assumed. In the first part, key researchers who have begun to seriously tackle this problem present some of their recent researches. This part is intended to give readers a ‘feel’ for contemporary inter-city relations and its study through a variety of different research routes, substantive and methodological. In the second part, contributions focus upon how networks and systems concepts have been combined to provide distinctive depictions of inter-city relations. These chapters introduce continental European contributions to understanding inter-city relations. The third part includes chapters that are explicitly concerned with political questions relating to inter-city relations. Politics is an under-researched but necessary component of inter-city relations that is introduced here in quite different ways. Finally, the book concludes with Part IV, which focuses on rethinking how we might study intercity relations. These chapters aspire to suggest future research agendas through mixes of developing new ideas and repackaging some old ideas.

The chapters in Part I all have a substantial empirical core that is worldwide in scope. The first three chapters each illustrate a level of Castells’s (1996) space of flows, beginning with social relations and moving on to a key infrastructural relation before focusing on elite relations. We begin with Alderson and Beckfield’s longitudinal study of corporate presence in cities from 1981 to 2000. This follows their cross-sectional study of 2000 (Alderson and Beckwith 2004), which is the largest-scale published study of world cities. They combine social network analysis with the world cities literature to test ideas on whether the growth of world cities is accentuating core-periphery patterns or eroding them. Their findings clearly support increased worldwide divergence. Previously the only world cities literature to have attempted longitudinal studies have used airline passenger data. In Chapter 2 Witlox and Derudder review past limitations of using such data, and show fresh possibilities through introducing a new database. This overcomes many of the important problems previous researchers have encountered to enable unique passenger origin-destination network analysis to be undertaken. The elites that Beaverstock studies in Chapter 3 are investment bankers. He shows how these highly professional, and knowledge-rich, staff of global investment banks require face-to-face contacts generating inter-city expert labour mobility. His focus on the firm leads to a call for intensive research on ‘micro-network systems’. In the final chapter of Part I Knox uses the interlocking network model of inter-city relations (Taylor 2001, 2004a) to look at the recent globalization of design services. He finds a dominance of large firms in a limited number of world-regions where capital is being invested heavily in real estate, notably in Pacific Asia and the Middle East Gulf states.

The pedigree of the chapters in Part I can be traced back to World Cities in a World- Economy and its Anglo-American research origins. Running parallel with such studies there has been a very strong research tradition on inter-city rela-tions among researchers in continental Europe. These have borne fruit in several ‘Europe of Cities’ policy and research programmes through the European Union (Bagnasco and Le Galès 2000; Ipenburg and Lambrechts 2001; Faludi 2002; ES-PON 2005) and in research of a rather speculative nature in the new members of the Union (e.g. Centre for European Studies 2003). Here we present four chapters on City Networks and Systems by influential authors from the Netherlands, Italy, France and Germany, countries that have been particularly prominent in EU urban thinking. Van der Knaap shows how inter-city research has changed as the world has changed resulting in central place theory giving way to ‘network systems’. He emphasizes the role of government in network formation and the variety of networks, reflected at different scales as polynuclear city, network city and urban networks. Camagni describes the network paradigm that is a key product of the southern European tradition of spatial analysis. This provides a new logic of synergy and complementarity in city networks that can act as policy tools: it has been adopted in the EU spatial strategy document, the ESDP—European Spatial Development Perspective. Rozenblat and Pumain present their approach to urban systems using ownership networks which are now multinational networks. They derive principles of spatial ordering to describe an emerging European system of cities. Finally, Krätke develops the thesis that Europe’s economic territory is a process of metropolitanization of economic development potentials and innovation capacities. The focus is upon development paths of city regions and their transnational inter-linkages.

As reflected in the first two parts, the world cities literature has focused largely on economic globalization: political processes have been relatively neglected. To be sure, there are scattered references to a range of political questions: on particular ‘political world cities’ (e.g. Elmhorn 2001), on city planning policies (e.g. Newman and Thornley 2005), on citizenship (e.g. Isin 2000), and on global civil society/global governance (e.g. Sassen 2002; Taylor 2005) However, as this short list shows, there is no coherent pattern of research on politics and world cities. This may be because political science/international relations research inevitably focuses on states, resulting in most political researchers ignoring cities. Thus in Part III we have three chapters on quite different topics. Hubbard discusses the limitations of sedentary thinking in urban politics under conditions of contemporary globalization. Cities exist in spaces of flows and therefore city politics has to include a politics of flows: politics needs to be upscaled and network externalities harnessed from flows through the city. Van der Wusten is concerned for the role of cities in multilateral political organizations, which he terms political central places. He focuses on the politics of four European cities in four small countries—Geneva, The Hague, Brussels and Vienna—that are disproportionately important as loci for international relations. Finally Graham relates contemporary cities to the ‘war on terror’. He describes a new imagination that is an urban geography of terror, a discourse that opposes ‘terror cities’ to ‘homeland cities’. The result is the creation of strongly anti-cosmopolitan politics, an anathema to the future vibrancy of cities.

