Global

Front 1

Globalization

Back 1

“Globalization” seems to be a near-universal word these days, describing all sorts of things we experience in many large cities ... but it’s still helpful to think carefully about how this term is defined.

The most influential definition comes from the journalist, columnist, and author Thomas L. Friedman. Friedman writes a regular column for the New York Times and has won the Pulitzer Prize three times.

Front 2

Friedman, who has described himself as a “free-trader,” sees globalization as a level playing field. Globalization

Back 2

“involves the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states, and technologies to a degree never witnessed before -- in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations, and nation-states to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before. The driving idea behind globalization is free-market capitalism -- the more you let market forces rule and the more you open your economy to free trade and competition, the more efficient and flourishing your economy will be.”

Front 3

Friedman’s definition of globalization is

Back 3

Friedman’s definition of globalization is ironic and paradoxical.

Front 4

Friedman's definition of globalization is ironic because

Back 4

It is ironic because the way he describes an inevitable process bears a striking resemblance to this prediction from the middle of the nineteenth century: “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, establish conditions everywhere. ... All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.”

Front 5

Friedman's definition of globalization is paradoxal because

Back 5

because globalization is not, in fact, inevitable, and “free markets” aren’t really free. They require a lot of hard work and tough decisions.

Front 6

How do cities reflectand reinforce globalization?

Back 6

The concept of the “World City” was first described by Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), a Scottish biologist, sociologist, geographer, and town planner.

Front 7

Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), a Scottish biologist, sociologist, geographer, and town planner

Back 7

He regarded large city-regions as the logical evolution of previous kinds of cities. He devoted an entire chapter of his 1915 book Cities in Evolution to “World Cities and Their Opening Competition.” World Cities were the leading edge of “a new economic order -- a Second Industrial Revolution” arising that requires “corresponding changes in economic theories.”

Front 8

For Geddes, the old paleotechnic obsession with industrial technology and individual wealth would be replaced by a neotechnic era of civic wealth:

Back 8

“...as the neotechnic order comes in – its skill directed by life towards life, and for life –” humanity will set its mind “towards house building and town planning, even towards city design; and all these upon a scale to rival—nay, surpass– the past glories of history.”

Front 9

In “Christaller for a Global Age,” Peter Hall suggests

Back 9

that central place theory must be updated to consider the growth of informational industries, financial services, and global economic linkages. Hall observes that Christaller’s theory, which focused on local and regional settlements within the nation-state, needs to be reworked to understand transnational “higher-level” central places. Global cities are the central places for globe-spanning activities and information.

Front 10

The World City Hypothesis (John Friedmann, 1986)

Back 10

1. The form and extent of a city’s integration with the world economy, and the functions assigned to the city in the new spatial division of labour, will be decisive for any structural changes occurring within it.2. Key cities throughout the world are used by global capital as ‘basing points’ in the spatial organization and articulation of production and markets. The resulting linkages make it possible to arrange world cities into a complex spatial hierarchy.3. The global control functions of world cities are directly related in the structure and dynamics of their production sectors and employment.4. World cities are major sites for the concentration and accumulation of international capital.5. World cities are points of destination for large numbers of both domestic and/or international migrants.6. World city formation brings into focus the major contradictions of industrial capitalism – among them spatial and class polarization.7. World city growth generates social costs at rates that tend to exceed the fiscal capacity of the state.

Front 11

Saskia Sassen explained the fundamental organizational dynamic connecting globalization and world cities:

Back 11

the spatial dispersion of production paradoxically makes it more important for large companies centralize their key decision-making activities: it is important to have a strategic position in the world’s most important “command and control” centers to supervise and coordinate far-flung, globe-spanning networks of production, investment, and distribution.

Front 12

Sassen’s influential Global City consolidated a conventional wisdom that the world’s three indisputable global cities were

Back 12

New York, London, and Tokyo.

Front 13

Disagreement persists because:

Back 13

1. There are many alternative measures of globalization or “world-city-ness.” One side of a “global city” is the number of bank headquarters; but another side is the number of undocumented immigrants struggling to survive.2. Different measures yield different rankings. There’s now an entire world-city-ranking business. The rankings are not a reflection of some underlying reality; they are epistemologically performative -- the rankings help to shape actions by important decision-makers.3. The “dirty little secret” of world-cities research is that most rankings measure the characteristics of individual cities -- but global-city theory is about relational networks among cities.

Front 14

3. How can we measure and map the world system of global cities?

Back 14

In response to this “dirty little secret,” urban geographers have worked to create new relational measures of global city networks. Let’s consider one example -- the “advanced producer services firms” data compiled by Peter Taylor and his students at the Globalization and World Cities Study Group at Loughborough University.

“In this paper, we consider ... ‘the world cities’ whose transnational functions materially challenge states and their territories. These cities exist in a world of flows, linkages, connections, and relations. World cities represent an alternative metageography, one of networks rather than the mosaic of states.” Jonathan V. Beaverstock, Richard G. Smith, and Peter J. Taylor (2000). “World-City Network: A New Metageography?”

Front 15

metageography:

Back 15

the “spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of the world.”

Front 16

Airline connections are valuable indicators of world-city networks, because they

Back 16

1. are one of the few available measures of direct transnational urban flows.2. are the most visible manifestation of world city interaction.3. reflect the continued importance of face-to-face meetings among elite decision-makers.4. capture the preferred mode of inter-city travel for migrants, tourists, and the elites of the transnational capitalist class.5. are actively sought out by cities aspiring to world-city status.