From the heydays of central place theory and national urban systems research in the 1960s and 1970s until fairly recently the study of inter-city relations was relatively neglected, largely because of the paucity of relational data. This book symbolizes a turnaround in this situation in recent years—so much so that the last part is dedicated to searching out new ways forward from a reasonably sound foundation. Certainly this rethinking is necessary since we remain at the very beginning of our understanding of inter-city relations in contemporary globalization. Sassen concentrates on telematics and how these affect cities in what she terms a ‘global digital age’. This introduces a new complexity into her global city analyses: there are myriad different circuits that are transnational but also fragmented and often quite transient. Smith argues that we should move away from the conventional political economy basis of world city research to more post-structural approaches. He favours bringing Deleuze to centre stage to solve a ‘theoretical lacuna’ in the world cities literature by using philosophies of connection, actor-network theory and non-representation theory. Derudder’s rethinking takes a conceptual turn: whereas it has become commonplace to bemoan the paucity of data, he argues that we also have to get our concepts in order. He compares, contrasts and critiques the three main approaches to worldwide inter-city research: world city, global city and global city-region. Taylor’s chapter locates his interlocking network model of the world cities network in a broad geohistorical argument about inter-city relations. Transhistorical processes of town-ness and city-ness are defined in relation to the hinterwork and net-work that operates through cities. These are related to world-systems coreperiphery concepts. Finally, Saey promotes some methodological and ethical rethinking. He takes five writings from the world cities literature (by Alderson and Beckfield, Camagni, Friedmann, Smith, and Taylor) that represent different methodological standpoints and uses them as ‘stepping stones’ to contrast and critique the various research approaches.

We do not claim that the chapters that follow provide a comprehensive collection of world cities studies in the early twenty-first century—that would be impossible in one volume—but they do represent an unusually rich range of empirics, concepts, theories and ideas. We provide a state-of-the-art collection of key writers on inter-city relations in contemporary globalization.

REFERENCES

Alderson, A.S. and Beckfield, J. (2004) ‘Power and Position in the World City System’, American Journal of Sociology, 109:811–51.

Bagnasco, A. and Le Galès, P. (2000) Cities in Contemporary Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Faludi, A. (ed.) (2002) European Spatial Planning, Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of Network Society, Oxford: Blackwell.

Centre for European Studies (2003) ‘European Space in the face of enlargement’, in The West to East European Trajectory Project, Europe XXI, vol. 8, Warsaw: Stanislaw Leszczycki Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization.

Elmhorn, C. (2001) Brussels: A Reflexive World City, Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell.

Derudder B., Taylor, P.J., Witlox, F. and Catalano, G. (2003) ‘Hierarchical tendencies and regional patterns in the world city network: a global urban analysis of 234 cities’, Regional Studies, 37:875–96.

Derudder, B. and Witlox, F. (2005) ‘An appraisal of the use of airline data in assessing the world city network: a research note on data’, Urban Studies, 42:2371–88.

ESPON (European Spatial Planning Observation Network) (2005) ‘The role, specific situation and potentials of urban areas as nodes in a polycentric development (2002–04)’, Project 1.1.1., http://www.espon.lu/online/documentation/projects/thematic.

Friedman, J, (1986) ‘The world city hypothesis’, Development and Change, 17:69–83.

Ipenburg, D. and Lambrechts, B. (2001) ‘Polynuclear urban regions in North West Europe, a survey of key actor views’, EURBANET Report 1, Housing and Urban Policy Studies, 18.

Isin, E.F. (ed.) (2000) Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City, London: Routledge.

Newman, P. and Thornley, A. (2005) Planning World Cities: Globalization and Urban Politics, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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

Sassen, S. (2002) ‘Global cities and diasporic networks: microsites in Global Civil Society’, in M.Glasius, M.Kaldor and H.Anheier (eds) Global Civil Society 2002, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shin, K.H. and Timberlake, M. (2000) ‘World cities in Asia: cliques, centrality and connectedness’, Urban Studies, 37:2257–85.

Smith, D.A. and Timberlake, M. (2002) ‘Hierarchies of dominance among world cities: a network approach’, in S.Sassen (ed.) Global Networks, Linked Cities, London: Routledge, pp. 117–41.

Taylor, P.J. (2001) ‘Specification of the world city network’, Geographical Analysis, 33: 181–94.

Taylor, P.J. (2004a) World City Network: a Global Urban Analysis, London: Routledge.

Taylor, P.J. (2004b) ‘Regionality in the world city network’, International Social Science Review, 181:361–72.

Taylor, P.J. (2005) ‘New political geographies: global civil society and global governance through world city networks’, Political Geography, 24:703–30.

Taylor, P.J. and Lang, R.E. (2005) US Cities in the World City Network, Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution (Metropolitan Policy Program, Survey Series).

Part I
World city networks

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